Michael Terry is a graduate of Fanshawe's Adventure Expedition and Interpretive Leadership program, a biker, a 23-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, and a PTSD advocate
Post-traumatic stress disorder may be one of the most well-known mental health diagnoses in the world. It’s a condition that has become almost synonymous with war, violence, and those who struggle to find a life back home after being in active duty. For how much PTSD is discussed and portrayed in media, it can be difficult to understand just how someone diagnosed with PTSD goes about managing and growing through their condition. On Thursday evening, I was able to sit down to hear about just that.
Michael Terry has done a lot of things. He’s a graduate of Fanshawe’s Adventure Expedition and Interpretive Leadership program. He’s a biker, making annual trips across Canada. He founded Dispatches Adventure Ride, an advocacy program where he advocates for PTSD awareness. He’s a 23-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. And he’s been living with PTSD for much of his life. After his diagnosis in 2001, Terry served for another 17 years, eventually voluntarily releasing from duty in 2018:
“I recognize that my health was in very rapid decline and I truly felt that I really just couldn’t afford to wait for the system to arrange that medical release. So I had the had to leave early, you know, and I had to kind of set that date and set that goal and and leave on my own terms. That was really difficult decision to make: for those of you who know about the the military release system and medical releases, it means I left with without a lot of supports in place.”
After leaving the military, Terry enrolled at Fanshawe. What should have been a much more relaxed and stress-free experience compared to military life brought difficulties in navigating a world that Terry hadn’t been prepared for:
“I still didn’t have any peers any cultural or experiential peers to bond with both in and out of that classroom. You know when I left class for the day. I went home I was by myself. There was a very strong feeling or a very strong worry that I would never be able to connect with people outside of those.”
During those times, Terry spoke of struggling through anger, anxiety and dissociation at the world around him, feeling panic in events far more mundane than active duty. He also described difficulty in coming to terms with no longer being a soldier —a loss of identity he still struggles with.
A large turnaround point in Terry’s journey was when he approached his professors during an expedition with a request:
“That I take over planning the class movements the next morning. We were moving to a new location so that I could share that military planning process with the class. And it would give me an opportunity to adjust some of those, you know to apply some of those experiences and some of that knowledge to my new world, you know, to this new reality.”
To Terry’s surprise, his professors agreed with him and gave him the opportunity.
Terry graduated his program in 2019. Since then, he has applied himself to the Dispatches Adventure Ride, an advocacy program dedicated to bringing attention and conversation to PTSD. His work brings him across Canada on motorcycle, speaking at events and giving honest conversations about PTSD and how it can affect people.
For anyone wanting to hear Terry’s entire story, you can listen to the whole talk below:
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