I should start off by saying that the data we used in our studies was collected in 2002, so it was a very different world before Afghanistan in the Canadian military.
I only wanted to clarify that point about the work we have done so far. We don't have access to follow these people. This is an anonymous database that we used, and was collected by Statistics Canada in collaboration with the Canadian Forces. It's only among active-duty soldiers, so that is another limitation to keep in mind. We're only looking at people who are in the military, serving currently, and perhaps these kinds of risk factors will change over time in their lifetime.
The study you are talking about, concerning the relationship with combat and peacekeeping and suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, says nothing about completed suicides and t says nothing about what happens when they are done with their military service.
I agree with you; of course it seems quite reasonable to expect that when people are seeing atrocities of this nature during a combat exposure it will have a possibly negative effect on their mental health afterward. It is limited by the fact that we're looking at it here and now. Anybody who had severe mental health issues at the time of the study would have not been included in that sample because they may have been released from the military. They may have committed suicide already from their experiences. This is simply a representative sample of active-duty people at the time.
Also keep in mind the fact that the combat exposure only asks “Were you in combat?” It doesn't ask specifically or address specifically the experiences they had during that combat mission, so it is possible that some of the people who had more severe experiences and the people who had less severe experiences are being put together, so that might be wiping out a little bit of the effect there. Maybe asking more specific questions around their combat experience might delineate better what kind of outcomes people have based on certain combat-related experiences, rather than only calling it combat in general.
On your second comment--