National Defence committee  Only the last five minutes.

National Defence committee  This is a practice that dates back to at least the Second World War. It's not anything new. It's something that we've done, and, honestly, the philosophy hasn't changed much. But it emanated from the experience in the First World War, when they really asked much more of human beings than they ever could do, until they finally couldn't take it any more.

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

National Defence committee  I admit that I may have lost track of one or more of them, but to work backwards, no, I'm convinced that the differences between our own suicide experience and that of the U.S. military are not due to differences in technical ways of counting the events. We do them slightly differently, but that's not accounting for that.

National Defence committee  I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to. I'm not actually the one who is responsible for maintaining those statistics. What I can say, though, is that about two and a half years ago, in response to the expert panel on suicide prevention, one of the recommendations we made was that the CF initiate what we call a professional technical military suicide review.

National Defence committee  The issue is that suicide is an important public health problem in Canada, obviously, and we're part of Canada. It's also a particularly important public health problem in the demographic that tends to form the bulk of the military, which is largely young and middle-aged men. These things attract public attention, so they seem very salient, and it seems that every time we turn around we hear another story about another suicide.

National Defence committee  Suicide is a very complicated phenomenon, as you know. In any given case, there is a particular pattern of things that play together. The things that are of the essence are stressful life events. Usually there is one or more stressful life event. Usually at some point there is an acute stressor that contributes as a trigger.

National Defence committee  This problem is an international one and it is a Canadian one, which is to say that if you were to go to any out-patient mental health care setting in Canada and ask, what treatments are you providing, how well are you providing them, what outcomes are you seeing, and how do those outcomes compare to the guy next door, the answer you would get is the blankest of stares.

National Defence committee  The survey is a very important part of the answer. There are two criticisms in there, and they're sort of related and sort of different. One is the ability to understand the magnitude of the problem, who has it and who doesn't, and whether problems are increasing or decreasing. That's an important public health surveillance function that we need to have, and we have pieces of that in place.

National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen of the committee, for the opportunity to appear before you today. I am Mark Zamorski, and I am the head of the deployment health section of the Canadian Forces Health Services group. My section mainly does research in the domain of mental health and related problems, such as suicide and family violence.