From Combat to Film-making: The Grief Counselor

by Jason Keating

I left the Marine Corps at age 32 in 2012, three months after returning from Afghanistan. My last deployment was as a team leader as a Reconnaissance Marine. I thought I was invincible, I thought I was whole.

I was wrong.

After seven years of denial, anger outbursts, next-day headaches, and back-and-forth debates about divorce, I had finally been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. It was at this time I started writing again. I typed Fade Out, hit enter on the keyboard, and finished my first screenplay.

My eight-page script on mental health was complete and sent to a director I met at a film festival the year before. I was feeling good again. There was meaning to the story, it gave me purpose, again. We started researching mental health and trauma. The statistics on mental health and PTSD in women were alarming. The data showed us the number of women surpassed men.

It was eye-opening.

We reworked the story and changed the narrative to a female veteran and her dealings in mental health. Welcome to the film, The Grief Counselor.

Imagine a grief counselor who is in the role of helping others struggling to even help herself. Imagine the mindset of someone who has lost so much trying to keep the sanity of strangers while hers is lost. Our film is a fictional story created from reality. Whose reality though?

It’s your reality. It’s my reality. It’s the reality of those we don’t know.

Grief and trauma come in many forms. It comes to not just a single person. It does not choose only men or women who serve in the military. With our film, we hope to help open eyes to the realm of mental health. We hope to encourage more people to open up, to accept it. If that happens, that’s a win.

To accomplish this mission, we need your help.

The funding phase takes a village. In order to hit our mark and get the green light from one of our funding avenues, we need to raise a minimum of 80% of our goal. The good news is we are almost there. With your support, we can surpass the minimum. After all, minimum standards are not the standard of those who serve.

The funding platform calls your support a pledge. We call it believing in the cause, the mission, and the message. Every dollar helps. Whether it’s a single dollar or one hundred dollars, it all helps.

Help us tell the story. Help us help others. Together we can.

The link for our crowdfunding campaign is https://seedandspark.com/fund/the-grief-counselor#story

Semper Fi,

Jason Keating

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.