Yes, sir. In addition to the general cultural mindset that's palpable in the armed forces, where it is countercultural to not be supportive as a result of all of the education that has occurred to sensitize leaders, peers, subordinates, and individual members and family members to the signs, the symptoms, and the ways to obtain care, we have about five objective measures that demonstrate....
One is a study we did just two or three years ago, in which we found that only about 7% of Canadian Forces respondents would think less of another individual soldier who had a mental health problem or who presented with a mental health problem. That's quite significant, even compared to the civilian population.
The Royal Society of Medicine in the United Kingdom published a study comparing the stigma levels in five Anglo-Saxon and Canadian major allies—New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the United Kingdom—and found that the Canadian Forces had the lowest level of stigma among its service members.
The enhanced post-deployment screen that we apply to everyone is a very detailed and thorough evaluation for mental health and physical health problems. It's applied three to six months after deployments of about two months' duration. Formerly, at the time of the Canadian Forces supplement to the Canadian community health survey in 2002, we were finding that it took an average of 5.5 years before people would present for mental health care.
Only a couple of years ago, by the time of that enhanced post-deployment screening, three to six months after return from deployment we found that over half were already in care.
Finally, a U.S. researcher who is very well known and very credible compared U.S. data on stigma to Canadian data and found that levels of stigma in the Canadian Forces were about one-third of those in the U.S. military population.