Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, we were having that discussion. Again, CAF is a little bit different from veterans. One of the things that came out in Riga, which we've all sort of known, is how high the risk is—for the whole year, but certainly within the first few days, the first week—of somebody presenting to an emergency department with a suicide attempt.

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, there's work on spirituality, in a sort of non-religious sense. There's a tendency that more spiritual people are less likely to harm themselves. It's extremely complicated when you read the studies. The definitions are all over the place. The idea that there's something beyond me is protective in many people, and it is helpful in chronic illness also.

Veterans Affairs committee  I think it is to really push that research agenda, given those three thrusts. We have sat back with the whole trauma thing. We joined along, and for years we were happy to go along for the ride. Clearly right now, we're the leaders. We're leaders within this country, and other nations are looking to us.

Veterans Affairs committee  There is. Rates are different in different countries, the scope of the problem, so to speak. We need to continue with the idea of early education upstream as much as possible, as our colleague was saying. That's really going to be the key, as well as more mental health education, literacy.

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. At our last dinner in Latvia, I was talking to my colleague, my counterpart from the U.K. In a way, to understand as a physician, let's say you have somebody who has obesity, high cholesterol, and they smoke. They're coming into your office and you're going to give them the talk about watching their diet and stopping smoking, and then you'll give them a cholesterol medication.

Veterans Affairs committee  Currently the medical folks themselves are advisers to the chain of command. Again, the psychiatrist would advise the family doctor that the general duty medical officer actually implements.... We have a medical category system with lots of different things—vision factor and all of that—but the important ones now are the geographic and the occupational factors.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll answer in English, if that's okay.

Veterans Affairs committee  It is, and all nations are facing it. You want your military to be representative of your population. If we say that 50% of our forces have adverse childhood events, and 30% of society has, you're not going to kick out 50% of people because some bad things happened in life. We've actually found that joining the CAF helps those people, because the link between suicidality and adverse childhood events is lower in the military than it is in civilian life.

Veterans Affairs committee  Quebec has done wonderful things in terms of reducing its suicide rate, which was once one of the very high ones within Canada. Not everything is being done in our centre of excellence, but overall within our health services and within the CAF, we definitely do have programs such as peer support.

Veterans Affairs committee  They've been consistent with what we've been working on. Outside of an affirmation that we're on the right track, we were consulted as they were coming up with the framework. We had some good discussions in the prevention, the pre-post. The whole idea of the framework is consistent with where we're headed as a path, as a population we're looking after.

Veterans Affairs committee  We are light years ahead of that statement. We've been on this journey for at least 15 to 20 years. There probably isn't an organization in Canada, or NATO writ large, that talks about mental health and suicide more openly than us, so again it affirms the direction we're on. We have colleagues, the Dutch, the Germans, and all of this, and they're just amazed at some of the programs we have.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, that's a great question. We've done so many things over the last 15 years, or close to 20 years now, to dismantle and ask which one is the one who has done it.... But our stigma rates are down. When you ask a battle group coming back from theatre if they would think less of someone else who had a mental health issue, it's about 7%.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's extremely complicated. That's not a cop-out, because there are many, many factors. Many people who don't deploy kill themselves. It's clearly not the single factor. The common factors really are mental illness or a crisis. It can be a crisis with a big C or a little C, because when you're ill you can interpret different kinds of things.

Veterans Affairs committee  I think it's very interesting. There will be a group who may be ill. With illness, you treat illness. You find them the appropriate evidence-based treatment and let them do it. As a group, I think transition is going to be adapting to a new identity—it may not be the old identity—and how we transition between.