In fact there has been CANFORGENs—I suppose you're familiar with the term—that have been issued by the Chief of the Defence Staff over the years, where the chain of command has no authority at all into the medical support that an individual gets. However, when we use chain of command, it's often used in the informal way; that is to say, it's not necessarily by order and directive, but it's by the boss: he's a warrant officer and I'm a corporal, and the warrant officer doesn't like anybody talking about PTSD or anything problematic of that nature. So the chain of command is not something that turns on and off, but a lot of the informal authority that still remains is a significant influence.
That's why I argued that there has to be a deliberate culture exercise, an attitudinal exercise change within the forces in order to ensure that both veterans and non-veterans are on line in regard to that injury and its honour as an injury, just like a physical one. That's on the in-house side. So there's a continuum of culture shift that absolutely has to be implemented and responded to, and not be ad hoc, which too often happens, and the supervision thereof.
In regard to the therapist, when I was working with the VAC side of the house, one of the first things we realized was that some of the therapists had enormous problems with the patients they were seeing because they didn't know how to talk to them. So there is an apprentissage that the therapist has to go through in learning the jargon. One of the things we insisted on is that in every one of the clinics they have a retired warrant officer or sergeant to explain the culture of the military, what its background is, the ranks, the acronyms, and so on, so that the therapist is able to move into that milieu with more comfort and not look foolish.
One of the first things we realized was we needed to sell the forces patient, this unusual patient, to therapists who are used to civilians. One of the answers we did look at was looking at those therapists who work with police, firemen, paramedics, people like that, and trying to bridge the gap on how they work with those specialists and how they could work with the forces. But the overriding factor is some of them just don't want to find themselves in a complexity that is not within the norm of patients. And that then falls on us to sell the product much more effectively.