National Defence committee  Our biggest challenge in dealing with the mental health issues related to Afghanistan or specifically...?

National Defence committee  I think one of our greatest issues—and we've talked about this a lot—is dealing with mental health and the stigma related to mental health in Canada in general, in trying to open up access and having people present for their mental illness earlier and get that treated. If we're t

National Defence committee  One of the things that has helped a lot in the military is the fact that we've called this an injury. This is a mental health injury. Soldiers are much more likely to come forward for an injury than an illness. The other thing we're trying to do is get people to recognize that

National Defence committee  That's a great question, because the first thing to also recognize is that the majority of mental health we deal with has nothing to do with operations. The majority of mental health we deal with is the same as what every other Canadian in Canada deals with, so we have a baseline

National Defence committee  If I understand the question correctly, it's about what percentage of our mental health care providers are civilian versus military...?

National Defence committee  Over the past decade, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of civilian mental health care providers. Rx 2000 is the name of the project that we went through to rebuild our health services. In that, we hired a lot of civilian health care providers, so that number has gone

National Defence committee  That's a good question. As for where we are in relation to other NATO nations, it all depends on the nation. Some we're actually quite close to and others.... We can provide that NATO report if you'd like to see how we compare to the other NATO nations. Why is that? It's mainly

National Defence committee  I can't really say in comparison to other NATO nations. We just made the decisions based on what we felt our risks were going to be and what we felt we should be doing.

National Defence committee  That's a great question. The evidence base is certainly not there to exclude equine therapy. We go through a review process for all different therapies, all types of adjunct therapies that exist out there. There are many things out there that can assist all of our patients in man

National Defence committee  That's what our treatment standardization committee does. It reviews all of these therapies beforehand, before they even get presented to the Spectrum of Care Committee. We have specialists—and it's multidisciplinary, including psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers—who

National Defence committee  Right—these are guiding principles. You don't have to meet all five criteria to be included. This committee is chaired by the assistant chief of military personnel, with representatives from the army, air force, and navy. It's an operationally led committee that can decide to inc

National Defence committee  Of your couple of questions, the last was, what percentage of our mental health care providers have military experience? I can't answer that for you, but I can try to track that down. It may be difficult to find, unless we ask every single one of them, but we do have a fairly sig

National Defence committee  Right. Do you mean the percentage of people?

National Defence committee  I know of those who participated in that event, but I don't know them as mental health care patients, no. I know people who have participated. I've been in Afghanistan myself, sir. All of those are very challenging experiences. When you're exposed to a significantly traumatic e

National Defence committee  I'm sorry. I misunderstood. I don't know of any specific cases that came out of that event. We don't track specific events like that to identify percentages of people. We don't keep track of everybody who was there who may have developed that, but I suspect that there are some.