Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for being here and giving us your expert opinions. Thank you also for the work that you're doing.
I want to thank my colleagues on this committee for taking on this issue and giving it serious attention and public prominence as well.
For me this is all too real. I served for seven years in a war zone. During that time, over a very short horizon, I had two colleagues who committed suicide. One of them was a serving U.S. service person who went on home leave and killed himself with his service weapon. The other was a civilian PSD, personal security detail, who killed himself in theatre, again with his service weapon. Neither of the two men was directly involved in front-line combat, but neither of them, obviously, had received adequate treatment, and they had the most severe response to the condition that we know of.
I want to begin by asking a question that might be blatantly obvious, but may drill down a bit into the clinical ramifications. The fact that we're talking here, and that this is now out in the open as something to be talked about, has given us the opportunity to give it the attention, the planning, and the resources that it deserves. Again, it's stating the obvious, but is there not also a clinical component to getting past the stigma?
Dr. Merali, in your writing you compared this to the stigma that existed with respect to cancer. We're now breaking down the walls of stigma.
What can we do as parliamentarians? What can we all do as human beings to make sure that this continues to be something that is not stigmatized and is increasingly talked about? Very concretely, what might be the therapeutic benefits of bringing this phenomenon out into the open and tackling it nationally, and increasingly, internationally?