Good morning.
I'm Dana Batho from Send Up the Count, a Facebook group that was started in December of 2013 in response to a spate of military suicides, one after the other, just before Christmas.
There are six admins. I'm the only one who's a veteran. I released in August of last year. I was medically released; I got a neck injury in training.
Send Up the Count covers all aspects of mental health for the military, veterans, and first responders. That includes depression, PTSD, other OSIs and things like that, relationship issues, and financial issues. We don't really discriminate as long as you're either military or a first responder. We cover any issue. It's basically a sounding board, a peer resource support group. We have a lot of resources listed. A lot of people find that really useful because they can come to our group and see this huge list of resources that they can access in one place instead of having to go all over the place.
As far as the group itself goes, it's apolitical, and we also have nothing to do with money. We've done this completely with no funding. It's literally just people helping each other, people who've been there and want to support each other.
For me, because I'm relatively new into the Veterans Affairs system, I'm still learning a lot of things about the different systems and such. One of my main issues is that there is quite a big discrepancy between what we're told before we release, by the Veterans Affairs staff at the JPSU and in the SCAN seminars and things like that, and the information we're told by Veterans Affairs after we release.
For example, I was told that there was a possibility that I might have to reimburse close to $9,000 of massage therapy that was misallocated to me—nothing to do with my fault—and I was also told before I released that all medications would be covered under my disability award. Again, just yesterday, I paid for some medications that should have been covered. It's quite a hurdle. That's a really big problem when you're already dealing with a lot of issues. You don't need to be told one thing from one side and then something else from somebody else. It makes what you're going through in general very difficult, on top of what's already very difficult.
Another major issue I have is that it can take a very long time to access resources, particularly for mental health issues. Personally, I deal with chronic pain. I was injured four years ago. I asked for some psychological help in November, and I'm still waiting to have an actual appointment with a counsellor. That's a really long time to wait for actual help.
Military members tend not to ask for help that easily, so when they do ask for help, they're pretty much near the end of their rope. This is something that I've noticed very much in the Send Up the Count group. People are pretty much at the end of their rope by the time they do actually think to ask for help, so having a four- or five-month delay between asking for help and actually getting that counsellor's appointment can be highly problematic, I'll say, for many people. It contributes to a lot more stress than is necessary and, in my case, a lot more physical pain.
There are things that they're doing very well. I can tell that the staff of Veterans Affairs are trying really hard to help the people they've been assigned to, but there are a lot of gaps in the system. My case manager retired and I wasn't told who my new case manager was even a month later, so that's a gap in the system.
Things like filling out forms online are very useful for me because I can't write anymore and I can't do a lot of things physically, but there are technology issues. One is that the forms will only open in certain browsers. I'm pretty tech savvy. I was working as an intelligence officer and a cyberthreat analyst for Transport Canada, so I'm pretty tech savvy, and if I'm having issues in accessing some of the online services, I'm sure other people are having issues as well.
Those are pretty much my main concerns for the moment, but also, in regard to accessing your case manager, the online system for contacting case managers isn't great. They apparently don't check their emails that often when it goes through the online system, and phoning them is kind of a pain because you have to go through an operator and tell them basically your entire life history before they connect you. There could be ways to streamline that process a lot.
As I said, I can tell that the staff themselves are trying really hard to help their people, but there seem to be a lot of gaps in how they are able to help their people.
That is all from me for now.