Lionel Desmond’s mind became his enemy
GUYSBOROUGH, N.S. – The twomonth stint during the summer of 2016 at St. Anne’s Hospital, an occupational stress injury clinic in Quebec, helped but only briefly.
The nightmares started again in force soon after Lionel Desmond moved home to Upper Big Tracadie after his discharge.
Instead of vivid recollections from the front lines of Afghanistan collecting bodies while watching out for landmines and enemy fire, the dreams became predominantly that his wife, Shanna, was cheating on him. He’d wake up angry at her. That anger would persist for hours even as he realized it stemmed only from dreams his own mind had conjured.
Desmond’s own mind was becoming his worst enemy.
And during his better moments, he knew it.
“When I asked questions about concentration or memory his response would be that ‘I have none’ — that, ‘I can’t concentrate,’ or, ‘I have no memory,’” nurse Heather Wheaten testified on Tuesday at the fatality inquiry into what led to Desmond killing his wife, daughter and mother on Jan. 3, 2017.
By October of 2016 Desmond was getting desperate.
He wanted therapy but couldn’t afford it and didn’t know if Veteran’s Affairs would pay for it.
By the time Desmond and Shanna arrived at the St. Martha’s Regional Hospital emergency room on Oct. 24 his troubles had begun to overwhelm him even as his wife’s star was rising.
She’d graduated from St. Francis Xavier University’s nursing program and had begun work at the hospital.
He was no longer a soldier (which he’d been for a decade), was unemployed and couldn’t think straight. It would overwhelm him if Shanna was talking to him while he tried to concentrate on driving through the relatively mild traffic of Antigonish. He distrusted everyone.
He arrived in the busy emergency room of a hospital with mental health supports, but little experience with young soldiers struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder.
After being triaged his first visit was with Wheaton — a nurse trained to intervene with people suffering a mental health crisis, assess them and direct them to other available services.
Shanna did most of the talking. “I did have to ask her to not answer for her husband,” testified Wheaten.
“That I would look to her to answer if needed.”
Though she wanted to speak with Desmond alone, Shanna wanted to stay and so Wheaten didn’t push the issue.
They wanted him to get therapy but couldn’t afford to pay for it and didn’t know if Veterans Affairs would cover the cost.
With his post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms ramping up over the previous month, he’d had outbursts at physical objects but had never gone farther than to hit a table. He hadn’t directed them at his wife or their 11-year-old daughter, Aaliyah.
Wheaten relied upon him to honestly answer the questions listed for her in the suicide risk assessment tool she completes for each patient who ends up before her.
She found him to be a low risk for suicide and he told her he didn’t have thoughts of committing violence against those around him.
She called in Dr. Ian Slayter, a psychiatrist who had his first of two meetings with the Desmonds.
The second would come two weeks later when Slayter would diagnose the veteran with major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, posttraumatic brain disorder, borderline delusions regarding his wife and possible attention deficit disorder.
“People with post-traumatic stress disorder essentially have difficulty handling their memories of the trauma,” Slayter told the inquiry tasked with making recommendations, not finding fault.
“The memories cause such great distress they can’t process them because they are so frightened they back right off dealing with them.”
Of the opinion that Desmond had fallen through a gap in service availability when he moved home to Nova Scotia, Slayter intended to step in to work with the veteran.
At the same time he knew there was a lack of capability to deal with Desmond’s unique needs.
The area lacked trauma therapists experienced in working with combat veterans.
The last time he’d attempted to get a neurocognitive assessment done in Halifax for someone with symptoms of brain damage from concussions such as he saw in Desmond, it had taken five years to get a “no” from what used to be called Capital Health.
He didn’t prescribe new medications for Desmond, who already had prescriptions for drugs meant to help him sleep, because he wanted records of what had been tried before.
He couldn’t get those records, so far as he knew at the time, himself and so resorted to asking Desmond to get them from Veterans Affairs.
Only during the inquiry would Veterans Affairs point out that it doesn’t collect the medical records of veterans after they leave active military service — that they are the responsibility of each individual provincially run institution where veterans are treated.
“I thought we had time,” Slater testified on Monday.
But they didn’t have time.
On Jan. 3, 2017, Lionel Desmond shocked everyone with the horror he committed in Upper Big Tracadie.
And none of the doctors and experts who had testified so far — the halfway point of two weeks of testimony — have yet been able to say why.