The Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Veteran’s Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence, joined by Professor Santa J. Ono, President UBC, Announce Funding for the Veterans Transition Program.
On Wednesday, January 23, the Faculty of Education welcomed the Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence, joined by Professor Santa J. Ono, President UBC, to announce government funding for the Veterans Transition Program.
With an estimated 601,000 Canadian Armed Forces Veterans in Canada, 81,200 of those in British Columbia, it is essential to make sure their post-service wellbeing is maintained, not just physically but emotionally and mentally. This is especially important as we have started to recognize the immense toll that war and military service can have on those who choose to devote their lives to protecting people worldwide.
Helping to usher in this new age of understanding is the UBC developed Veterans Transition Program. The Veterans Transition Program was first created by Dr. Marv Westwood in 1999, out of the Centre of Group Counselling & Trauma (CGCT) in the Faculty of Education at UBC. The program helps men and women returning from military service transition to productive civilian life. Having now treated one-thousand military veterans over the last 20 years, the CGCT helps craft a new narrative about our returning veterans and how they can be helped with stress injuries, most commonly Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD). PTSD can cause depression, anxiety, shame, and an increased risk of suicide for those who are affected.
The Veterans Transition Program consists of a series of group sessions help on weekends over six weeks. This approach to post-service counseling has shown that it can get through to veterans in a way that traditional one-on-one counseling does not. Instead, the system is based on feedback from its participants. Alongside the group counseling, veterans take an action-based approach of the Therapeutic Enactment exercises. The veterans use actions as well as words to describe the traumatic experiences of their time in service. This is to help the veterans work through the events as, in most cases, the trauma that they have experienced have been caused by actions they were part of or witnessed. Therefor some traumas can’t be repaired by just talking about them.
With the proven success of the Centre of Group Counselling & Trauma’s Veterans Transition Program and the apparent need for expansion of the program, Veterans Affairs has granted further support for the program by awarding a $250,000 grant to help open a new clinic and extend the amount of help that can be provided.
We want to congratulate the Centre of Group Counselling & Trauma on this recent funding. We look forward to seeing how the program expands as it continues to support our veterans across Canada.
To learn more about the Veterans Transition Program, please visit their site.
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