Another Mans Shoes
Interviews with fellow military veterans and adventurers about their experiences of war, the lows and times of hardship, joining them on their journey and how this has shaped their lives in the most extraordinary way. Comedy moments, dark humour and witty banter.
Another Mans Shoes
Confronting Mental Health Challenges in the Military and Emergency Services with Matt Hellyer
Matt Hellyer, CEO of Pilgrim Bandits and former SAS member, joins us to shine a light on the often overlooked mental health challenges faced by our military, police, and blue light services. Sharing his own battle with mental trauma following a devastating bomb blast in 1992, Matt opens up about the journey from denial to acceptance of his symptoms, including aggressive behavior and excessive drinking. In a candid conversation, he emphasizes the importance of identifying personal trigger points and seeking support, offering hope and guidance to those who might be silently battling similar issues. This episode is an essential listen for anyone wanting to understand the complexities of mental health within these vital communities, as well as the significant impact of childhood trauma.
We also explore the broader issues surrounding mental health in the military and emergency services, highlighting the struggles veterans face when transitioning to civilian life. The discussion underscores how pre-military experiences can shape mental health challenges, and the critical role that camaraderie and open conversations play in healing. Discover how organizations like the British Legion and Pilgrim Bandits are stepping in to fill the gaps left by inadequate support systems, and learn practical steps for maintaining mental well-being during hard times. Join us in fostering a supportive community where reaching out, talking, and seeking help can truly make a difference.
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Welcome back to Another Man's Shoes, and in this episode we're joined by Matt Hellyer, who's the CEO of the Pilgrim Bandits charity. Matt, former member of 2-2-SAS and a paratrooper, has a wealth of experience in operational environments around the world and as part of that he has seen some nasty things. He's lost friends and colleagues and this inevitably impacts their mental health. He takes that experience as CEO of the Pilgrim Bandits and he's going to talk to us about his thoughts and how he overcomes mental health issues and what he can recommend to others who are struggling. It's a very informative episode, some dark moments, but I hope that you enjoy this and you can take something away from it. But without further ado, please welcome Matt Hellyer.
Speaker 2:Hi, ed, thanks a lot. Just to start off, really, where we are and why we've put together the series of podcasts gladly hosted by you, we're looking at the mental health situation throughout the military, the police and our blue light services and we can see that, probably due to lockdown and due to the sort of depressive state the country and the world is in at the moment, we seem to have an increase in uh in mental health issues, which is leading to a huge amount of suicides and it's becoming extremely disturbing for all of us who have suffered, served and are part of the community now. So it's an initiative really that is being driven by the Pilgrim Bandits and yourself, adam, to try and put out some people's experiences of their mental health, how they deal with it and whether that can help anyone else who are considering or suffering a bit of a downturn at the moment. Uh, the aim of it really is to try and help people, to try and get them out of that rut, try and get them out of that dark place and just try to show that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Um, again, you know, I, I was, I'm, an ex-soldier 25 years in the military. I first served in the third battalion, the parachute regiment, and then led on done selection, ended up in uh in a squadron 22 ses? Um for the next 15, 16 years.
Speaker 2:My first real experience of mental health issues was when I was caught in a bomb blast in 1992 and one of my colleagues and and close friends, uh, stepped on a pressure pad. He's well known and lost both legs and I was in actually in the blast zone and administered first aid. It's extremely shocking at the time and took its toll on me and the remainder of the patrol um, the, the, the, you know. The victim survived and the victim went on to have an extremely successful career in as a professional sports, sports personality, sportsman, free fall really um. But what happened was that after the incident I was taken into hospital and spent a night in hospital under the observation of a psychiatrist because they identified that the incident we'd been in, we would have suffered possibly some sort of mental trauma from what we'd, what I'd seen and what I'd administered to me. That was a bit bit over the top. You know I was a young, feisty paratrooper. I just wanted to get back on the ground, although you know I had a real um shock, you know, being part of that incident, and it hit me emotionally and physically, hit me for six really. But I still wanted to get back out on the ground with the guys. I felt guilty, I needed to be on the patrol.
Speaker 2:It wasn't until I got back to London, where I was living at the time, a number of months later, that it was my colleagues, my friends actually from school you know you grow up and all the friends from school, my, my community, that they noticed that something was wrong. I was extremely aggressive I drunk a lot when I'm on leave and we was constantly in trouble and we lived in South London, we had a close, we had an Irish community that we were usually close with. But I took it upon myself to blame the Irish community of South London for what had happened to my colleague in Northern Ireland. And it wasn't until a couple of years later that friends actually and I'd calmed down a bit and friends actually pulled me to one side and said you know was you was like off the record really, you would. You know you was drinking too much, we were causing fights, we're in trouble, we're getting lifted by the police. You know, thank god the army was a little bit more lenient back then, otherwise I'd have been kicked out of my ear, um, and it wasn't until I spoke to members of that patrol later on, you know, know, years later, that everyone suffered a similar experience.
Speaker 2:I sort of what I thought was really I sort of got over that incident and then pushed on and had a successful career. And it wasn't until the end of my career that again I noticed that I was sort of slipping into depression and a bit of a depressed state. So sometimes I would wake up and I was now I was working on my own in london on a desk job on the final stages of my career, so I didn't really have the camaraderie around me, the banter that was going on, and it was just. You know, some mornings I would wake up absolutely in a dark place, didn't want to get out of bed, um, felt utter, utter crap, you know, and uh, and I couldn't really understand what, what the problem was, and it was, I think it was just depression, just a bit of depression. It may have been from the incidents that we've been through in the past, it may have just been, I don't know. It must, you know, I suppose, with mental health, you know, the big uh stigma about it is that we don't really know what causes it while we get it. What can trigger it? You know, I know we're starting to identify people's trigger points. We're starting to identify people's trigger points.
Speaker 2:But for me, you know, I would hit a dark place and I would try and find a way out of it. But if I couldn't find a way out of it, I'd be in that dark place for a good three, four days, sometimes a week, where I was the most miserable man, negative person you would ever come across, excuse me and then, you know, analysing it myself, thinking why am I into this dark place? And I could feel, when I started to get a bit depressed, I realised that you know, I needed to get the endorphins flowing through the body. So for me, my personal treatment was to get, get out, go for a run, get the endorphins, get in the swimming pool, go for a swim, you know. Run around Hyde Park, jump in the serpentine, get something going, you know, and try and get back into that routine. Get up in the morning, do the running, you know.
Speaker 2:So you, you actually feel like you achieve something and if you can achieve something each day, whether it's just a run, a walk, you know, uh, something that works, something that you've completed, a bit of work that's waiting to do, you're filing your, your accounts, that really give me a boost. You know, I would, I would, I would make sure that I'd achieve something every single day and that really sort of kept me out of slipping too far into that dark place. If I did and it happened a few times and it happens very occasionally now um, if I do slip into that dark place and I I haven't recognized the signs correctly, then again I'm in it and there's nothing that can drag you out of it. You are in that dark place, you don't want to get up bed, and I just know that you've just got to ride it through because there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that light at the end of the tunnel is you coming out of it. You're feeling a bit happier, you're getting rid of that dark place, you're getting rid of that depression. Um, it's never really, and that's as far as I've had, you know. You know I sort of um, personally, after speaking to some of the doctors and friends of mine, you know, we, we would like, uh, you know, there is a everyone gets diagnosed.
Speaker 2:I'm sure if I went to the doctor I'd be diagnosed with some sort of ptsd um, due to my experiences that I've had through service. But what I would like and we would like to see, you know, and I know a few of the mental health trauma specialists would like to see that PTSD, that stigma of PTSD, is eradicated and we come up with proper categories of mental health Rather than ring fencing everyone with right you've got PTSD. We ring fence it, such as depressed, depression and some sort of you know, medical trauma, and then you could, then then you can evaluate it properly. You know to to to diagnose everyone with PTSD is wrong. It could just be. I know people that are now have been diagnosed with PTSD. They've been kicked out of the military because of it and now they've had that diagnosis backtracked through medical professionals and they found that they was just literally depressed. You know, I know you've had some interesting people on this show. What we also found, you know, through studying and looking at some of the experiences some of the people that we have spoken to in my regiment, in my former regiment, and some of the fantastic regiments of the British Army that really suffered a lot in Afghanistan and Iraq is that a lot of the people that suffer from PTSD. They don't actually get it from service.
Speaker 2:The great thing about the military is that we all come from. We're not all sorry. There's a lot of people that come from broken homes and had rough upbringings and they suffered a lot of mental trauma in their childhood. Whether it's a marriage breakup a simple thing like that a marriage breakup that I had when I was 13 had to fend for myself, you know or it could have been an abusive childhood like um. You know a good friend of ours who's spoken about it openly, phil campion. You know he had a horrendous upbringing and phil would be one of the first to admit that. You know those sort of traumatic instances come out later in life. So people join the military. You have that brethren, you have the comradeship from your brothers and sisters who serve with you and you're almost stable. The military has a good platform for serving soldiers, to treat them and look after them and rehabilitate them. Once you're out of the military, there's literally nothing.
Speaker 2:You are turning on charities, the NHS, which is, as we know is overworked, understaffed and underpaid, although they have a fantastic mental health pathway, but it's just not enough.
Speaker 2:There's not the capacity to look after us all and what we find is that those instances through childhood actually break through and they come through an adult life.
Speaker 2:So, and a lot of people are too fast to to um, to label that as military service, whereas really a lot, of a lot of people went through a lot of mental trauma in their childhood and it comes through later in life and it's nothing to do with the military. You know, the military gives physicians and doctors an excuse to label us, which is, I think, is wrong. You know, and it's understanding actually the, the triggers and what happened in the instances through your life, looking back and and if you can identify where it actually started, you can start identifying and getting a proper prognosis on your condition. So you know, our effort are really trying to put all of our experiences different experiences, whether in the police, the ambulance service, the fire service or the military you know we all suffer some sort of mental health issues and we're trying to document these together on these podcasts and hopefully give people who are suffering an indication, a help, something that they can relate to and hopefully it will help them.
Speaker 1:One of the big things is if someone was to phone you up now or you thought, right, you're, you're in trouble. A friend of yours phones you up, says, look, I need help, matt. Where would you direct them? What link, what charity, any numbers? You would sort of say go ring yeah, I mean we're we.
Speaker 2:I mean we're quite lucky, we, we, as a charity, as the pilgrim banditsgrim Bandits.
Speaker 2:We never started off as a mental health charity but we see mental health as one of the big problems that we've all got to come to terms with and be open about it. It is as prevalent as a physical injury and we find what we find. I don't want to speak too far out of turn, but some of the instances that I found is that it's not the guys that have actually been injured. I mean, they do have the guilt complex, but we find that a lot of the individuals that helped the injured or was in that blast zone or was part of that process evacuation process or even part of the process of burying our glorious dead, when some of the young soldiers were killed in battle they have suffered. They're the ones that suffer.
Speaker 2:The ones with the injuries have gone through a sort of process and have been guided. I know there are some cases, and there's probably a lot of cases, but the ones that we've discussed they're the more stable ones. They do have the guilt complex, as I said, but it's the ones that were part of the saving process, the rehabilitation and maybe the burying process. They're the ones that have really suffered from mental health. You know if you're seeing what they've saw.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you're right, you know, and a lot of these issues come, you know, if you've come from a broken home or you've been abused as a child or something like that. You know you've had a real rough upbringing in one of the states you know up the north of England, like that. You know you've had a real rough upbringing in one of the states you know up the north of England, or you know you haven't had a stable childhood, then you will find that there will be issues and those issues do come out. I mean they really do come out.
Speaker 2:I spoke to a close friend of mine and he was talking about the Falklands War in 1982 and he was a member of three power and he told the story many times. But he was telling me the story of when 3PAR were just on the brink of taking Mount London but it was on a knife edge, they'd lost so many people and he said he saw a company from 2PAR coming to reinforce Threepen and, as he was telling me, he broke down in tears, absolutely broke down in tears, and was sobbing. And I said you know what's up? And he said, matt, he said I've told the story a thousand times. I've never, never, broke down in tears like that. He said it was just that camaraderie to see these friends coming through. You know, there was, there was a pent-up um trauma inside him and he, and it was that instance that he just let it all out and he, you know, you know, and he felt better for it.
Speaker 2:And these are big are you know? You know people want me and you join the military. Military, we signed up to follow in their footsteps. Everyone, if you've gone through a traumatic situation, it will come out. You cannot bottle these things up Somewhere along your lifetime. It will come out and this is what we're trying to do is if we can openly talk about it as friends, as comrades, as ex-serving soldiers or police officers or ambulance or fire, we can all get together and talk about it. You know it really lightens the burden, you know, and we can discuss and find out what works and what doesn't work. You know every person is slightly different.
Speaker 1:That's right, and there isn't a magic pill to it. But talking to a doctor recently, recently, and we were sort of talking mental health and just various things, and he said but if there was one pill that I could prescribe, it would be exercise. He said the power of exercise and getting out will do more than anything that you can stick down your throat and he said it's the biggest thing. And then you know, doing a bit of research for these podcast episodes, looking at the nhs, you know one of the top things they're saying is interactions with other human beings and they form meaningful relationships. Don't just be sat on your phone, just looking at a computer, just getting drawn into that web of sort of despair. You know, get out. No, get on the hills. Don't take pills and just get the endorphins going.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, set yourself daily goals, like you were just talking about a little task learn, learn a new skill, whatever. That might be Just baby steps, but just something different. Also not dwelling on the past, because that just drags you back down into that pit and you want to just sort of think take every day and move forward. Set yourself I want to achieve this by next week. Or speak to your kids, find out what they're up to, take an interest in other people's lives and help others. I think all those little things you put that all together, it puts you in a whole different place.
Speaker 2:No, definitely You're right, and it's identifying it before it's too late. And you know, if you do feel a bit, you know a bit down, then that could be your trigger, that could be your identifying, that could be the identifying mark that actually puts you into your depression, depressive state. So it's identifying that and as soon as you feel down, like you said, you know, put on your trainers, go for a brisk walk, get out for a run, jump in the sea. You know we're doing some and you're going to have a close friend of ours, the charities, and he's going to come on and talk about his breathing exercises and cold water training. And we've seen that so many times.
Speaker 2:You know, some of our guys who suffer quite a lot really find their cure through cold water. Getting in the water, freezing cold water. It's invigorating. When you come out, you've actually achieved something. Your body fires, the endorphins fire around your body and you feel fantastic. That's what it's all about trying to beat the depression before it gets hold of you. But unfortunately, when it gets hold of you, it gets hold of you and you've got to ride that out the best you can.
Speaker 1:And avoid the alcohol.
Speaker 2:Yeah, alcohol, drink drugs. It doesn't help.
Speaker 1:And same with diet. Try and get good foods in you. If you're sticking McDonald's down your grid every five minutes, then that just doesn't help. It puts you into a worse state. But I was out running the other day and I really didn't want to go and when I came back I felt great. And I was with a mate and he turned around and he said to me no one ever came back off a run or doing exercise and said I wish I'd never done that.
Speaker 2:You always what you're doing. It's hard to get out the door, but you're glad once you have. Yeah, exactly it is and you've achieved something, you've done something for that day, which is fantastic. You know we can all sit at home and you know, play on the bloody playstation or do what you know, watch some good tv and stuff like that. But you don't feel great, do you? You know you, you end up eating junk food, getting bored. You know right, you said you know up. Get your trainers on first thing in the morning, get out the door.
Speaker 2:Go for a swim, go for a run, go for a walk. You've achieved something before you've even started your day. That's amazing. That's what's one thing is good about the army. You know those half seven morning runs. You know we're whinged about them. You know we're all whinged about them, but you know what they set us up for the day.
Speaker 1:We'd achieve something if nothing else, get out of your pit when you can Enjoy the day, meet your bed, set yourself up.
Speaker 2:There's that great video on YouTube, facebook and all the rest of the platforms of the admiral, the US admiral. That's brilliant and he talks about getting up, making your bed. And you know you make your bed in the morning. You've achieved something already, you know. So you've got up, you've done your daily chores, you've made a bed. You know that bed's ready for you to come back in after you've had a hard day's work. Yeah, and you know that's something that we've done in the military.
Speaker 2:But when you're out of the military it's hard and you're looking for work or you're trying to support a family, you know it's a lonely place. And as soon as you feel lonely, that's when you know your mental health suffers. You've got no one to turn to. But you know we're always here, we, as a charity, the Pilgrim Bandits. We are extremely close and we're very loyal to each other. You know we're we're friends, we're drinking buddies and we get out and raise the money we're always open to to work more people into our charity. It's it's an extended family and you know, and it really helps us a lot, I think, adam that does, and so for anyone that is listening to this, you, you want somewhere to look.
Speaker 1:The british legion and your own regimental associations. They reach out to someone. Speak to guys in your unit, or if you're listening to it and you recognise that potentially someone that you know is struggling, send them a text, drop them a phone call, say hello, mate, how are you doing? People are feeling lonely, especially in these sort of pandemic times that one phone call really could save someone's life.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:Well, matt, I appreciate you coming on and sort of spreading the message. We'll get that out there and even if one person looks at this and it makes a difference, then we've achieved our goal definitely 100.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much well.
Speaker 1:That was a really interesting episode there, you know, learned a few things as well, and I think we can all recognize the signs of mental health decline. And one of the main points to take away from me is that you've just got to talk to each other. It really does help Talking, doing some exercise and just speak to someone about your struggles. Get professional help. You've got your regimental organizations. There's the Pilgrim the pilgrim bandits charity a wonderful organization that is there to help. So please, if you are struggling at the moment, reach out, ring the nhs helplines, speak to your organization, speak to your friends, family and loved ones, but don't bottle it up. That's us. That's the mental health episode of another man's shoes finished, but please leave feedback and if you've got any questions you want to reach out to us. We're on all the channels, so feel free, drop us a note if you're struggling and we'll help point you in the right direction.