National Defence committee  If I understand your question, it sounds as if you're concerned about whether people who are medically evacuated are receiving some kind of psychological decompression as part of their repatriation. Is that where your concern is?

National Defence committee  I'm not familiar with any research that specifically gets at that aspect of the repatriation or evacuation procedure. The general approach is that these are people who have identified medical needs. They're in medical care and their psycho-social state is under consideration by t

National Defence committee  Unfortunately, I think the gains that we have made in the prevention of physical casualties and the treatment of combat casualties to prevent death and serious disabilities have not been matched by gains in the prevention of operational stress injuries. Arguably we've made no p

National Defence committee  I think there will be preventive measures that are effective, but I think they will be, at most, of modest efficacy. That is my guess. I don't think I will see the reliable prevention of PTSD in my lifetime, unfortunately. It's just too big of a task.

National Defence committee  I think the main efforts will be to get people into treatment sooner, so as to provide better treatments that work more reliably and more completely, better tolerated treatments. Those are achievable things. Above all else, we have to make sure that, given the treatments we have,

National Defence committee  Lisa, do you want to answer the first part of that?

National Defence committee  Certainly the more research we do, and the higher-quality research we do, the better. The upcoming mental health survey is a good example. It is basically the very best way anyone can do a mental health survey, which is to say the best possible response rate. Statistics Canada

National Defence committee  If I may, I think the general population has a lot to learn by looking at our mental health survey. We have eliminated in the military almost all of these terrific structural barriers that make it very hard for many Canadians to access care—not enough mental health providers, wai

National Defence committee  There's a fair bit of research on this. The most consistent observation is that being a victim of family violence is a risk factor for mental disorders, including PTSD. That is the primary linkage between family violence and traumatic stress disorders. That being said, there ar

National Defence committee  Are you speaking in general, in terms of being complacent about the problem of suicide in particular?

National Defence committee  In my position, I get only a superficial portrait of many people. That is the nature of what I do, and that is the nature of somebody who's trying to do research on the mental health of some 60,000 people. That kind of an in-depth understanding I think needs to be something our c

National Defence committee  I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to. Probably—

National Defence committee  Yes. I'm not sure what “clearance rate” means.

National Defence committee  Well, I know that people have looked at temporal effects on suicide, including seasons and days of the week and proximity to holidays, and I know that people have found some patterns there. In our own data, with an average of maybe 12 or 13 reg force suicides a year, it would be

National Defence committee  It's reg force. Sorry.