Sick Parade
From PTSD to PhD
Dr Stuart Griffiths
Glory of War: Part 3
Sick Parade is the third and final instalment of Stuart Griffith’s Glory of War trilogy – military memoirs which cover his birth into martial life as a 16-year-old ‘boy soldier’ in the Parachute Regiment; through to his journey on to Civvy Street as a raver turned paparazzi snapper; and then finally into middle-aged veteran status, as an academic and award-winning photographer.
Having decided to better his life, Griffiths takes on a university PhD scholarship in the place where his traumas first began: Northern Ireland, where he served in the British Army at the height of The Troubles in the late eighties/early nineties.
Griffiths reluctantly has to move back to Belfast where he sofa surfs at a depressive and erratic veteran’s council flat. He comes face to face with his former combatants in the IRA, and becomes embroiled in the chaotic and often contradictive world of veteranism.
Griffiths’ paints a picture of lost souls caught up in a claustrophobic cult from which they cannot escape because their identities are defined by the service they gave to country as young men, trapped by trauma and trifling squabbles.
Hunger strikes, far right ideologies, mental health issues and simmering violence feed into an explosive cocktail that Griffiths struggles to cope with.
Sick Parade investigates the plight of a British veteran is in the 21st century, deep inside the claustrophobic world in which Griffiths is finally diagnosed with PTSD.
The story is a raw account of the struggle of an individual to find his identity as a creative in an uncaring world, racked with poverty and post memory.
The book’s apotheosis is the rigmoral of eventual treatment, and its relapse in a divided society, the long process of recovery and subsequent compensation within a brutal system.
Sick Parade is about what is left behind at the very end of the long journey of rehabilitation and the search for freedom in trying to locate one’s identity.
Sick Parade sits under Yellow Press‘ Big Story series – books written by journalists about the big ideas which matter to them. The Sick Parade follows Griffiths’ first two volumes of his Glory of War trilogy: ParaTripper and Pigs’ Disco.