Sen. Romeo Dallaire says it's time that Canadian soldiers who commit suicide after serving in the military be counted as casualties of war.
Dallaire, a former lieutenant general who led United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda during the genocide, struggled with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder upon his return.
He told CTV's Canada AM Thursday, during a town hall focused on suicide, that he attempted to kill himself four times before he emerged from the darkness of depression.
Those attempts were a direct result of what he witnessed in Rwanda, he said.
"The night I flew out from Rwanda I landed in Nairobi and I was on my way back home and my left side started to paralyze and remained paralyzed with pain, and the stress and so on began to appear physically," he said.
"Then there was an inability to communicate, an inability to speak to the family and talk about what was happening to me."
Brenda and Darrell McMullin, who lost their 27-year-old son John James Gordon McMullin (Jamie) to suicide, said his death was the direct result of his time in Afghanistan and the inability to adjust to normal life on his return home.
"He is a casualty of Afghanistan. He may not have died in Afghanistan but he is a casualty of Afghanistan," Darrell said.
If his son had come home with a physical wound, such as a lost limb, he would have been immediately treated with the best care that could be provided. But because the injury was invisible, it was largely ignored until it was too late.
"Jamie's injuries were on the inside, they were in his mind. If he had been blown up by a roadside bomb over there and died two years later he would be considered a casualty of war. We think he should be considered the same as if he was physically injured," Darrell said.
Dallaire – whom the McMullins consider a personal hero who has inspired them to speak out -- said he is on a mission to change the way the military views post-traumatic stress disorder and the care that is offered to veterans after they come home.
Upon his own return to Canada, Dallaire said he tried to ignore his depression and the effects of PTSD by working himself "into the ground" in an attempt to avoid dealing with his feelings.
"There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground," he said.
In an honest, heart-wrenching account of his struggle, Dallaire said there was a moment after his return from Rwanda when he got drunk and began to cut himself. Unable to even sit at the table, he said he crawled down onto the floor in what was physically and mentally a low point in his life.
He said he found an old razor blade and began to cut himself, "not deep cuts, but a thousand cuts."
As the blood began to flow, Dallaire said he began to feel a false sense of peace.
"The warmth of the blood on me was the most soothing, it was like all that pain was pouring out of me," he said.
Dallaire said he felt as though he was going to join those he had been unable to help in Rwanda, the soldiers and Rwandans who had been killed while he led the UN forces, unable to convince the world to send more troops.
"All the pain would then go away and I'd be able to survive in another world," he said, describing the thoughts that were running through his head.
Perhaps just moments from ending his life, Dallaire said it was only the intervention of a peer supporter, who happened to stop by his house at that moment, that saved his life.
Somehow, after hitting rock bottom and surviving that attempt, Dallaire was able to move forward, emerge from the darkness and begin to help others dealing with similar struggles.
It has become his mission ever since.
"PTSD has a terminal side to it that calls for more urgency," Dallaire said.
