Thank you, Louise.
Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chair and members, to be with you today.
My name is Phil Upshall. I'm the national executive director of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada.
Before I start into my quick remarks, I'd like to point out the fact that Syd Gravel is sitting here with us today. Syd is the co-chair of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada's peer and trauma support team. Syd has lived and continues to live with PTSD and its impact, as a former police officer in Ottawa. He's well informed on both the national stage and the provincial stage, particularly in Ontario as it looks at it's WSIB issues. Syd and his co-chair lead our peer support and trauma team, which is the largest peer support team in Canada, and probably in North America, directed specifically at first responders and people who have significant issues with PTSD. If you want to talk to him later on, you're more than welcome to. He's really a great guy.
The Mood Disorders Society of Canada is a national consumer-led, patient-led, and caregiver-led organization. All of our team, including me, have lived with mental illness, at one stage or another. My associate national executive director, Dave Gallson, lives with PTSD, having lost his legs in a terrible accident. It took him a year to recover physically from losing his legs, and it's taken him many years to recover from the PTSD associated with it.
My senior research person and project manager, a fellow by the name of Richard Chenier, is a former RCMP officer whose colleague was shot to death while he was writing up a report. He lived with that trauma for 29 years before he got the proper help.
Now I'm going to have to really go quickly.
As we outlined to the finance committee a few weeks ago, 85% of first responders and veterans dealing with mental illnesses, including PTSD, go to their primary health care provider. Regardless of all the other opportunities out there for help, if someone is going to go for help with PTSD, most go to their family physicians. Sadly, many of them, over half in many instances, leave without adequate care.
I'm not going to remind you of PTSD's significance today. Because of the expert advice you've been given, I won't get into what PTSD is. But from our perspective, PTSD is an issue that does not need to come to fruition, if you like, if early diagnosis is available and if help in the community in which that person lives is available.
Mood Disorders Canada learned about this problem when people phoned us and asked, “Where can we get help? There's no help for us.” We would refer them to the armed forces, Veterans Affairs, or their own police department, and they would always come back saying there was no help.
The first thing we did was ask, “How come?” We held a meeting. It was called Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind. At that meeting, it became very clear that we needed to attack the problem in a very significant way. As an organization with limited financial resources, we chose to focus on one thing, and that was family physicians and health care providers. They are the door. They're the gatekeepers. They're the first ones who see people living with mental illnesses. They are not taught appropriately in their medical training with regard to mental illnesses generally, and certainly not with regard to PTSD.
We have a very good working relationship with the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the shared care community, including all primary care providers. We've talked to them about working to engage them in the business of learning about PTSD, and they're all on board.