Fishing for Heroes provides fully expensed fly fishing courses as part of a therapy package for veterans and serving personnel who are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, combat fatigue, or any other emotional or psychological problem relating to them having been involved in active service. ‘Active Service’ is legally defined for us and forms part of our deed of trust, basically it means anyone who has either been in a theatre of operations where they have either received fire, or were likely to return fire. This definition is of great importance to us as it creates a qualifying test of who is eligible for our help.
Any service man, woman or veteran from any of the three armed forces of either sex, can apply for help at any time - PTSD can often take many years to manifest itself. Although the current campaigns are foremost in people’s minds, any veteran from any era or conflict is eligible to apply. Currently many of these veterans are being missed by the mainline services, and although they may have no physical or visible disability they are suffering – some of them are quite severly incapacitated. At the present moment, it takes on average 14 years for a veteran suffering from mental or emotional problems to receive the necessary help they require - We want to rectify this. Every veteran who is sleeping on the streets, each suicide, or any one of them suffering mentally – is one too many. We want to help them. If you are or if you know a veteran we may be able to help please contact us. WE HAVE NEVER TURNED A VETERAN AWAY WITHOUT HELP
The reason why Tom and Tony formed the charity was because Tony was given some statistics by the widow of one of his soldiers. The soldier had killed himself aged 37, leaving behind his wife and two children. Sadly this story is only one of too many. There have been more men who have committed suicide since the Falklands War than those that were either killed or injured during the campaign. More men and women have taken their own lives since service in Northern Ireland than those killed during the troubles. Sadly the suicide rate among veterans is up to nine times the national average. 30% of the white jail population are military veterans. It is estimated that on any given night in London alone, there are approximately 6000 veterans sleeping rough (nationally there are between 9000 and 14000 men and women – many of whom are suffering psychological trauma).
During the three day residential fly fishing course, we can not only assess the veterans ongoing need, but also teach them a life skill, which they can use to help themselves. Fly fishing is now widely recognised as an effective therapy for many emotional and psychological problems.
After the course, we either introduce them to a mentor in order to establish a bridge back into society via the game fishing community, or if we judge the needs to be more severe, we will invite them to begin a programme of neuro linguistic programming.
We now have had two veterans who having gone through our program are now fully trained therapists, who hold recognised qualifications in NLP. We believe that veterans helping veterans is the most cost effective solution and provides the best results.
At present we are desparately short of funds. We would like to be able to treat a minimum of 200 veterans each year, but in order to achieve this we would need to raise £500,000 per annum to maintain this level of help. We want to expand our team of therapists so that we could then focus on treating 500 veterans a year and also establish a network of regional centres. To helpachieve this aim we are pleased to suport Forces for Good.
