Inspired by his own road to recovery, an Army veteran is retraining as a counsellor and making headway in confronting trauma-related mental health issues. 
Charles MacMillan, a final-year counselling degree student at Coleg Sir Gâr, took three years to recover from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following his diagnosis at Combat Stress, the veterans’ mental health charity.
The journey to recovery has been a long road for Charles. “During the last two years of my military service, I was starting to change,” he said. “I was messing up and developing very bad habits which were out of character, but what I have learnt is that at the time, I was self-medicating, trying to supress my nightmares.”
Day and night, Charles’ was reliving the trauma he experienced as a combat soldier. “Every day, I was seeing the faces of bodies I’d witnessed in war zones and I felt under threat all the time and I didn’t know why,” he said. “I didn’t realise or understand what was going on so this was the start of my downhill struggle which was thankfully turned around after reaching my darkest moment when I tried to take my own life.”
This led to Charles’ behaviour patterns being addressed and over the course of his three-year recovery, which was only supposed to take nine months, he was referred and supported by many organisations including the Gordon Moody Association, Combat Stress and All Wales Veterans Health and Wellbeing Service. Interestingly, once Charles recovered from his addictions, his nightmares returned and this is when he was officially diagnosed with PTSD.
Over the course of his recovery, Charles has undertaken many therapies, from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and cognitive behaviour therapy to art therapy and he fully engaged with all of them, believing in a holistic approach to rehabilitation.
It was at Combat Stress in Birmingham where Charles realised that he wanted to help others. “I saw people there who were really struggling,” he said. “And following my own recovery process and experiences, I could totally relate to what they were going through.”
Charles decided to study a counselling degree at Coleg Sir Gâr’s Ammanford campus which he attends one day a week as well as working as a project development officer for West Wales Action for Mental Health, where he is setting up groups for people with experience with mental health problems and their families.
He is also the main lead for veteran related issues and has a key role in the armed forces covenant at local and national level using his experiences as a veteran, service user and counsellor, making a difference to veterans across the country at a strategic level.
Rebecca Seale, counselling lecturer at Coleg Sir Gâr, said: “Charles has an amazing story to tell having survived his own experiences of trauma and he dealt with these very effectively. He is committed to helping others and has even risked his own wellbeing when he intervened after a serious road accident last summer.”
Looking to the future, Charles will graduate this year and as a result, has been offered employment as a counsellor with Llanelli mental health charity Links, a service he once used for his own recovery.
Charles MacMillan added: “I’d like to offer my sincere thank you to every single person and organisation that helped me along my journey.”
You can also listen to Charles's journey via this video