ROYAL COMMISSION INTO DEFENCE AND VETERAN SUICIDE
Opening Remarks - Timor Awakening, Michael Stone, 29 November 2021
Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak, and for all who made this Royal Commission possible. I will start by briefly introducing myself. My name is Michael Stone, I served in the Australian Regular Army for 15 years, and the Australian Army Reserve for 5 years. I spent over seven years of my regular army career on overseas missions, a career that started and finished overseas. I experienced significant moral trauma, witnessing and working to prevent violence and death in my various roles. My life was in danger frequently. I am proud to have served and represent my country, to serve alongside many great Australians and have the opportunity to make a difference. I actively sought out operational service. I avoided the defence health system wherever possible. I avoided discharge and transition by transferring to the Army Reserve. I refused to believe I was unwell, deserving or in need of help. I was dragged to outside medical support by my father, also a veteran with lived experience, who processed the veteran’s affairs paperwork for me and assisted me with the challenges that came with that. I lived many years of expecting an early or imminent death, high-risk behaviour, suicidal ideation, isolation, addiction, horror filled restless nights, stress and anxiety. I was heavily medicated. I lost hope, purpose, joy and my identity. I have had friends who have taken their life. I work regularly with veterans who are suicidal or have been suicidal.
I prefer to demonstrate, rather than talk about it, that healing and return to a purposeful life is possible. Life is not easy, but I didn’t choose an easy life. I am grateful to be alive and for the support of many people.
I am here to speak about a holistic health program that I have been leading for the past 6 years called Timor Awakening. It is important to start with Why we have done this?
Timor Awakening is run by mature age veterans and partners who have struggled with a wide range of health issues in uniformed service and beyond. We did not receive insight or support until we were acutely ill. We have tried all services on offer, worked in the support system, attended funerals, and were desperate to find a successful approach for ourselves and our tribe. We were a part of the high-intensity continuous ADF operations since 1999 and have experienced this crisis building. The current funded pathway of veterans is medicate, compensate, and isolate. This is not working and the compassionate and professional people in the system cannot bear the load. We identified that we could help fill a gap in contributing to both prevention and early-intervention of illness in veterans, and we could engage them in ways that civilian clinicians would not.
Our driving mission has been to prevent veteran suicide. We also seek to reduce domestic violence and the range of impacts on the families of veterans. And to restore the lives of some of our finest and committed citizens, to feel a part of their society, live lives of dignity and purpose.
We come with a solution. We have six years of thorough evidence, quantitative and qualitative data, that we have presented to the Commission, demonstrating holistic health education and meaningful engagement, delivered by lived-experience peers, saves lives. It has saved lives and turned damaged lives into purposeful and dignified lives. I will refer to veterans, though our program, which treats participants with equal weight, respect and attention, has included many ADF members, partners, parents, adult-age children, first responders and a range of clinicians and workers in the ESO and mental health community.
Our strategic objective is to model and improve the systemic way veterans’ health is managed, shifting the current “treating sickness” model, to a funded, post-traumatic-growth, “promoting wellness” model.
A holistic rehabilitation program such as Timor Awakening is based on a paradigm of wellness and growth, of potential and empowerment, and facilitates healing and recovery whilst restoring, reshaping and developing an individual’s sense of identity, purpose, values, responsibility and accountability.
Timor Awakening engages disengaged veterans, educates them about health and wellbeing possibilities and promotes support and clinical therapy before they become acute cases requiring hospitalisation. We utilise a front-line team of peer supporters, and an advisory group of doctors, nurses, psychologists, exercise physiologists, holistic-health practitioners and social workers. Our program centres around a residential concentration of between 9-12 days with average groups of 20-30 participants. We have conducted 16 of these in the last 6 years.
We have a program in Timor-Leste, a domestic program, and a peer-mentor development program. Veterans provide each other with inspiration, lessons learned, practical tools, strategies, resources and routines in overcoming trauma and re-establishing purposeful lives. They learn to try new things, re-engage with the community, get out of their comfort zone, to laugh, to cry and have some fun. We have built upon and developed each program through detailed evaluation, and have accumulated a program full of topics and activities that work. The endstate of the program is the veteran walks away with a wellbeing plan, a connected group of peers, and avenues of possibility and resources to help themselves, other veterans and the community.
A key element of Timor Awakening is cooperation with Timorese veterans, and a range of community development work in Timor-Leste. This started with a scholarship program of over 50 Timorese youth with vocational training. Over the past 3 years we have funded and built a school that today facilitates daily English classes, boarding facilities, provides nutrition, practical skills and leadership training. The school is within the poor communities who supported our soldiers in World War 2, only 10 kilometres from where the HMAS Voyager still lays on the beach at Betano. This year we deployed ourselves to a natural and humanitarian crisis in Timor-Leste, and almost every day since April this year, through the Timorese veteran council, we have been delivering aid to people in desperate need. All initiated, facilitated and funded by Australian veterans, their families, and the community. These programs have provided veterans and Australians with avenues for restorative justice, living out dignified values, strengthening regional relations, practicing compassion, providing purpose, pride, and a sense of achievement.
Accumulated evidence, from our lived experience and engagement with veterans, suggest effective elements for rehabilitation include:
To be engaged as early as possible to the point of awareness and desire to be rehabilitated.
To acknowledge the past; forgive, focus forward & experience an awakening to positive possibilities.
To be intentionally educated that they can get healthier and embrace a new identity, life purpose, and community of belonging.
To have guidance to address the injuries that are non-medical, non-vocational, non-psychological, those involving shame, guilt, unforgiveness and hopelessness. The soul matters, whichever way you refer or identify with it.
And, to be guided to the realization and empowerment that they themselves need to become their own complex case managers, eventually, and ultimately responsible for their health and wellbeing.
Our public system and Department of Veterans Affairs cannot meet the demands of acute and chronic mental health. A Veteran who successfully manages their own mental health, including engagement with the health system, holistic health resources, and the community, reduces the burden on the system while achieving better health outcomes for the individual.
From the hundreds of veterans that have participated in Timor Awakening it is evident that many veterans who are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress are suffering from moral trauma, which merits a unique diagnosis and modalities of treatment. Awareness and acceptance of moral trauma, and reframing the self-esteem and potential of an individual, is a healthy foundation for rehabilitation. The earlier the better. Without this, even with medication, moral trauma manifests, causing more damage to the individual, their family and can lead to suicide.
Who will a veteran trust to encourage them, motivate them, understand them, love them and call them out?
Empower them to take responsibility, accountability and do the hard work it takes to get well and stay well?
We have evidence and methodology that veterans, especially veterans with lived experience, and their partners with lived experience, can do this. // It is very difficult work, and requires support, though in healing others, veterans are healing themselves.// We have not spent money on marketing and never had a program undersubscribed. Veterans & partners who do the program, find others in need, becoming mentors and healers themselves on their journey of recovery.
Military operations have multiple dimensions of exposure to violence, human suffering, and government policy.
It should be no surprise that the moral burden of overseas missions and wars executed on behalf of the Australian People and ordered by the Australian Government, are left with the Australian veteran to process, and their families to absorb the impacts. It is hard to acknowledge. To talk about. To relate with our families and our communities. How does one stand witness to the many who die and suffer, mostly vulnerable civilians, from humankind’s malevolence and failure to resolve issues peacefully?
A soldier does not question their mission, indeed they will commit all to achieve it. A veteran often has no choice.
Unresolved issues can appear in your nightmares, manifest as guilt, shame, anger, violence, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, confusion and the list goes on. For many, this torment has ended in suicide.
I was honoured to know a number of Australian WW2 veterans who served in Timor, such as Paddy Kenneally, Ian Hampel and Jack Hanson. Among the bravest and honourable Australians to have lived. Their story of survival and guerrilla warfare in Timor is legendary. They owed their lives to the Timorese people. A guerrilla cannot survive without support and sacrifice of the people. The Timorese lost 60,000 lives in protecting Australian soldiers & our shores.
Imagine how a veteran feels to learn that Australia abandoned it’s United Nations obligations in 1975, blocked the media, medical and diplomatic support, and successive Australian leaders blatantly lied to the Australian people, while 200,000 people died an hours flight from Darwin? An Australian veteran shared with me recently the breakdown he experienced when learning of allegations of spying on the Timorese during resource negotiations, where someone determined it was in Australia’s national interest to have slightly more profit.
I have toiled over these issues and questioned what are Australian values? and when, if not with our friends and neighbours do we practice them? It is what someone who is medicated and isolated does. Witnessing the death of innocent women and children, indeed anyone in conflict, leaves a mark on your soul, a permanent reference that we must do better to prevent this. I have learned, through our program, that we must live out our values through our actions, rather than ruminate in the past or be frustrated in darkness. Of course, the Timorese don’t blame us nor seek apology. They are grateful and proud to be our friends, grateful that we came back in 1999 and keep coming back today. On our Timor Awakening programs it is the Timorese veterans and people who are our greatest mentors.
Those who endured unimaginable hardship, have been a healing and inspiring example to us, that we can and must own our past, acknowledge it, reconcile, learn from it. Forgive ourselves and others.
We can’t change the past. And the suffering, scars and sacrifice is an important part of who we are today. What matters most is our next step forward. And this is essentially the philosophy of our program.
The Veteran is the embodiment of the best of us as a Nation. Those who join the Defence Forces are vetted prior to joining for their mental acuity, psychological stability, health, motivation and physical fitness. On joining, they are above average in every statistic. On departure, they are above average in the worst statistics.
Like all people, we veterans have our problems, but we can be empowered to be part of the solution. We can significantly contribute to prevention, early intervention and postvention. A paradigm shift for everyone involved, from a focus on sickness to a focus on promoting wellness, will significantly reduce suicide in Defence and the Veteran Community.
Thank you for listening.
