We're very, very pleased to be here to speak before your committee. I'll tell you a little about who we are and why we're here today.
You've had some very impressive presentations from very knowledgeable people on the subject of post-traumatic stress disorder. We'd like to augment some of that information—or certainly try to—and tell you a bit about our mental health strategy.
My role in the department is the director general of program and service policy out of our headquarters in Charlottetown. I'm responsible for some of the policy aspects of the mental health strategy, and I have a director who works for me in that area. He's ill today, so he wasn't able to be with us.
Raymond is operational director for our mental health strategy, and he is responsible for the various clinics we have across the country. As you mentioned, Mr. Chair, Raymond is based out of our operational stress injury centre of expertise in Montreal. He has the knowledge of the day-to-day operational aspects around this issue.
You have a presentation from us. I won't go through all the detailed slides, but I will talk about our mental health strategy.
The department has made a commitment to improve the quality of life of its clients with mental health conditions, and their families, and that's what our mental health strategy is essentially all about. You will hear us talk about operational stress injuries. The term is used to describe a broad range of mental health problems, which include diagnosed medical conditions such as PTSD, but also anxiety disorders, depression, and other conditions that might be less severe but still interfere with daily functioning. PTSD, which you are more familiar with from the presentations that have been made to you, is a psychological response to an experience of intense traumatic events, those that threaten life, making one extremely afraid, helpless, or horrified.
I should point out, and I think other speakers have also pointed out, that although the term “PTSD” we're using now is a fairly new term, this is not unknown in terms of other conflicts. During the American Civil War it was referred to as “soldier's heart”. The First World War often referred to it as “shell shock”, and in the Second World War it was often referred to as “war neurosis”. It was referred to by our American colleagues during the Vietnam war as “combat stress reaction”.
The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” was coined in the 1980s. There's a substantial amount of research that has gone behind the establishment of this particular mental health condition. You've had some clinicians speak to you more specifically about the actual nature of the illness. Raymond and the colleagues he works with in Montreal are our departmental experts on the subject.
If you're following along, the next slide in our deck is number 5. I'm not terribly comfortable with putting this slide in next because it tends to focus your attention on pension conditions. Our approach has evolved in the last few years with the implementation of the new Veterans Charter, and we have many more tools in our tool kit other than simply a disability pension.
In the past, the department has focused on disability pension as a gateway to other benefits, especially benefits that relate to the treatment of things like post-traumatic stress. We no longer have to put people through that gateway process. We now have a suite of wellness programs that allows us to intervene when people have symptoms and deal directly with the medical treatment of their conditions without having to go through a long and complicated process associated with pension adjudication.
Certainly slide number 5 will show you that in spite of the perception perhaps, Veterans Affairs is a department with a reducing number of clients. The overall number of clients has gone up steadily over the late 1990s and into the 2000s, with the forecast numbers projected to drop off. But we haven't actually seen a decline in our work yet, and that's not likely to happen with the increased operational stress and tempo that is being experienced with Canadian troops abroad.
You will see from that slide that the proportion of clients who make up our veteran population has increasingly become Canadian Forces clients as our older veteran clients pass away. That trend is also expected to continue.
Many people perhaps lose sight of the average age on release. This is something that the new Veterans Charter was about. The average age of a CF member on release is 36. That's quite a young age to be thinking about a disability pension and being disabled for life. I think it's quite appropriate that we have done a lot more than issue pensions to these younger veterans who are suffering from conditions such as PTSD.
Having said that, the interventions are still there. We now have 10,000 clients who have been pensioned or who are receiving disability awards for a psychiatric condition. There are 63% of them who have conditions labelled post-traumatic stress disorder. That number has increased quite dramatically over the last five years. Slide number 7 illustrates the number of people who have been pensioned for psychiatric conditions in the last number of years.
The next slide highlights those people who have been specifically pensioned with post-traumatic stress disorder. I say pensioned, but I should say that since last year, younger CF members are now able to get a disability award, which is a lump sum payment, treatment, and monthly benefits by virtue of rehabilitation that they undertake as part of their case management.
As I mentioned, we now have a much more comprehensive approach to case manage members. We provide a very broad suite of wellness programs to help them back into civilian life and to recover as quickly as possible.
The next slide, committee members, focuses on where the favourable decisions for PTSD are located in our offices across the country. I should tell you that the five offices where we have the most clients are in Edmonton, Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, and Calgary. We have clinics, and our colleagues in the Department of National Defence have clinics, for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other occupational stress injuries in these areas. Part of the budget measure is to expand our number of clinics across the country. We are putting even more focus on this issue in the next few months and years.
If you look at slide number 10, the deployments the military is facing result in serious and dramatic human suffering. This human suffering is the type you see in the newspapers and on television almost every day, but it is also a much more subtle form of disablement that comes from mental health conditions such as PTSD.
The other thing that's quite evident from the research and the work we are doing is that in general there is a lack of capacity in Canada to deal with mental health issues. That is why we focus a lot of our efforts in two areas. One is to establish a legislative and regulatory framework that gives us the tools, as I mentioned, to actually intervene and provide the treatment that is necessary for these folks. The second thing is to provide facilities where they can be treated. That is what these occupational stress injury clinics are all about.
I'm now on slide 12, if you're following, and I'm talking a bit about our response. Veterans Affairs Canada has launched an aggressive approach to try to deal with people suffering from these operational stress injuries. We've established a mental health strategy. This strategy was developed and launched a number of years ago, but we have put a lot more resources into it in the last couple of years, and we envisage, as I mentioned, putting substantially more resources into it in the years ahead.
The components of the strategy, on slide 13, are providing a comprehensive continuum of mental health services and policies, to build our capacity in the department to deal with these issues, and to provide leadership, not just leadership in Canada but leadership outside the country. We've sponsored a number of international symposia on this subject, and we're working in collaboration with many of our colleagues in the health care field in Canada and also internationally.
In terms of a comprehensive continuum of mental health services, we are focusing on more health promotion, assessment, and treatment for people who are suffering from these conditions, and we have a very comprehensive case management scheme under our new Veterans Charter that allows us to deal very actively with cases.
I'll move quickly through the next few slides and then conclude and answer your questions.
I mentioned the capacity-building we're doing. We're focusing on establishing these new clinics, five that we've already established and five more that were announced in the recent budget. We're providing leadership in terms of research in this area, and we'd be happy at some future date, if you have interest, to talk to you more about some of our research, the research that's taking place at Ste. Anne's and also across the country with some of our research capacities. And my research colleague who works with me, Dr. David Pedlar—we can talk to you more, if you have interest, about the collaborative partnerships we have.
That summarizes the major issues we wanted to highlight for you this morning. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have on the policy aspects, and I'll direct questions on some of the operational issues to my colleague, Raymond.
Thanks very much.