I'll respond with a couple of points.
For those who remain in the forces and go through a process of follow-up at three months and six months--my son came back six months after a tour of duty in Sierra Leone and went through the process--although they may be identified with PTSD at a different level, which is essential to identify early, the availability of care is not necessarily immediately there. So with the follow-up, the care, there's a deficiency, both on civilian street but also with the military, although both DND and VAC have increased the contractual arrangements to get more therapists available.
One of the downsides is that we're not putting enough emphasis on psychologists versus psychiatrists. I like to use the analysis that if a person puts their hand on a burning stove the psychiatrist will give you the pills and so on to attenuate the pain and to try to watch it heal. The psychologist is going to ask why you put your hand there in the first place.
The deficiency is not in giving them that initial stabilizing, and in some cases creating zombies; that stabilizing effect by therapists is more and more available, and it comes out. It is in fact the therapeutic side of bringing them back to a level at which they can sustain a reasonably normal life--i.e., build their prosthesis to live with--because that's what you have to do. So it's professional therapy, medication, and accepting that.
Then the third one is peer support. That is to have someone there between those sessions who's willing not to ask any stupid question but to listen for hours, to let you talk. Rarely is it the family, because they're too close. My family hasn't even read my book. It can be uncles, peers, and so on. In building of the peer support, recently Veterans Affairs opened up their peer support for families, which is interesting, and for children it would be needed.
There are processes in motion for those in the regular force. Those in the units are staying within a cohesive group, like in a regiment. But there are a lot of individual augmentees, who end up all over the forces, who are not necessarily followed up on because nobody else in that unit has gone there. There's not the same concern by the chain of command on the follow-up of the individual, or the leadership won't even understand what the problem is. In so doing, they can fall through the cracks.
However, the greatest deficiency is with the reserves. For the reservist who ends up in all kinds of villages across the country and decides to quit, there is very little follow-up on how they're being taken care of. That's why you're ending up with more soldiers in front of the courts. You'll see a lot of reservists there because they've been nearly abandoned.
That is a great deficiency for the reservists. We are counting more and more on them to be operationally capable, which is a whole world of difference from what we were doing in the seventies and the eighties, when we thought them to be the mobilization base during the Cold War.