Thank you. I'm Dr. Alice Aiken. I'm the scientific director of the Canadian Institute for Miliary and Veteran Health Research and a professor at Queen's University.
I'm going to talk to you today about a model that I think works well and could potentially work to meet your needs, and that's the model we follow. I had the advantage of being at an earlier meeting held in Regina and talking about this very issue. TheHonourable Michel Picard was there as well.
I would really urge the committee to think beyond just post-traumatic stress disorder and encompass all mental health. The issue is that if you only focus on post-traumatic stress disorder, we're going to have a lot of people getting that diagnosis who don't have the problem, and, as we just heard from my esteemed colleague, we're already struggling with finding the correct treatments. It's not going to help if everybody is getting the wrong diagnosis in the first place, so I really urge you to think beyond just post-traumatic stress disorder to mental health more broadly.
One of the facts that supports this is our focus is in military and veteran health research. We know from very good epidemiological data that there are many influences on mental health disorders beyond simply our own biology. There are societal, cultural, and experiential influences on mental health, and one of the best examples of that was a very large-scale study done out of the U.K. on returning combat veterans with mental health issues. The number one diagnosis in the U.S. is post-traumatic stress disorder; in Canada it's a major depressive disorder; in the U.K. it's binge drinking. All three are related diagnoses, but there are obviously differences in culture that might explain those.
I just want you to keep that in mind: that perhaps just to focus on PTSD is not ideal.
As I mentioned, about seven years ago we started the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, and respecting what Minister Oliphant said, we started out with no money and we did it because it was the right thing to do and a good idea. I'm extraordinarily biased, because I am a veteran and I'm married to a veteran, so I thought it was extremely important.
We started this institute at arm's-length from, but in consultation with, National Defence and Veterans Affairs. They recognized that they needed independent arm's-length research to inform their health policies, practices, and programs as they moved forward. Both National Defence and Veterans Affairs recognized that. Their link-in was to the academic community. I would hope that we perceive in this country that a lot of our best and brightest researchers exist in our academic institutions and that it would be where government should be able to turn for these answers.
We actually do operationalize a fairly large standing offer now on behalf of National Defence and Veterans Affairs for their research ideas that they want to put out to the research community. We are a network of 41 Canadian universities and over 1,000 researchers dedicated to researching the health needs of military personnel, veterans, and their families. Public Works has actually cited the way we do business with National Defence and Veterans Affairs as the way government and academia should be working together, so we're pretty proud of that.
The other thing that we did not do from the beginning is we did not limit the research areas. We really wanted to focus on the population, which I think is very similar to your mandate. Your mandate is public safety personnel, meaning first responders, corrections, 911 operators—public safety personnel in a broad sense. We focus on military, veterans, and families.
The vast majority of the research is being done in mental health, but we also do research in physical health, novel health and technologies, and occupational health. There are different areas of research, and what's been really remarkable is we're now seeing overlap among a lot of the areas of research. For example, some of the technology allows for children of military families who are moving around the country to still be treated by the same psychologist through social media and through technology. Those are really neat overlapping areas of research.
I think it's incumbent upon our government—and I say this not as a researcher but as a taxpayer—to ensure that policy or programming decisions are based on evidence, and it's out there. It exists. It's just not always harnessed and used to the best of our abilities. I believe the academic community is here to help with that.
I'll stop there. I'm happy to answer any questions, but my orientation is just to say we've done it. We're happy to help any other group that wants to set up similar organizations for public safety, but I'm going to agree 100% with Dr. Merali that it needs to start with the research. To focus on one area of treatment or to fund treatment programs blindly doesn't solve the problem. We need to go back to research, and some of it in very basic science and new diagnostic methods.
Thank you.