National Defence committee  I'll take a wild guess and say that this is what I would expect to see, except for the American air force. I'm sure it's the same thing in the Canadian air force. There is so much emphasis placed on making sure that people are not fatigued, that they're well rested, that they can operate during long flights in different kinds of missions.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. You reminded me of something else that's important to mention. The issue was trying to determine how many hours of sleep people get in a 24-hour period. It wasn't necessarily 6 consecutive hours. People might get close to 6 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. So yes, you are absolutely right.

National Defence committee  Yes. I'm starting discussions with them just as I did today, promoting sleep as a core component of mental health. I'm very interested in depression and anxiety. I think PTSD has a unique position to play in that institute with regard to integrated sleep. I know Dr. Merali has been here, and one of his three recommendations was focused on sleep disturbances, so I was pleased to read that.

National Defence committee  Krueger and Friedman was the civilian population, over 10,000 civilians. The data that they compared it to...or that I used to compare it to was what we see in military samples. The other one is a study by Amber Seelig and her colleagues, looking at the likelihood of people starting to report sleep problems during deployment.

National Defence committee  I think it's the training, what kind of job people have, probably partly social aspects, as well, and high demand, I think, would account for this. In this particular study, they didn't measure what kind of factors can contribute to shorter sleep duration.

National Defence committee  This particular study looked at people who had been back for, I believe, three to nine months. This is just an example of the studies. Most of the studies that have been done so far have looked at people from three months to a year post-deployment, or further than a year. We do know that even five years after deployment, if people have sleep problems when they come home, they tend to still have sleep problems five years later.

National Defence committee  Seelig is all people who had deployed and then came home, or during and after deployment.

National Defence committee  At all.

National Defence committee  When I left Montreal to do my post-doctoral training in Pittsburgh, my main goal was to learn how to use the various neuroimaging methods so I could study sleep in people with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I've been doing the same thing for a long time. For 20 years now, I've been studying sleep in people who have nightmares, who have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

National Defence committee  No, but that's my goal. Some changes have been made, mainly… in the air force. We are making various efforts to manage fatigue to protect sleep to ensure that pilots and their team are well rested when they are on a mission. Everyone has a war fighter's sleep kit now. Military personnel get one as soon as they are deployed.

National Defence committee  I don't know that it's resistance, as much as there are so many demands and so many things that people have to address. Sometimes, unless sleep is already on their list, it's one more thing to attend to, and their priority is always the training, the preparation, and safety of their troops.

National Defence committee  Yes. We are currently studying families where at least one member of the couple has completed United States military service or is still active in the army or one of the units. We are seeing that family members are having trouble sleeping, be it either spouse or even the children.

National Defence committee  I'm a sleep researcher, so I started doing EEG research and looking at brain activity and how we use neuroimaging to address some related questions on sleep and on post-traumatic stress disorder. I was nodding for a different reason. If you can have objective markers for rehabilitation efforts or for post-traumatic stress disorder or for sleep that identify clinically significant improvement, or that can predict whether or not a patient is maximally benefiting from any kind of intervention to guide the clinical decision-making process that is going on....

National Defence committee  They are different things. One is the likelihood of having difficulty with sleep during the deployment; the other one is a survey of how many hours of sleep you get even when you're not deployed. In this case, it was 72% of people who said they slept on a regular basis six hours or less.

National Defence committee  I'm going to try to answer you in proper French. Based on the data we have on treating post-traumatic stress, be it through cognitive behavioural approaches or medication, the best we can expect is a 40% to 60% success rate. I'm not talking about remission here, but really a response to treatment.