Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm very happy to answer the member's question and to emphatically support his comments. I agree that we need to engage in more preventative medicine, period, and certainly with mental health care I think prevention may very well be the key.
We can do a lot with prevention already in providing additional education. There are already cross-sectional studies, and even some nascent or prospective longitudinal studies that have provided us with some initial directions about what to target, because it's not as simple as identifying a virus or identifying bacteria and then wiping it out. It's more complicated than that with mental health, as I'm sure you know.
With the prospective and longitudinal research that we want to engage in, we want to be able to target specific aspects of individual vulnerabilities and resiliencies. So for example, there's a construct that we refer to as anxiety sensitivity. Anxiety sensitivity refers to how you respond to your own internal sensations associated with anxiety—heart palpitations, for example. How you respond to that can influence your subsequent anxiety responses, so that's one of the variables that we're very interested in researching, because it's also one that we can modify. So if we can broadly proliferate modification of that variable, we can reduce it as a risk factor and then build resiliency right into mental health and mental health care at a very fundamental level.
So variables like those we are very interested in studying, because we know how to change them. We're excited about the prospect that if we can demonstrate the success associated with that change, we can then encourage and support the use of those kinds of changes, not just for first responders but for all Canadian citizens.