Absolutely. Thank you, and certainly my training as a mental health occupational therapist really informs this perspective as well. We do know that when you have someone who's in active service, there's a great deal of structure that goes along with that particular way of life. A lot of decisions are made for you on when you wake up, where you go, what you do, where you live. If you're told that this is where you're going to be living next, you know you have three months to make that happen.
So you go from a period of time when a lot of things are externally structured for you to that great unknown, where now the time use can actually be quite a challenge to people in their mental health and well-being. You think you have all this time available to you and isn't that great, but in fact, it can be quite detrimental to positive mental health. If you have too much time on your hands, it can be very difficult to fill any of it in a meaningful way. So if you combine that, in terms of time use, with the sense of meaning and purpose....
People sign up for the military because they believe in something. They have an identity that's recognizable. People can look at you in uniform, and that means something to them about who you are and what you're bringing to bear in your day to day. But if you're just in your civilian clothes, you could be involved in any number of different kinds of jobs or contributions to society. You don't have that same kind of face value recognition around what your identity brings. You potentially have a compromised sense of your meaning, identity, and purpose. You have some difficulties potentially in how you're structuring your time, and then your sense of belonging gets quite disrupted as well. You have this very tight family of other serving members, and this is also true for military families. There's an identity of being a military service member or being a military family. We can't say the same for a veteran family or for a veteran. It's not nearly the same, and many veterans—we see this from the United Kingdom example—don't even identify themselves as veterans because they don't see themselves as veterans: they see themselves as ex-service members. Veterans to them are people who have served in combat in World War II or Korea.
So that sense of identity is quite a real issue. We know that if we can support people through the transition so that they continue to be living lives worth living, as we say in occupational therapy, then that can really support people's mental health transition and general quality of life.