By the time war veteran Dennis Oldenhove noticed how poor his mental health was, it was almost too late.
It was 15 years ago that the decorated Macclesfield resident and RSL president found himself sitting in his car in the process of attempting to take his own life.
“I didn’t even know I was attempting suicide,” he says.
Dennis says an unexpected sound pulled him out of a trance that night and he caught himself just in time.
The next day, he went straight to his barracks doctor and had a conversation that would ultimately end his career as a soldier.
“The doctor at the barracks said ‘right, go home (and) we’ll send you your discharge papers; don’t come back’,” Dennis says. “And that was that.”
After 20 years of service in the Australian Defence Force (ADF), including active service in Iraq, Dennis was sitting alone on his couch at his lowest, pondering what had happened.
“I was just sitting there going, ‘I’ve just lost my job, I’ve lost my career, I’ve lost my pay cheque, I’ve lost all my healthcare, I’ve lost my security, but most importantly, I’ve just lost my identity’,” Dennis says.
“I was a soldier, and I had just lost that and now I was sitting on the couch suicidal with nobody around me to help.”
In 2011 when Dennis was discharged, terms such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were widely known, but not well understood or openly discussed among ADF personnel.
Many people suffering refused to talk about it, for fear of being in Dennis’ situation.
Around that time, the ADF had recognised its shortcomings in that area, but was still working through the complexity of how to address stigma and fear within its ranks.
A 2014 study by army veteran Captain John Bale, which used data collected by the Army in 2010 during its Mental Health Prevalence and Wellbeing Study, found there were “considerably higher levels of stigma and barriers to care” for personnel with PTSD.
Capt Bale concluded that this was because their role as soldiers was connected to “perceived self-worth” and doing anything that impacted one’s worth was to be avoided at all costs.
Dennis says some fellow soldiers later told him they had known about his deteriorating mental health for some time, but didn’t say anything – likely for those reasons.
“So many people came up to me and said ‘oh, yeah you haven’t been right for ages’ and ‘oh yeah, I’d noticed a big change in you’,” he said.
“Then why the f*** didn’t you tell me?”
As Dennis sat alone on his couch after his close call, he said he had “the presence of mind” to call his wife, who raced home to be with him. “With the help of my wife, I got to see a doctor at the Repat Hospital, and I was soon admitted there,” he says.
“I then spent months in and out of the Repat, years on medication and in and out of mental wards.
“Eventually I got myself back on track, and I mainly did that through getting out and volunteering and getting involved with the community and finding ways to keep myself distracted.”
Dennis was a member of the Macclesfield RSL while he was serving, but he stepped up his involvement at the club after he was discharged.
He also joined other community groups, such as the local football club and school council, and began using his experiences to help transform the community, particularly others struggling with an invisible illness.
We created a small group called Maccy Mates and with help from a grant from the State Government, ran mental health first aid courses …
“A couple of kids in a neighbouring town suicided, and that had a ripple effect through other towns, because kids from our town either went to school with those kids or played footy with those kids,” Dennis says.
“Somebody approached me and said, ‘Well, what do we do about it? How do we protect our kids in our community?’.
“The first thing that came to my mind was back in the army, every unit had a welfare officer so that if anything happened, they were the link to families from the military … and that position of a welfare officer stuck in my mind.”
Dennis approached all the sports clubs in town to explain the concept; each club would have a welfare officer who was trained in mental health who members could go to if they, or someone they knew, was struggling.
“If we do that within each club, then hopefully the message gets out wider; the stigma is reduced, and fingers crossed, the suicide rate comes down,” he says.
“So we created a small group called Maccy Mates and with help from a grant from the State Government, ran mental health first aid courses, and we offered the free positions to the footy club, tennis club, cricket club and so on.
“Straight away, we had 15 people in the town who were mental health first aiders.”
After successfully implementing that support model, Dennis moved his attention to increasing the awareness of mental health services, particularly within the town’s Anzac Memorial Garden, where he led a project to install metal signs listing details of support services.
“We designed the gardens to provide a place for veterans and community members to go and have a safe space,” he says.
“Next to some of those benches, we put signage up for Lifeline, Beyond Blue, Open Arms, those crisis numbers because it’s a visual representation, a national logo that people recognise.
“If someone calls (those services), it’s not going to go to a message bank.”
Dennis says it was all about creating a distraction or trigger to take action – similar to the distraction he needed the night he nearly died.
That original project later inspired a sister project that involved installing posts listing similar support service details in other parks.
“I didn’t want to start putting big mental health signs in parks and gardens because that can be counterproductive; whereas just a subtle post that unless you’re actually sitting on the bench, you wouldn’t even know it was there.”
Dennis worked with his community to expand the idea, which became known as Reach Out Posts. Today, up to 400 posts have been installed across four council districts – Mt Barker, Alexandrina, Campbelltown and Mid-North – paid for by either the councils themselves or groups such as Rotary or local suicide prevention networks.
The posts are built by the volunteers at the Macclesfield Men’s Shed and delivered through the RSL.
Last year, suicide prevention charity R U Okay? visited Macclesfield as part of a roadshow focused on mental health, and Dennis jumped at the opportunity to introduce the charity to the concept.
“R U Okay? is now going to go everywhere they go promoting the concept around Australia,” Dennis says.
He says his experience with mental health shouldn’t be repeated, and that opening up the conversation can have a real impact on the lives of thousands of people across the nation.
“Suicide is like a pebble in a pond where the ripples just keep going out,” he says.
“If you’re talking to somebody about it, it might not so much affect them, but it might be something that they’re aware of in a friend of theirs or a relative of theirs.
“… If (a post) only saves one person, it makes one person ring (a crisis line), and it changes that trajectory they’re on, then it’s all been worth it.”
