I think in some ways I pinch myself. I think of deploying to Rwanda in the early 1990s, where mental health was an afterthought; we didn't think we needed it, but people who went suffered, and of course there's Roméo Dallaire and that whole story.
In one way mental health was the poor cousin of health care. Thankfully to the Canadian Armed Forces, the leadership and a few broken souls along the way, there was the realization that mental health is important and paramount, despite the thousands of years of history, knowing that psychological injuries have always outnumbered physical injuries in war and in deployments, whether World War I or World War II. I think that's the piece, a watershed moment for us in the Canadian Armed Forces, and our allies are extremely envious of the way we managed to create this whole operational stress injury paradigm.
What we've done is that we've basically given it footing and we have the Sacrifice Medal like the Purple Heart, the American one, albeit the latter doesn't recognize PTSD. With our medal, if three members are hit by an IED explosion, and one person dies and one person loses two legs, and the third person gets PTSD, all three receive the Sacrifice Medal. If you understand the military, that sort of recognition in pinning something on is important. I think for the whole oversight paradigm it's important.
More recently this interest in understanding guilt, shame, anger, the whole moral injury concept, which may explain some of the suicides, and also some of the resistance to conventional treatments, I think is really important.
The two main things that we're going to continue to work on in the future are understanding the biology, understanding what's happening in the brain, what's happening in the body, the inflammation, the heart disease, the diabetes, which seem to be higher in people with mental illness, and why soldiers with PTSD die earlier than others. I think Veterans Affairs, of course, cares about it.
I think that's important. I think leveraging technology, using your Fitbit, your wearables, getting to that point where we can create this 24-hour caring system using technology and things is important.
I still think the whole idea of personalized medicine is important. We're getting there, but the idea of the trial and error is frustrating for doctors and patients, so we need to understand a little bit more which treatments are going to work for whom, and start with the first one that we think is most likely going to work.
We've come an incredible way, and I pinch myself. I remember giving talks in Gagetown, where it was almost like I was being mocked for the touchy-feely talk, and I compare it to right now when nobody is laughing anymore at mental health.
I think we've come a long way, but it's a journey and there's a long way to go. I do believe that one of the other really important things is our engagement by looking up and out with the civilian community, and working with Bell and Bell's Let's Talk, and all of the different things that we're doing, because I truly believe that for soldiers, like athletes, if we're able to talk about our own mental illness and difficulties, I think that's important for the kids and for society. If the soldier can do it, the toughest guy who's out there can do it, why can't I if I'm an adolescent struggling? I think we've come a long way.
