Committee members, I put the uniform on when I was 13 as an air cadet. The truth is, my family was a military family and by the time I was 12 I knew all the drills anyway so that's where I was headed. I took it off when I was 54. That's 41 years in uniform. I've had eight deployments representing my country.
According to Veterans Affairs I'm now officially 136% broken; government math. I spent 15 years fighting with my PTSD before I wrote off my car and went into treatment. It's a tough thing to look at the back end of another vehicle and not realize how the hell you got there. But I'm more than just a soldier. I ended my career as the managing editor of the Canadian Army Journal. I have written, published, and edited more than 11 books and 30 peer-reviewed articles. Since my release I've been to at least half a dozen of the major Soldier On type events across this country. I'm familiar with most of the players in the game and have had long discussions about how to prevent suicide and what the effects of PTSD are.
I'm not going to stand up here and talk to you about all of the issues that are around PTSD, and how to treat it and whatnot. That's between the doctor and the patient. You guys know all that stuff anyway. The question is, and further to your point, how do you find purpose when you have something that is not just a job but a profession taken away from you? In my case I'm a writer. My latest book is called “Shiny Side Up on the Road to Recovery”, and it chronicles my journey through the medical system. It also chronicles my journey across Canada on a motorcycle, which is the first thing I did when I got out of the military.
I'm also responsible for two fishing events that take people who have PTSD, be they first responders or military personnel, and teach them to fish and get them into an environment where it's safe to talk about their issues. You're going to hear, or have heard, in various meetings, all the stories: “I didn't want to talk about it”; “It was a tough thing”. Our first speaker today went on at length about that type of thing. The stigma surrounding PTSD is huge. As much as we want to deny it and as much as we want to sit back and say, guess what, we're going to fix this, it's not going to happen. A cultural change has to take place.
The question on the table here is how to prevent suicide. The answer is, you cannot. By way of example I would say look to the guy next to you. How well do you know that individual? Are you prepared to say that he's suicidal or he's not? How is his life at home? Does he have erectile dysfunction? You don't know that anymore than I do. As a soldier we put those things in the background and we accomplish the mission. That's our job. It's what we do. We don't talk about our feelings.
Most of the suicides that occur are stress-related, which then brings up the question, how do we mitigate the amount of stress that goes on? There are two components to that. The first is needless stress within the military. First and foremost, you're dealing with a military that was invented in the 1700s. You're also dealing with a National Defence Act that was written in the 1800s, yet you're asking us to employ it in the 21st century. There's a bit of an issue here.
The government, by virtue of its nature, and its unwillingness to actually make any concrete changes, is trying to use a Chevette to do a truck's job.
In short, the military is designed for one thing and one thing only, and that is to close with and destroy the enemy. Why are half the leadership involved in project management on projects for which they have no concept of what the hell they're doing? They get thrown into a job because they're no longer useful within the battalion, and now they have a steep learning curve. It's misuse of proper leaders.
That brings us to the question, do you want to take on the “plugging the holes in a sinking boat” approach that has been going on for the past 50 to 60 years? In that case, I would suggest you look to Veterans Affairs Canada, in particular, and turn it into a real working service organization. Bring individuals in, sit them down, fill out the forms for them, help them through the process, make them understand, and then you will have a much higher success rate when the forms go in. As Brian pointed out, err on the side of yes instead of no, and you'll have greater success.
The IPSCs are important organizations, particularly OSISS, because OSISS is, “I know a guy who knows a guy”, and that's how we pull the guys out of the woods. If you continue to constantly nitpick and pull funds out of these organizations, then you're going to lose more and more troops.
The question I posed earlier was, how many bullets does it take to train a troopie? Nobody knows, so you cannot sit down and count bullets and give them three or four bullets to pass their exam. That is exactly what's going on right now, because they don't have enough money to give them a case of ammunition, so that they can get good at what they're doing.
Finally, you're not tracking suicides. You have no idea how many suicides there are. The military doesn't track it. The hardest thing, or one of the things, you need to realize is that there are two organizations you need to follow. It's not just the regular force, but also the reserves, because what happens is that when the deployment is over, the reserves go home, and nobody follows them.
You asked, how do we prevent suicides? Try tracking some of these guys and find out what's going on. One of the organizations that I belong to is the Mood Disorders Society of Canada. I'm a special consultant with them on peer review. They've instituted a three-phase study. The question I have to you is, why is it that a civilian organization has to incorporate a study of suicide within the military, when the military is not doing it itself? I don't get that.
If you're going to take an approach of systemic change, then we need to look at a couple of things. First and foremost, the deployments that we're involved in, that we've all gone through time and time again, are broken into three phases. There's the pre-deployment, the deployment, and the post-deployment. These all make sense.
The problem is, they're run on a six-month routine, which was driven down to us from the United Nations, because that's how long a deployment was supposed to take place. I think that nine months to a year is far more effective.
I propose, and have proposed, that the post-deployment phase be broken into several portions. One portion is for classes that educate the individuals on post-traumatic stress disorder. I want to back up a bit here. In the late 1990s, there was a mutiny that took place in the Canadian Armed Forces. As a direct result of that mutiny, three things came out of it. The first thing was better communications between the reserves and the regular forces. The second thing was that the entire training system was overhauled. The third thing was that SHARP training was instituted, and that's the sexual harassment component.
Why is that important? It is because it shows that you can physically pick the military up and say, “That's not how we do things anymore, this is how it's done”.
Post-deployment, this is important. We need to institute a concept of education that has been neglected up to this point. You can't drive it from the top; you have to drive it up from the bottom. That means group, that means PT, rest and recovery, and it needs doctors who are available to help people through their issues.
Brian made one extremely good point. He made several, actually, but he made one really good point. You can't depend on civilian statistics to measure what we're going through. The simple fact is that we screen and screen our guys before we send them over, and we still have problems in the end.
The biggest issue that we face is this concept of moral obligation. Why is it that we, as veterans, feel that we are constantly fighting against you guys?
As for medical marijuana, what the hell is the Minister of Veterans Affairs doing trying to tell us how much marijuana I can use? That's between me and my doctor. If you want to fix it, fix the system. Don't fix the individual.
Start looking to put more veterans into Veterans Affairs, so that the department understands. There are lots of reasons we can talk about, but at the end of the day, this us versus them, us versus you, has to stop.