FORMER Army padre Frank Parkinson has published a new guide to understanding post-traumatic stress using the experience of his own war veteran father.

A military man with 25 years’ service in the army, Rev Parkinson’s previous books on the subject have been adopted by professionals and the emergency services where people are suffering as a result of being involved in traumatic events.

But now A Short Journey into Trauma has been published in print in a bid to challenge common views of the condition and offer helpful information to people outside the profession.

“There are lots of technical books for counsellors, psychiatrists and psychologists but I thought I would write my personal experience,” said Frank, from Longcot.

“I spent a long time in the Army trying to increase the knowledge and change the difficult and unhelpful attitudes that many people had.”

Service in the Second World War had a lifelong impact on his father. Frank also saw the effect being taken prisoner had on the vicar and a member of the congregation in his first parish even though it was in the early 1960s and the conflict had ended many years before.

People didn’t talk about what they had seen and suffered and they were expected to get on with life. Often their families had no idea what was wrong of how they could help.

“When I got into the Army I found a very similar attitude to people who were suffering,” he said.

Frank, who trained as a counsellor with Relate while he was in the military, was involved in efforts to have post-traumatic stress in service people recognised and treated, especially in the wake of the Falklands War. But it was a struggle.

“I had senior officers and generals say: ‘What’s the point in all this. We don’t need it we’re British.’ There was a very general attitude towards soldiers, sailors and airmen that it was very bad for morale if we accepted there was such a thing as traumatic stress. There were lots of negative attitudes towards welfare generally.”

He retired from the Army in 1992 and went on to work as a consultant, lecturer and psychological debriefer.

For the book he has also drawn on his experience of debriefing people includes the US embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998 and the Manchester prison riots in 1990. He also trained and debriefed members of the army’s war graves registration team.

“There are lots of things in the book which I talk about from a very, very personal level.”

A short Journey into Trauma is published by Merlin Press and is available on Amazon.