National Defence committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I am Colonel Allan Darch, the medical advisor to the Chief of the Land Staff. I'd like to briefly explain my background and the roles and responsibilities of my current position. I

National Defence committee  The problem of stigma regarding mental health illness is a common one, I believe, in our Canadian society, and it's the same in the military. We've done a lot to try to destigmatize mental illness and to create an awareness of it. Some of the things we've done include a series

National Defence committee  Generally, sir, I think we have seen an improvement in terms of people coming forward to seek help for mental health problems. Specifically, with respect to the deployment coming back to Valcartier, it is way too early to have all the information on that. We won't have that for

National Defence committee  Yes, sir. In and around 2003-04, we had 229 mental health care professionals in the military. That included military and civilian psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental health nurses, and addiction specialists. With the approval of the mental health initiative, we

National Defence committee  I've just read a summary of it, and of course I've read the comments General Jaeger made to the committee. We're continually evolving the processes we use to assess and to treat mental health and the processes we use for screening people both before and after deployment. So this

National Defence committee  Some of this is a bit out of my area, but I'll talk about two general things. First is the challenge of ensuring that we provide the best possible medical care for our soldiers. Second is ensuring that we have enough commissions ourselves as well. With respect to the number of c

National Defence committee  Yes. In order to get the civilian doctors to work for us we've had to offer fairly good salaries. But the salaries are so attractive that when there is a position available, we've had military doctors retire so they can get that position.

National Defence committee  We do collaborate with them quite a bit. I don't know what specifically mental health may have done with them. You asked Captain Courchesne about the stigma and what we are doing about that, sir. Some of the things we have found to be very helpful in terms of reducing the stigm

National Defence committee  Yes, sir, absolutely. We would never deploy somebody who we knew was suffering from an untreated psychiatric or physical disability. However, we do deploy people who have successfully been treated for those things, and I know that if a person is given medication in theatre, it'

National Defence committee  The nature is that we're a learning organization, and one of the things that's very important to the whole process is what we call “lessons learned”. After an event or an operation, we assess and analyze the operation to look for things that we could do to improve the service we

National Defence committee  That's a good question, sir. I'm afraid I don't know specifically how long it would be.

National Defence committee  Sir, on my saying they do not seek help, actually I think what I did say was that they delay seeking help.

National Defence committee  It's very common in Canada in general on mental health issues for people to delay seeking help. I'm not sure if it's denial or if they're hoping they can solve the problem themselves. I'm not sure. With respect to the post-employment process, when they have the screening done th

National Defence committee  To put the delay in seeking care into more perspective, of the people who are screened during their pre-deployment screening as possibly having an OSI, over 50% of those people are already receiving care for it. If you go back to 2000 or thereabouts, the average time between the

National Defence committee  I do know that from 2004 to 2009 we're investing $98 million into health care. We are increasing the number of health care professionals in the military to 447 by 2009. Other than that, I couldn't tell you what percentage of funds are devoted to that.