The military briefs its members on a lot of things in the run of a year. It's a continuation training on things like general awareness, harassment, first aid, quitting smoking, and things like that, but oddly enough there is no formal briefing or discussion of the mental health side of things, none at all, and I can't understand why. I think that has to be built into the yearly training so they are thinking about their mental health and thinking, “If I end up being released, then at least I have some knowledge of what I'm going into”.
The transition is completely from black to white. There's no grey area where you cruise through. A lot of the fellows, as you heard Trevor Bungay say, lose their identities, lose their jobs, they may lose their families, and so on, and now they're standing there not even knowing that they need a health card and things like that.
I think the idea of transitioning should be talked about a lot more. It's no longer a 35-year job like when I joined. There are things that may happen to you where you will not be able to serve anymore. We can't hide the injured fellows like we used to in the 1970s. If a guy had 30 years in, broke his leg, and couldn't go to the field, then they put him on a base job. DND doesn't do that anymore. They track you down because they have a computer system. They find you.
I was a classic case: diagnosed, 18 months, civilian, done, and away you go. No transition, nothing. A few brochures and that was it.
They have to look at it as a whole. If you have 30 years of service, then you should be serving about 31 or 32, and for the last two years you should be going through all the stuff you require to become a civilian.
They do run medical scans, where it's briefings and so on, and it's interesting because a lot of the fellows who go are told, “Bring your wife with you because she will remember what's being said”. You wouldn't write it down, and so on. We're putting the onus on a lot of people to try to help this guy through, and it's sometimes doing more harm than good.