Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. I think it's multi-faceted, but I believe that a lot of individuals have missed a lot of family time with their service, so sometimes it's about how they fit back into this unit. Families at home have been doing things for a long time in one way, flex

Veterans Affairs committee  I believe that one of the really important pieces is to think about how we develop research in collaboration with the community. The centre that we're meeting with this evening, the centre for chronic pain, is doing a really great job of having veterans working in collaboration w

Veterans Affairs committee  Definitely. There is a very clear line between women presenting with personality concerns—depression, anxiety and then PTSD—whereas when the men come in, the PTSD sort of drives the bus, so to speak. For a lot of the chronic pain, I know that a lot of the women I work with—the

Veterans Affairs committee  I think one of the other challenges.... Although Veterans Affairs provides some child care services.... A lot of women veterans I work with have small children, and they're trying to balance how to go to all these different places and their different treatment modalities while ha

Veterans Affairs committee  I find that a lot of the women who come to my practice have been diagnosed with comorbid disorders. Often when men are presenting, they have PTSD as their primary concern. A lot of women I end up working with have been diagnosed with personality disorders, more serious levels o

Veterans Affairs committee  One thing I find is that because of the “soldier on” mentality, when they experience systemic, micro-sexualized traumas, they stuff it down and lose their identity as to who they are as women and how they identify. In order to exist in this culture, they have to be okay with how

Veterans Affairs committee  I often work from an approach of acceptance and commitment therapy. A lot of pieces of that practice are first to help someone identify their emotions, understand and identify their physiological challenges, and understand their nervous system responses. The stages that follow ar

Veterans Affairs committee  I definitely believe so. I find that it takes a long time. When veterans first present in our office, the level of stress is so high that the services we do a lot in the initial stages have to create that regulation in order to decrease some of the nervous system's response so th

Veterans Affairs committee  “I endured multiple traumatizing situations while I was deployed to Afghanistan. To this day, most of my comrades know that I was released for mental health reasons and most probably assume it's combat-related, which isn't true. It's 100% mental health issues stemming from prolon

Veterans Affairs committee  We are actually going to be sharing our time today.