Join author and ex-professional firefighter Anthony Ajduk for National PTSD Awareness Day to speak about being a firefighter: The highs, the lows, and being burned by PTSD.

Each year, National PTSD Awareness Day recognises the effects post-traumatic stress has on the lives of those impacted by it. You can find out more about it at https://www.phoenixaustralia.org/ptsd-awareness-day/

About the Book:

The book follows my 31 year career as a professional firefighter who was medically retired due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One defining traffic accident in 2012 tipped me over the edge and I never returned to work. That traffic accident is where the book starts.

What followed was 18 months of treatment under a Clinical Psychologist that took me through the process of understanding what had happened in terms of my mental health. The story outlines my symptoms and how they affected my life and that of my family. It is all the things that sufferers do not talk about and it is detailed unambiguously and graphically.

The story switches between that process and my life from my late teens through my career and finally to medical retirement.

Living with PTSD is like fighting with your mind every day. One part of your mind trying to destroy you while the other part tries to fight the horror being inflicted.

The language and incident descriptions are raw and shocking but it had to be to capture the emotion and tragedy of what Firefighters see and do on a daily basis. It is warts and all, the good, the bad and the ugly.

On a lighter side the story is interspersed with funny stories of life on a Fire Station where grown men have a habit of practical joking and shenanigans. The story questions whether this behaviour is the pressure valve that releases the stress and anxiety of a PTSD build up which is likened to a cup being filled water before finally overflowing.

The underlying motive of the story is to inform people of the growing burden of PTSD on emergency service workers, specifically Firefighters. It is a growing problem with solutions hard to find but consequences brutal and in some cases fatal.

The story concludes with my medical retirement and subsequent recovery which has me living with but managing PTSD.

It is a story that needs to be told so that people suffering this hideous condition can be understood and accepted as being injured without there being any obvious physical wounds.