Keep in mind that when we're talking about equine assisted psychotherapy, these sessions take place with a mental health professional present who has partnered with us for programming through an agency. This is always done with another agency. Approximately 35% of the clients we've seen in this past year, and 50% of the clients from a pilot project that we did a year ago with the Phoenix Centre, involved military families.
Usually the children are coming in with some behavioural issues that we're looking to address. I'm very pro-family. We can make some little changes in the child, helped by the use of the horses in the program, but when the child goes back into the home, it's very hard for them to start integrating some of the new skills they've learned, such as the new coping skills and, the new communication and relationship things they've learned in the session. So we quite often get the family involved.
For the most part, the military families were very game to come to programming with their children, but some of the activities are high energy and there's a lot going on. What we've found is that we're supposed to be there for the child and helping with some issues, but we're seeing something else. There's something else in that arena that we're not addressing, and we call that the elephant in the arena: that elephant is the mental health issues that the parent is facing on his or her own—obviously stress-related.
So we're putting on band-aids and we're getting little fixes here, but there's this big elephant that we're not even allowed to talk about or discuss: why the parent is so stressed and the factors for this family's disintegrating. We can put on these little band-aids and give little tips on how to work together as a family, but really, there's an issue here that is not being addressed, and that is a concern for someone like me. We could be doing much better in these programs if we were actually able to address the PTSD.