If I could just talk on two issues, then you can follow up with Don.
You really raise two issues here: one is that dealing with mental health issues in general is not a medical issue, it's a leadership issue. It's a chain of command issue. That's a drum we've been beating from the mental health advisory committee for a bit of time with the Canadian Forces. There is a tendency to transfer responsibility for people when they're injured psychologically to the medical community and say, “Okay, that's their job, let them take care of it”. That's a serious mistake for the average soldier. He or she doesn't respond to the medical community the same way they do to their leadership chain. So we need to increase the involvement of the chain of command, the leadership, with these young men and women, whether they're in the service or they're not.
That's the second point. There's a transitional period when the soldier transfers from the military to civilian life or whatever follows. That is not being well handled, in my personal opinion—and this is a personal opinion. We lose them when they transition. It happens with great frequency with our reservists. Ten years ago, this was an issue that came up during the focus on the Croatian veterans who had come back. I chaired a board of inquiry looking into some of the issues, particularly suicides and serious physical and mental problems from that. At that point, ten years ago, we said, “You have to do a better job of tracking reservists as they transition back to civilian life”. The answer was, it's hard. It's hard to do that. I understand it's hard to do that, but we're ten years later, and a lot of these young men and women who are having the problems are having the problems because we've lost track of them. We have to do better there.
I think that leads to the other point that you've raised about the interaction with the caregivers, who are almost always the families—as long as families are able to stay with these people. If we were tracking them better, I think the interaction with caregivers would be better. If the interaction was with the chain of command, it would be better than if it was with just the medical community, because the medical community—and I have tremendous respect for that community—is a bit hung up, if I can use the term, on privacy and all these rules and regulations. The chain of command has a tendency actually to work around that, when they need to.
So that's the other point I would stress, that we have to focus on transition and we have to focus on the continuation of the responsibility of the leadership. That means Andy Leslie, the commander of the army, and all the guys down below him continuing to be responsible for these people as they transition.