National Defence Committee on March 11th, 2008

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

I had a question around what we've been told about the military culture making it more difficult for people to come forward when they start to experience this. We've been assured that that is lessening as time goes by, but that it is still part of the problem with people coming forward.

I'm wondering, from Cyndi or Shawn's perspective, if there are differences according to rank in coming forward. I wonder myself if officers who are in leadership positions find it more difficult or less difficult to come forward. I'm also wondering about differences between regular forces and reservists and how the follow-up is done with reservists in particular.

The third part of my question is whether there are specific challenges for women. Maybe Major Le Beau and Cyndi would respond to that. I'm wondering about how women come forward. Is it different from their male colleagues in the Canadian Forces?

[Col Donald S. Ethell]

Cyndi, you're much younger than I am, and hopefully you remember all three questions.

[Cyndi Greene]

You knew there were three. I will try to remember.

I guess on one part of your question about the coming back to work and if that's making it harder, in my area the majority of the people I deal with are already out of the military. They're coming forward now, and I think a lot of it is as a result of word of mouth, as everybody has said here. The guys go out and they see results and they're getting help, and then their friends notice a change in them and they ask, “What's going on with you?”, and they say, “Well, you've got to give this person a call.”

I work with people in Thunder Bay, and I live out of Calgary just because I've had friends of those people.... I work out of the Veterans Affairs office. I can tell you one thing: in the office I work in, Veterans Affairs are really, really looking after their people. Every single time a soldier or a former soldier phones that 1-866 number, and they want to make an application or just ask questions about post-traumatic stress disorder or OSIs in general, they are automatically referred to the OSISS personnel at my site. I think that is part of the reason why I'm so busy.

I know the reservists on the base in Calgary. That's 41 Brigade, which I work with in Alberta. They just took on a new initiative, and I'm thinking it's called Operation Home Grizzly, but I'm not 100% sure. That's going to be a committee, and they're going to have one unit representative per reserve unit. So they'll be the liaison officer. And we'll be part of the committee to make sure these people don't fall through the cracks. That committee will be made up of Canadian Forces health services, the unit representatives, Veterans Affairs Canada, padres, operational stress injury clinics, family resource centre, and of course OSISS.

So the efforts are there, being done. From a Veterans Affairs perspective, I can tell you that I was 100% confident there's nobody falling through the cracks who are coming through.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thanks, Cyndi.

I apologize; time moves fast here. I appreciate your being thorough.

Mr. Hawn is next.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here. It's really appreciated.

Did I hear correctly? Are there 17 PSCs, 17 peer support coordinators?

[Col Donald S. Ethell]

It's on your--

[Maj Mariane Le Beau]

There are 21 coordinators for military members and families.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

How many peers can one peer support coordinator comfortably handle? I know that varies widely.

Cyndi, I think you said you're handling 197. Is that correct?

[Cyndi Greene]

That's correct, yes; it's 197.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

It sounds like a lot. How much time does that take every day?

[Cyndi Greene]

It does take a lot of time and a lot of effort. I do have one very good trained volunteer. Our volunteers, of course, also have suffered OSIs and are at a point in their recovery at which they're able to help out on a limited basis.

It's a huge client base, but there's really nothing we can do. Word on the street, if you will, is that we are there and we are available for the work we're doing, and there's the fact that it's 100% confidential. Sometimes I might spend a week working with one peer on certain issues, and sometimes I just call up the guys once every couple of months just to see how they're doing.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You're dealing with 197 clients; they're unloading their troubles on you, and you're downloading their troubles onto yourself. What do you do to cope with your own...?

[Cyndi Greene]

Part of our job as peer support coordinators, sir, is we are mandated to see psychologists. Every year we have to get a medical screening from our psychologist, saying that we are still able to do this. As well, we have self-care calls once a month with a psychologist at St. Anne's. He phones us individually--or as a group, sometimes--in each region, and we talk about what's going on. There are tons of support available, plus our managers; as well, our own peer support coordinators--we ourselves--talk a lot.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

We talked about burnout as the biggest problem of peer support coordinators. How many have we burned out to this point, or have we burned out any?

[Shawn Hearn]

I'd just like to add to what Cyndi is saying. I'd like to break her job into two percentages: 75% of her job, I think, is peer support; the most important and first percentage, for me, is 25% on self-care. In order for me, Cyndi, and other folks in our program to be able to help others, we have to learn to take care of ourselves.

In the beginning, it's not easy; there's a lot of playing checkers, but you learn to get it right and get your kings in one end. At the end of the day, we do self-care teleconferences with the veterans hospital in Montreal, Ste. Anne's Hospital, referred to in the presentation given by Colonel Ethell, as well as teleconferences with each other. We do regional teleconferences to talk about lessons learned and things like that.

The biggest thing, I think, is talk among peers. It's been harped on by our management team to take care of ourselves.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Colonel, would you comment?

[Col Donald S. Ethell]

I think Kathy has some figures for you here. Of the 197, how many would be active? They're not all active, as I indicated; some of them would go for a couple of months.

[Cyndi Greene]

Currently I have 89 active cases that I'm working on. However, at any moment.... I could go home tomorrow and ten of those inactive may be active now, and I may have eight e-mails and four voice mails and more referrals from within the office. That number changes quite regularly.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

The Cyprus program has been playing a role in that for close to a couple of years now; can somebody comment on the successes and the challenges that are there?

[Maj Mariane Le Beau]

I'll start, but both Cyndi and Shawn have been on the ground; I have not. I can only talk to you from some of the lessons learned.

When we were invited to participate in a TLD, a third location decompression, we were extremely happy to be working with the mental health team. As it progresses from decompression to decompression, it has provided us with many opportunities. One of them is definitely for the peers, and I'll let Shawn and Cyndi talk to that.

The kind of contact it affords the soldiers to the peer support coordinator is absolutely outstanding, and also for the mental health teams, because they're not always the same, obviously; they rotate. It's the same thing with our peer support coordinators; we try to identify those in the area to go to the decompression so that they will be providing education briefings to soldiers they may eventually provide peer support to. I think it has a lot to do with getting OSISS to be known more widely among the soldiers, indeed.

Cyndi and Shawn, would you like to add something to that?

[Shawn Hearn]

Sir, I think the third-location decompression in Cyprus has been a great thing. When I came back, I ended up slipping through the cracks because I was very unaware of what resources were out there for me.

When I was in Cyprus it was quite encouraging to see soldiers of all ranks coming up to talk to us after our briefings. Our briefings mainly focused on the OSISS program, peer support, but also redeployment from the veteran's perspective--going back home and talking to them a little bit about what it was like for me when I came back home, what the road to recovery was like for me.

I will say that we still have a ways to go, but I can say it's been quite encouraging for me to see young men and women who I've seen in Cyprus approach me now in St. John's, saying “Hey, I remember you when I was in Cyprus, and I remember you talking about the OSISS program.”

In part of our presentation in Cyprus there was a slide about possible reactions when you come home, and the key there--if you looked at the presentation that Colonel Ethell handed out--the definition is “any persistent psychological difficulty”. A lot of men and women, when they come back, are going to have normal reactions to having served in a place like Afghanistan, which is a very abnormal place, but the key, of course.... And that's the thing that I hit home in my presentations: “Listen, I'm not here to implant in anybody's head that they have an operational stress injury, and I'm not qualified to tell anyone that they have an operational stress injury; however, if you come home and any of these issues are persistent, then the bells might go off and you might need to get help.”

This is where Cyndi and I get a lot of contact, because our program is 100% confidential, and they know that, so they come to see us. A lot of our job is spent encouraging these individuals to get in touch with either the CF health services or Veterans Affairs Canada.

[Cyndi Greene]

Also, in Cyprus there are five briefings that the troops have to attend. There's one mandatory--battle mind--that everybody has to do, and then on the second day there are four, out of which they have to choose two. The briefings were battle mind, as I said; healthy relationships; leadership after the action; coping with stress and anger; and OSISS. The OSISS was by far the most attended briefing in my three and a half weeks, and I believe when Shawn was there as well. As Shawn referred to earlier, the comments were that they were quite happy that they were talking to ex-military people who had been on tours. We've been through the wringer, so to speak, and they look at us as mentors or as somebody they can look to, when they get home, for some help.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Sorry, the clock seems to be going extra fast today--it's our interesting witnesses.

We start into our second round, and it's only five minutes now, so it's going to be tougher to keep on the schedule. We have official opposition, government, the Bloc; official opposition, government; official opposition, government. That's how it goes for the next seven spots. So we'll start with official opposition.

Go ahead.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions go mainly to Shawn and Cyndi. I'm glad to hear you're both from small towns, because I think that's something many of us can relate to when we look at military personnel who leave and go home. They're not around a base. I notice where you're set up. You're in major centres, and that's great, because there are a lot of people in major centres. But for the individual who goes home and is in a small town in rural Alberta, Newfoundland, Ontario, what outreach programs are there? How do you set up? What's the process for someone sitting in northern Ontario or northern Quebec who's feeling uncomfortable? They've heard of OSISS, they've been to the briefing, but now they're out of the military atmosphere. How would they go about getting someone to talk to, getting a group together? Who goes in to see them? How does that work?

[Shawn Hearn]

I can really speak to this, sir, being from Newfoundland. We have a lot of rural and outlying areas. Currently I work in St. John's, in the Veterans Affairs district office. However, I'm responsible for the other bases in Newfoundland, Gander and Goose Bay.

I think one of the keys to the OSISS program has been our volunteer component. Currently I have seven volunteers across the island of Newfoundland and Labrador. I have one in Goose Bay. I have one in Corner Brook on the west coast. I have one in central Newfoundland. As well, I have four in the greater Avalon.

The phone for us is a very big tool. Plus we're in a different age, with the Internet, and a lot of our peers spend a lot of time on the Internet.

Just to give you an idea of what I do, I'm in touch with roughly 168 peers in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. A lot of these individuals who come back do go to outlying areas. One of our biggest challenges has been to access proper mental health professionals outside the immediate areas of Gander, Goose Bay, and Corner Brook, and of course any of the other outlying areas.

The big thing we do--and a lot of the time, this makes the difference--is break the isolation and give these individuals someone to talk to. I like to think that God gave us one mouth and two ears for a reason sometimes. A lot of what I do is just listen.

A lot of times what we hear is very confidential, and at times it's very extreme. We're just somebody on the other end of the phone saying, “I understand, I know where you've been, I know what you've done, but at the end of the day, there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

As the colonel said earlier, we're just acting as that beacon of hope. A lot of times they look to us for that source of hope. They look to us when things are not going well.

When it's a stormy night and the guy out in Rocky Harbour or in Pumphandle Junction is having a rough go, he can pick up the phone and give me a jingle. I have a toll-free number in my office. He can pick up his phone and call me free of charge.

At the end of the day, when they're having a rough time--they're “in the bunker”, as they call it--or they've been in their basement for three days and their wife says “You need to talk to somebody”, they can pick up the phone and give us a jingle. It makes a big difference for them. It takes the load, the rucksack, off their backs.

The volunteers who go out are key, but again, the key word here is “volunteer”. I can't phone a volunteer and them they have to do this or that. But the volunteers are chosen quite carefully, because they are people who want to pay it forward and give something back to the system. The folks who are chosen as volunteers have had a medical screening as well, so they're at a good point in their recovery where they can offer that shoulder or be the bosom buddy for somebody.