I'm champing at the bit. Here is where we're dealing with a great amount of misunderstanding about what we're facing here today. Mefloquine intoxication is not a mental illness. Mefloquine intoxication is an acquired brain injury. It is also idiosyncratic in nature, meaning that it doesn't affect everyone the same way, at the same time, or in the same amount.
Mr. Brassard, I certainly feel for you as you feel for our testimony. I was listening a couple of days ago to testimony, and you had mentioned that you had a bit of background in lead and mercury poisoning, and whatnot. Was that you? Who was that? That was someone else? Okay.
This is where we get into that same sort of area. Like lead or mercury poisoning, mefloquine will build up in portions of the brain, and it will affect people intraneuronally to a severe range in some individuals, as it breaks the blood-brain barrier and disrupts the feedway patterns. It also creates lesions deep in the brain within the limbic region, as well. That's where you get this acquired brain injury, being any brain injury acquired postnatally. It's a chemical injury on the brain. It's not a mental illness.
The problem is, with mefloquine intoxication, when you start to throw SSRIs at that, you're going to exacerbate the symptoms, because you're dealing with the brain that is already not at 100%. That's where we're having the problems. Soldiers are being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because their symptoms mimic post-traumatic stress. When they reach into the DSM-IV or DSM-5, they look at the symptoms, and they're just treating the symptoms that present and what the patients themselves report, and that's going to mean SSRIs, talk therapy, and whatnot.
Meanwhile, we know that is going to compromise that soldier even further. He's not going to meet his PTSD markers for treatment. He's going to be looked at as either malingering, somatoform, or whatnot. People are not going to have faith in him that he's doing what he's trying to do to get better. He's going to become even more depressed because he can't seem to reach a level of functionality that he's being promised through the talk therapy and other therapies, so he falls further and further down into the crack. Then we end up with suicide, because as we know with associated and opportunistic disorders, if you don't treat the root cause, then it's those opportunistic disorders further along down the line that will be the end of you, if that answers that.
