I'll start with that.
The whole science of going from intent, to ideation, to attempt—either serious attempt or “not serious attempt”—then to the actual suicide act is a bit.... There's some debate in academia as to how somebody transitions through it. Are there differences between serial attempters versus completers? I think that's the key.
You can never really get a good, reliable number of attempts, and I've attempted to speak about this with your predecessors. If somebody has an overdose on a Friday and wakes up on a Saturday and carries on with their day, we'll never know about it.
We have in place a reporting policy so that if somebody in the chain of command becomes aware of a suicide attempt, a form is filled out. We collect the information, and the communication between leadership and the senior medical authority on the ground is to ensure that the person is in care. The chain of command and the senior medical authority, whom we'll call a “base surgeon” given my army background, will communicate, because sometimes the boss knows or the military police might find somebody, and you have to make sure that the doctor knows. It's just to make sure they're on the same page.
That's sent up to our headquarters within our directorate, and we track it. We do have the numbers, and I believe in a separate filing we produced that document. I don't have it right now, but it's coming to you folks.
Our emphasis is ultimately on getting the person into care. The cognitive behavioural therapy suicide, or CBTS, treatment that we've implemented in the last few years, with training across the country, is in both official languages is in effect a pivot that follows academia. In most of my career, growing up, when somebody was depressed and suicidal, you treated the depression as hard as you could to try to make the depression better. Cognitive behavioural therapy for suicide helps you to target suicidal behaviour specifically, giving a person the safety, skills and safeguards to try to prevent it.
The suicide attempt approach really comes down, in our medical system, to ensuring that the chain of command knows what resources are available for their people, and our clinicians, on a one-to-one basis, help them get the skills to attempt alternative coping rather than self-harm.