Evidence of meeting #31 for Veterans Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
November 17th, 2016 / 4:55 p.m.
Liberal
Professor, Psychiatry, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba
Thank you so much again for inviting me to speak.
There are two things I want to be specific on. One is that it's really important to review suicide systematically to see what specific issues are occurring and what the intervention points are. There are general suicide intervention strategies, but during the transition period there really needs to be a systematic look taken at suicide attempts and suicide deaths over 100 or 200 consecutive cases to say, okay, how can we reduce these? That kind of work would be helpful.
The second piece is media contagion. The media can increase the risk of contagion of suicide through media reports about suicide. We have been working with the military as well as journalists to really remind people about safe reporting around suicide. I can send you some of the literature on that as well.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
Great.
On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank both of you for testifying. Please relay our thanks to Dr. Bélanger, who had to take off a little earlier.
If there's any contact information or any other information you need to give to the committee, you can give it to the clerk and the clerk will distribute it to the committee.
On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank both of you for all that you do and have done for our men and women, and for taking time out of your busy day to testify in front of us. Thank you very much.
We will now recess for about two minutes and go into committee business.
Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]