Sure. I have a colleague who killed himself on New Year's Eve, December 31, 2014. He was working a project targeting a number of high-level criminals. He was away from home working an excessive amount of overtime for an extended period of time, away from his two young children and his spouse over the Christmas vacation when they were expecting him to be home. There's a lot more to this story but ultimately it appears to have culminated in this police officer becoming so overwhelmed by his circumstances—he also suffered a head injury during that time that was misdiagnosed—that he went to his hotel room on New Year's Eve 2014 and killed himself with his own service pistol.
I'm still supporting his spouse who's now left with no husband and no father to her two children. She has received no benefits. She's now lost the primary provider in the home, and is still now, over a year later, waiting for a response from the local workers' compensation board. I don't want to come across as being critical of the board because they are, of course, investigating and doing all those things, but there's a clear example of something that has resulted in the loss of a life. It's left two children without a father, a wife without a husband, and a lot of questions and uncertainty around their future.
That's just one example. We had four suicides in the police community early this year. I can give you many more examples, and that's just on the personal side. There's an impact organizationally when you have people suffering from operational stress injury or PTSD. The absences from work, the suffering, the issues with their performance that manifest themselves in disciplinary processes, and how that consumes an individual and the individual's family and an organization, and how inefficient that is, it's just a travesty.
That's why this is so important and why we have to get so ahead of it so that we understand it, so that we can diagnose it early, so that we can prevent it, and treat it, and provide people with support so they can stay productive, not just in their personal lives but also professionally.