Making Progress Through Scuba Diving With PTSD

Do you know how hard it is to give away $3,000 US, a considerable amount, more in Canadian I am reliably informed? Well, if you believe me, this story is for you especially if you either scuba dive or know someone suffering from the crippling symptoms of PTSD.

I (Kevin James) live on Long Island in The Bahamas and operate a non profit project helping PTSD sufferers rid themselves of their symptoms by scuba diving to depth.. So far 18 (including our latest Canadian visitor) have visited and left symptom free, according to them that is. Of the visitors, 3 have been ladies suffering PTSD from sexual and domestic violence.

Now to the scary part of not being able to give this money away! A very wealthy Canadian who has a second home on Long Island is aware of my successes helping PTSD sufferers and often very generously donates to the cause of flying people to the island, accommodating them, and then sending them home sorted.

He and his wife recently kindly gave me $3,000 with the comment “please donate it to your charity.” Now comes the difficult part, ordinarily I would send it off to the PTSD scuba bank account and at least one U.K. Combat Veteran would benefit as that is how the charity is set up.

However, as I know we have enough money for 2 or 3 sufferers in the bank to be able to travel etc I decided that finding a Canadian and spending the money that way would be more appropriate, especially as it was a substantial amount.

So, off I go emailing all and sundry north of the border, contacting every Canadian I know and generally making a nuisance of myself bugging people to put a buddy of theirs, male or female on a plane. Yeh, you got it absolutely no success, virtually no replies either which is irritating at best as I know there are loads of sufferers out there.

How PTSD sufferers feel, it’s always in the eyes.

To cut an already long story short I got hold of a Former US Navy Seal who I had helped as one of the 18 and asked him if he knew any Canadian special forces sufferers? He didn’t but a friend of a friend knew Dean, a former Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who left the service due to PTSD. Once Dean got in touch the ball started rolling and he flew down via Nassau and the diving began.

First comes a shakedown dive because Deans Blue Hole is 673 ft (202m) deep and I ensure the weighting of the divers is correct to a single pound for obvious reasons. Experienced divers out there will know he had to add a couple of puffs of air to his BCD early on in the dive so he would be ‘bang on’ with 500 psi left in his tank.

Shallow shakedown, sand waterfall.

After the fairly shallow first dive we progress safely as quickly as we can to some depth. The Johns Hopkins University Hospital (JHUH) discovered in 2011 that diving to an average of 60 ft (18m) for a period of a week improves PTSD symptoms by between 85 to 100%.

Off we go and my view is if JHUH decided a week at 60 ft does the trick, how about doubling both and maybe 2 weeks at a maximum of 120 ft (36 m) might be better. So using the Freedivers line from their platform as a safety downline we completed 16 total dives in the 12 days Dean was on island.

Once we got over 100 ft (30m) we only did one dive a day as we went as close to the no decompression limit as possible before going up to 20 ft (rim of the blue hole) where all of the fish and coral are and did at least a 20 minute safety stop swimming around.

Safety stop.

I was absolutely delighted after 3 days of diving (kind of the norm) that Dean said his debilitating tension headaches were gone. He also mentioned his constant “close to the edge” raging temper was receding day by day; so a great result, he said on leaving he was PTSD symptom free.

With regard to extra safety on any dive in excess of 100 ft (30m) I always clip on an extra tank with two regulators and stuff a spare mask in a pocket. The PTSD sufferers generally find the diving very calming but adding this extra level of safety makes them feel particularly relaxed.

On the way back up.

In summary, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that regular scuba diving to depths between 60 ft (18m) and 130 ft (40m) gets rid of the crippling symptoms of PTSD. Yeh, I know, there is no scientific proof apart from the JHUH study but when you consider more than half of the visitors were suicidal at one stage or another of their suffering and now they are not; that’ll do for me!

Article Submitted from Kevin James