Yes, we absolutely do. Drug addiction is one of the symptoms of people who are traumatized. It's a cascading or domino effect. They cope by trying to self-medicate; that's one thing. But if depression sets in and they're not treated.... They may not have seen active duty; they could have been traumatized by what's called “vicarious traumatization”, or secondary traumatization, by what they witnessed. That's a whole group that we don't really understand, but if you serve overseas...if you're in Afghanistan as a soldier, you may not be involved in direct face-to-face combat, but you can also pick up a certain amount of trauma just by the exposure of what you experience.
When they come back to Canada, I think you're absolutely right that we take very seriously that they...we look for acute depression that leads to isolation and that leads to giving up. People commit suicide in a number of ways, it has been my experience. They may commit suicide in an aggressive and active way, but some people just get really sick. I'm speaking now as a psychologist. They just give up, they get illnesses, and they die--and they die because of that.
I think that it's quite complicated, too. When you talk about suicide, I'm more concerned about all of the stresses our soldiers have before we have suicide ideation. I'm concerned about the risk of addiction, acute depression, isolation, becoming unproductive, and losing all the supports around them.