If you don't mind, I'd like to come back to one of the comments you made which I found very interesting. And I'll take this opportunity to answer your question at the same time.
One very important thing that you mentioned is that there is a big difference between the two types of trauma—and I did not refer to this in my presentation—type 1 and type 2. Type 1 refers to a single incident: a woman is walking down the street and she's raped; a person goes to a bank and witnesses an armed robbery.
Our troops are often subject to this type of trauma, they're subject to type 2 trauma. Type 2 involves repetitive events: marital violence, incest. Physicians with Doctors without Borders are constantly in contact with horrors. This means something altogether different for our servicemen and women. It means that if they want to last for nine months—and that's roughly the duration of their rotation: from six to nine months—they also need to protect themselves emotionally. For many troops, this will mean dissociation. That means that they cut themselves off emotionally from what is going on around them and continue what they have to do. When they get back, many of them will have gaps in what they remember. It's also difficult from a therapy point of view because you have to ask them to re-experience certain emotions, to "reconnect", whereas when on active duty, the way they tolerated the horror was to "disconnects". So there's that type of trauma, and it means that if an individual "disconnect", he or she comes across as being strong.
That brings me to your final question: how can we as Canadians improve their condition and lessen the stigma? That will be difficult, because "disconnecting", going about your business without feeling emotions, and not being afraid, are examples of behaviour which are considered strong within the Canadian armed forces. In therapy, they're told that courage is not about not being afraid, it's about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Feeling emotions may actually be an example of strength. So in order to promote healing, you have to get them to take the opposite approach to what they did to tolerate the horror and, sometimes, go against the grain of what is thought in military circles.
Our troops are extremely useful. They have to do horrible things, but policies are what they are and a decision is made to send them to fight because it's important for our country. They're very proud of that. Coming back traumatized is, for them, a sign of real weakness. They would have liked to have done what they had to do for their country without feeling any weakness. We have to show them that having post-traumatic symptoms is not necessarily a sign of weakness.
Gen. Dallaire has helped a lot with this. I think we need to be more aware that we're at war, and we need to decorate more soldiers and consider that they have done their duty to their homeland, even if they have post-traumatic symptoms, and not just decorate and recognize soldiers who didn't feel a thing. I don't know if I've expressed that well.