Les bienfaits de l’art-thérapie se font ressentir chez des vétérans de guerre canadiens qui cherchent à mieux gérer leurs traumatismes.
Un reportage de Paul Ruban et Kalinka Saint-Pierre.
They say, “War is hell”. A person never knows what to expect in the heat of battle. One moment the silence is deafening, and the next moment the countryside erupts in percussive explosions with the endless spray of bullets flying everywhere. Sometimes it is hard to tell, under the constant shelling and lifeless bodies strewn about the battlefield, who is friend and who is foe.
Art Therapy Helping Veterans
Alternatively, it is not always the intensity of the fighting that gets under a one’s skin. Just the sight of another member of one’s unit having a bad encounter with a roadside bomb is all it takes to shake a person up. The thought quickly crosses the mind, ‘That could have been me.’ Or, maybe it is the guilt some feel from that first or second confirmed kill. It is enough to compel many soldiers to ask, ‘Is human life really that expendable?’
Art Therapy Helping Veterans Battle PTSD
On the battlefield, the need to survive causes many soldiers to quickly learn how to suck it up and tuck many of those feelings inside. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is facing these issues when the war machine is no longer forcing these individuals to engage the primal instinct to survive. They call it aftermath, because that is when the real calculations are performed by the human psyche, and the final assessment of the real extent of the damages are made.
