CINCINNATI, Oh. — A new Kentucky law, House Bill 30, will establish a suicide prevention program for Kentucky service members, veterans and their family members. Spectrum News 1 spoke to a veteran who’s taking a non-traditional approach to fighting veteran suicide by inviting them to practice mixed martial arts.

Zach McGuffey is comfortable in uncomfortable situations. But that wasn’t always the case for the Marine Corps infantry vet.

“When veterans feel alone, then they start getting those dark thoughts, and they don’t know who to reach out to. They lose their purpose,” McGuffey said. “After getting out of the service, I struggled with my own mental health issues, and I had friends from the marine corps commit suicide.”

As he often does on the mat, McGuffey used all the leverage he had to get out of a bad spot and gain the upper hand.

He started a nonprofit and opened a gym with the mission of fighting veteran suicide, sharing his story with Spectrum News 1 a few years ago.

Now he’s a program support assistant with the Cincinnati Vet Center. He has the same mission, but he brought it to Vision Fitness and MMA in Cincinnati.

Gym owner Jason Laine said he was happy to welcome McGuffey and other veterans in.

“We wanted to create programs that they could come in, be part of a full community, support each other and have support from the existing community. For me, the veteran community is a really special group of people,” Laine said. “They bring leadership and experience to any place they come to. So to have them inside of our facility really does benefit us just as much as it benefits those individuals.”

McGuffey said it’s been an exciting new venture.

“It is the first jiujitsu gym that has a vet center cap site at it,” McGuffey said. “I’m the first friendly face that a veteran sees when they come in.”

A cap site is an outreach progam that allows veterans to meet in comfortable surroundings, but not in a traditional VA center.

He’s joined by Cincinnati Vet Center Readjustment Counselor Taylor Katt, who explained why the free one-hour jiujitsu training session might be more successful in bringing in veterans struggling with mental health than a more traditional setting.

“A lot of folks who have walked into the VA’s doors have what I like to call white coat syndrome. They see the doctor, they get rigid, and it’s very ‘yes, no’ kind of responses. You come to a place like this, totally disarming. This is a lot like what a lot of us experienced in the military where you’re training, you’re elbow to elbow with people,” Katt said. “By the time you’re done with it, you’re going to be so gassed physically, that what’s left is pretty much your mind.”

That’s where the post traumatic growth course, an open talk therapy session after training, comes in.

“Here I am, I get to just talk about what’s authentically my experience. So it’s pretty magical. And there’s a lot of research that shows if you can physically activate somebody to the same level of activation they were experiencing, say in combat, you can process trauma in a whole new way that you just can’t achieve in an office setting,” Katt said.

McGuffey explained why he thinks it’s an effective method.

“Once you build that rapport, you create this friendship, this camaraderie. And you can create a new support system, so if you start having mental health issues, you can call your buddy, ‘Hhey, meet me at the gym, I need some help. I need to work out,’” McGuffey said. “I think that is what makes jiujitsu so important in the veteran community, is the new camaraderie it builds, that is similar to the camaraderie you had when you were in the military.”

It might not look like it when they’re rolling around, beating each other up, but the bond McGuffey and Katt have formed with each other and the other vets who come in to train is tough to break. And they said it could help save lives.

“I personally have a friend, a very close friend of mine, that died by suicide. And I wept,” Katt said. “For me, any day that somebody chooses life is a victory.”

As Kentucky looks to establish new veteran suicide prevention programs, creative thinking might be an effective course of action. McGuffey and Katt said they want Vision Fitness and MMA to be the premiere community access point for veterans across the region.