Sure. I should make sure that I'm very clear about that. I don't think they are experiencing traumas that are beyond what's happening in the military; I think that they're experiencing things very differently.
When we deploy our military to Afghanistan, for example, we're taking them from a safe zone and we are deploying them to an unsafe zone, and then we are bringing them back to a safe zone. There's an important distinction between that framing and what we do with our public safety personnel or our first responders; we deploy them, effectively, to an unsafe zone for 25 or 30 years. They're in a constant state of uncertainty. On day one they might be out for a coffee with someone, and on day two they might be responsible for arresting that person, resuscitating that person, or rehabilitating that person. We're really deploying them to their own communities, which makes for a very different form of exposure.
We're also asking them, as Dr. Dadson said, to experience trauma on a very regular basis. Paramedics, for example, are called out to manage a current and urgent traumatic event, and they're asked to do that day in, day out, sometimes several times in a day. When we consider how that's impacting our first responders and our other public safety personnel, we need to understand that there's a dose-response that's going on there that's much higher than something we would see in most other cases.
With our military, you might see a very extreme, very intense dose-response, for example, during a specific period; but they're brought back to a safe zone that they can believe is safe and is kept safe by our public safety personnel; whereas for our public safety personnel, they're the ones keeping it safe.