Again, thanks for that question.
I've worked for DND since 2003, so when I started working there I was certainly seeing a lot of people from Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia. Those were most of the people I saw. Now, of course, the majority of people we see in the operational trauma clinic are from Afghanistan.
I also want to say that if we put it in context, the majority of people we see in mental health in any of our clinics are not people who come back with an operational stress injury. It's people who, like the general population, suffer from a depression or an anxiety disorder and who probably would have that no matter what kind of an occupation they had. But in the OTSSC, in our operational trauma clinic, I've seen that scope of patients.
In terms of symptoms, the symptoms are the same, and that makes sense because our diagnosis is based on a certain spectrum of symptoms, right? Those don't change. If somebody who'd been in Bosnia receives a diagnosis of PTSD, and if someone who was in Afghanistan receives a diagnosis of PTSD, the profile of the symptoms are the same.
How people suffer is sometimes different. How long it's taking people to come forward for care is different. When I first started working in the clinic in 2003, it was very typical for a soldier to come in and tell me that he'd had nightmares every night for 10 years. That was very typical.
Now we see people from Afghanistan, and in fact, at three to six months post-deployment, after Afghanistan, when they are doing the enhanced post-deployment mental health screening that we do, if they are identified in that screening procedure as probably having PTSD or another OSI, almost half of them are already in care. When they're told by the social worker that it looks like they need to see somebody, almost half of the people already are seeing someone. That's a big difference that we see.