Mark Wright Project Centre helping to put Andy back together again

Andy Lorimer

The answer came in helping Andy to confront the horrors he had witnessed and getting effective treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Together, the family were able to piece their lives back together, and now both Jane and Andy are helping others who find themselves in sometimes similar situations.

They work at the Mark Wright Project Centre in Dalkeith which offers support for both veterans and their families.

The Evening News is backing the closure-threatened centre's campaign to raise the funds needed to keep it open. Here, mother and son tell how they survived the ordeal of PTSD, and why they are now determined to help others get through it.

Andy Lorimer - the veteran's story

When he joined the RAF as air crew at the age of 21, Andy "absolutely loved it".

His father Bob, brother Jonathan and mother Jane had all served in the forces, and it seemed he too had found his niche there.

The places he served form a roll call of Britain's recent military actions - Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Iraq. On each tour, he got on with the job he had been trained for, but in hindsight can list many of the events which led him steadily down the road to PTSD: Collecting the remains of people blown up during the Gulf War; being ambushed at gun point; encountering a Macedonian orphanage where 121 children were chained to their beds with only three carers.

Thirteen of his friends died while serving, and eventually he decided to step back from the front line and return to the UK to train others. But there were signs that all was not well - and they swiftly escalated.

The softly-spoken 47-year-old says: "Friends I'd known for 12 years commented how much I'd changed. I was isolating myself, not sleeping.

"I had changed from being an easy-going party animal, enjoying life, to incredibly serious withdrawal. It was commented that I appeared menacing - just my demeanour. I was having nightmares, flashbacks and couldn't cope with people."

Eventually he was diagnosed with PTSD, moved to live with his parents in Norfolk, and in 2003 was given a medical discharge.

His account of the years that followed is both heart-rending and alarming. "Post-discharge, all I was offered was a once-monthly visit to a training psychiatrist, who was learning the job and changed every six months. The local mental health centre had a waiting list, so I basically continued self-medicating with alcohol."I was arrested on at least four occasions for being menacing, drunk and disorderly, threatening behaviour.

"I was devoid of emotion, I had no feeling towards anybody. If I'd hurt somebody, it wouldn't have bothered me. I was hospitalised on average three times a year due to various physical problems, not eating, not drinking fluids, but got no psychological help."

That time also took its toll on his parents. "I saw my father's health deteriorating, he became very withdrawn, very upset, my mother was crying a lot. Once, my dad came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and I completely threw him over me, and he landed on his back - and I had no emotion attached to doing that. Now I feel a great deal of remorse. As I started to get better, I realised that my two years at home had a detrimental effect on them."

But one day he met a former colleague with similar problems who had been helped by a therapy called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), which helps patients change the emotions they attach to traumatic memories. He tried it, and says it transformed him, finally lifting the confusion and pain.

The turnaround was so marked that he decided to train as an NLP practitioner himself so he could help others. Now settled in Fife, he works at the Mark Wright Project Centre, and also has private clients, who have included not just veterans, but formerly-embedded journalists.

He says: "I never thought I'd be this well. I use a running scale for people and they usually feel they're 10, 20 per cent of the person they were. I say 'Where do you want to be? To be 100 per cent is unrealistic' - and 60 to 70 per cent is what they say. I'd say I'm about 80 per cent.

"There's no cure for PTSD in my view, but I've gone back to a perfectly normal life. I've remarried extremely happily and have found something else to do with my life, successfully."

He is proud to be part of the Mark Wright Project, which offers the same hope to many others. "There's security and safety here, and most importantly there's continuity and consistency, which you don't tend to get in the NHS. If you feel bad at home, you can come here. It's a much-needed establishment with nothing of its equivalent offered by the government. "

Jane Lorimer - the mum's story

When Andy joined the air force, his mum was incredibly proud. But she couldn't have imagined the nightmare that her family would be plunged into - and the way they would have to fight to ease his despair.

Jane, 68, a retired nurse from Prestonpans, with a lively, motherly manner, says: "He was a member of Mensa when he went away, very intelligent, very articulate, and he came back an absolute wreck."

She finds it impossible to pinpoint when she first saw her son's personality change, but it seems to have been around the time he was serving in Bosnia. She recalls: "The thing that stands out most in my mind was when he was in Bosnia, we got a phone call one night and he was in tears. Apparently he'd come across this little man chopping wood and all he had was his cat. When he saw the boys, he started to cry, went in and got them a drink - and everybody had been murdered - there was just him and his cat."

At Andy's request, the family and their church and friends collected 68 boxes of clothes to send to Bosnia so they could at least ease the practical suffering of those he'd met. But this act of philanthropy didn't ease his mind.

"When I look back, that was a turning point," Jane says. "We realised then that he had problems. It's hard to describe, but he was different, and when he eventually came home he was so spaced out that his dad had to go and meet him if he went out to make sure he got home safely."

After his military discharge, things got much worse.

"He came in very strange and tried to burn his BMW, burn all his money because it was contaminated, very strange behaviour.

"My GP came and as soon as he met Andy said 'You've got a seriously ill young man there, he needs help immediately'. Within a couple of hours the whole mental health team turned out."

Andy was admitted to hospital, but if the family thought this would mark the start of his recovery, they were wrong. "We realised once he was in there that they didn't know how to deal with him. It was left for Bob and I to do what we could. Quite honestly, how our marriage survived, I don't know."

The couple fought tooth and nail to find the help their son needed. They lobbied parliament and confronted health chiefs at a public meeting, to no avail, all the while helping Andy with the most basic tasks.

"He couldn't string two words together. We used to get him up in the morning, get him dressed, take him to the woods with the dog and make him walk just so he was doing something. It was awful."

But when he started NLP, Jane says, things changed. "Almost immediately, he became more rational. I don't know the ins and outs and I haven't asked him," she says. But what she does know is that the therapy seems to have given her back her son - and when she sees him at the Mark Wright Project Centre, she is proud once again. "He's got his self-respect back. He never brags, but I've seen people look up to him. They've told me that if it wasn't for Andy they wouldn't have come in."

Not only that, Jane is now helping other women whose family members are suffering from PTSD. She has helped set up a support group, Friends and Family of X Service Personnel, or FFOXS, and clearly finds great joy in it. "I enjoy being a mum to the girls that come in. I think I've got a unique take on all this.

"The Mark Wright Centre is so unique in that you don't have to pay to come here, you're welcome no matter what.

"It's a very lonely place, being the partner or the other half of a PTSD sufferer because you can't get in their head."

To find out more about FFOXS, e-mail [email protected] or call 0131-654 2531.

Great support

Since the Evening News backed the call of Bob and Jem Wright to keep open the centre they opened in memory of their son, donations have flooded in. Around 18,000 has been raised since we reported a month ago that the Wrights were considering selling Cpl Wright's medals to help fund the centre's work, and many people have pledged to hold fundraising events. Around 250 readers have also signed our petition calling on the UK Government to provide funding to enable the centre to continue its vital work.