"The human response to psychological trauma is one of the most important public health problems in the world. Traumatic events confront people with such horror and threat that it may temporarily or permanently alter their capacity to cope, their biological threat perception, and their concepts of themselves. Traumatised individuals frequently develop post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disorder in which the memory of the traumatic event comes to dominate the victims' consciousness, depleting their lives of meaning and pleasure. Recent developments in neuro-imaging and other fields of the neurosciences have highlighted the complex interrelationships between the psychological, psychiatric, biological, and neuroanatomical components of the disorder.

"The diagnosis of PTSD is characterised by three major elements:

• The repeated reliving of memories of the traumatic experience. These tend to involve intense sensory and visual memories of the event, which are often accompanied by extreme physiological and psychological distress. 

• Avoidance of reminders of the trauma. Detatchment and emotional blunting coexist with intrusive recollections. This is associated with an inability to experience joy and pleasure, and with a general withdrawal from engagement with life.

• A pattern of increased arousal is the third element of PTSD. This is expressed by hypervigilance, irritability, memory and concentration problems, sleep disturbances, and an exaggerated startle response. Hyperarousal causes traumatized people to become easily distressed by unexpected stimuli. Their tendency to be triggered into reliving traumatic memories illustrates how their perceptions become excessively focused on the involuntary seeking out of the similarities between the present and their traumatic past. As a consequence, many neutral experiences become reinterpreted as being associated with the traumatic past."

"The vast majority of veterans leave the Services with no ill-effects.

The Ministry of Defence and the four health departments in the UK have together sought to improve the care available. We welcome this and recognise that there have been tangible improvements. Despite such improvements, there is no doubt that some serving personnel, veterans and their families are still being completely failed by the system.

"For those in service, fear for their careers remains a key barrier to seeking help: even if they do, it is unacceptable that the quality of care received is not always up to standard.Furthermore, it is a scandal that in an NHS budget of over £150 billion UK-wide, less than £10 million per annum (0.007%) has been allocated to veteran-specific mental health services.

"Even when specialist care is available, such services are clearly swamped by the scale of demand, leading to some veterans having to wait up to a year for treatment. 

"Many of these veterans see their conditions deteriorate further whilst waiting for access to treatment and, in the most extreme cases, they take their own lives whilst awaiting help.

"It deeply concerning that the MOD is not consistently providing the quality of mental health care to its Service men and women that they deserve."