Every time Jeff Mitchell spots trash on the side of the road, he sees a bomb. To him, every worker on a road crew is a sniper. Every abandoned car is a hiding place for insurgents. Even small children startle him, and Mitchell is a big man.
The medically retired Army sergeant, who served two tours in Iraq, has a severe form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It makes him isolate himself, causing him to spend most of his time in his room in his parents’ home outside Atlanta.
Jeff considers it an accomplishment just to go downstairs to have dinner with his parents. He has to force himself to go to restaurants, or any public place, even his therapy sessions at the Vet Center.
Jeff’s goal in life now is to help people like him, but he realizes that’s going to take a long time.
He returned from Iraq in 2006. He’s only now starting to get better. He speaks in public, which he hates, to promote a non-profit program called paws4vets, which provided him with a specially trained dog for troops with PTSD. Jeff is one of the estimated 250,000 who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffering with PTSD.
The program, funded by private donations, requires him to face strangers, even speak to groups, which Mitchell says “freaks me out,” but it’s part of his therapy, and if he wants to keep the dog he’s come to love, Tazie, he must do it.
Ironically, Tazie, a dog rescued from the war zone in Afghanistan by paws4vets, has canine PTSD. Jeff is helping Tazie as Tazie helps Jeff, says Miami Phillips, a Vietnam veteran from Paulding County who helps raise money for paws4vets.
Nobody knows quite why, but each seems to be able to sense the thoughts and fears of the other, and provide calming comfort, akin to petting or hand-holding. She sleeps on his bed and has also undergone intensive training.
Psychologists and psychiatrists say no one who doesn’t have PTSD, or who comes in contact with someone who does, can have a clue about its severity.
Jeff has had many hallucinations and flashbacks and says he is “in a continuous search for a part of me that is gone and I will never get back.”
“We were blindsided by Jeff’s issues,” his mother Carol says. But now, he gets out more, and “Tazie touched a place in his soul that nobody else could. They just ‘get’ each other. The difference in Jeff in 2007 when he came home and now is remarkable. He came home broken, severely depressed, on a very scary cocktail of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics that would kill most people, and also was drinking to medicate. Worse, he had no hope.”
Now, he does have hope, and he also has a mission, to help paws4vets fund training dogs to help others.
The all-volunteer non-profit is run by veteran Terry Henry and his daughter, Kyria, who started the Assistance Dog Training and placement programs.
Phillips’ job is finding funds for paws4vets at http://helpkyria.com .
“This program is desperately needed, and public support is vital.”
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