Evidence of meeting #41 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 services.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:35 p.m.
Director, Family Services, Military Family Services, Department of National Defence
It's since the pilot started. Before the start of the pilot, the military family services program did not have a mandate for delivery of services once the member had released. Pre-release those services were provided, but at release they were not, which is the reason for the veteran family program.
4:35 p.m.
Maj Jason Feyko
The transition services are outside my mandate, so I can't comment on that.
4:35 p.m.
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, but thank you.
Ms. Ogilvie, I wondered if MFS would have any role in tracking suicides or attempted suicides through DND, and if so have you seen any patterns that might point to gaps in the services provided?
4:35 p.m.
Director, Family Services, Military Family Services, Department of National Defence
We don't track anything related to member suicides, with the exception of anyone who's calling into the family information line. Because of its being a crisis support line, we will receive calls at times from people who are suicidal. That information we do track for our own internal purposes, but that is not shared with the Canadian Armed Forces; it's a confidential service.
4:35 p.m.
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Okay.
Mr. Feyko, when you were talking about things that are outside your purview, you said an OSI member is embedded in the group. Ms. Wagantall asked about nutrition. I'm wondering about this OSI member. Would there be any counselling for veterans who are still dependent on things like tobacco, alcohol, or prescribed medication, or is that outside of your purview?
4:35 p.m.
Maj Jason Feyko
That's why we have that person embedded in our camps. He's the subject matter expert or the peer supporter to provide those connections to those counsellors. It's outside the Soldier On mandate.
4:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
Thank you.
That ends our time for this first round. On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank both of you for all you do for the men and women who have served us. If you have any questions you want to elaborate on or any information you want to give back, if you get it the clerk, the clerk will distribute it to the committee.
We will take about two-minute break. We have another witness. With that, we'll see everybody back here in two minutes.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
We have a vote at 5:30 and are going to be running a little tight for time. I'm going to reduce the six-minute rounds to five minutes. That should get us through the testimony.
Welcome, Ms. Thomas. Thank you for coming, and thank you for waiting.
We'll start the round with up to a 10-minute statement from you, and then we will go into a round of questioning. The floor is all yours.
4:40 p.m.
Stephanie Thomas As an Individual
Thank you.
My name is Stephanie Thomas, and I am a behaviour mentor for the Anglophone East School District in New Brunswick. I'm in front of you today to speak as the spouse of a veteran with 18 and a half years of service, five tours of duty, two of which were in Afghanistan.
I've typed up a narrative, because the last decade of our lives has been very emotional. I feel like I might have to read it in order to keep myself regulated enough to try to disconnect from some of this emotion.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
John Brassard Conservative Barrie—Innisfil, ON
I'm sorry to interrupt, Stephanie.
Stephanie's family is with her, and they're back there.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
John Brassard Conservative Barrie—Innisfil, ON
That's just to provide a bit of support, because I know you're nervous, Stephanie.
4:45 p.m.
As an Individual
I'll continue now.
We tried building a sense of community after my husband's release and so we started attending a church. I fell and got a concussion at Christmas in 2015. Then a few months later our son got injured. And Marc took our oldest to church and told the minister that our son got injured, and somebody in the congregation overheard this. But then Marc left the service in the middle, crying, because it was Easter, which is a big trigger for Marc. It was one of the worst times for him in Afghanistan. So he left crying and this person took this as a sense of guilt for his hurting our son and made a call to social services to report abuse, even though there wasn't any.
In this public forum, I'm going to share with you what I feel safe about in this situation, because there are stories that I can only share with my military family, which would get it. But the thing is that when you are released from the military, that family is gone. So you have to find your own family once again.
I'm thankful for the few people I have in my life with whom I can share these stories; and there are other families who have their struggles with PTSD.
Marc's release and care within the military left the impression that he was just another number. And sadly, this has just continued now that he is a veteran.
In 2011, when Marc asked to be posted to a joint personnel unit in New Brunswick because of his OSI, his commanding officer asked, “What's an OSI?”
A group of colleagues were talking negatively about Marc, which was only shut down by a fellow 2 RCR soldier posted to Saint-Jean at the time, who said they didn't know what Marc was like before and that he had actually won “soldier of the year”.
When I expressed my concern about my husband's mental health to his mental health team at the Saint-Jean garrison, he was so heavily medicated he would just sleep all day, shuffle to the bathroom, back to bed, to the table, and back to bed. And when I expressed my concern, I was told, “Well, he's not hurting anyone.”
Our sons would say, “Mommy, how come our daddy doesn't do anything with us? How come other daddies do things with them? Why doesn't our daddy?” That's how it was impacting our family.
Now when we hear about a suicide or another death, because a lot of deaths have happened since people have returned, after that sense of loss comes the horrible thought that, well, the government's happy because they don't have to pay anybody any money anymore.
So clearly what we're doing right now isn't working.
I want to thank you so much for allowing me the time to speak to you. If I didn't have the prior knowledge and experience of working with at-risk youth, I'm not sure that I would have had the same level of understanding and compassion for my husband. There have been many times I've had to leave for my safety and the safety of our children. I was able to see Marc's behaviour as stress behaviour. I knew it wasn't intentional, but I also had to ensure that everybody was safe.
It's really hard to watch the person you love slip away, as Marc would have never treated anybody the way he did after he was diagnosed.
The first year went fairly well. We were posted to Saint-Jean, Quebec, and then things fell apart. We lost our routine, our main support system, and what we had felt comfortable with. He already had a diagnosis that he was medicated for and was on the wait-list in New Brunswick for surgery to repair a broken ankle. We moved, and the file about his ankle went missing, and there was no psychological follow-up to his condition. He didn't get help from the mental health team until I went looking for help at the local MFRC, military family resource centre, and then they got involved. Marc finally got help from the base.
I have stopped my husband from killing himself multiple times. He may be back on Canadian soil, but the war came home with him, and it has wreaked havoc on our family. I've needed extended trauma therapy, not just from hearing his stories but also from living with someone battling this injury. And that's what it is in OSI, an injury, and it needs to be treated like it. Just prescribing medication, whichever method you choose, is not going to get anyone any better. Trauma has to be processed in order to move on. We need to remember that parts of our brain shut down in moments of stress, and our fight, flight, or freeze primal functioning takes over. Short-term memory is suppressed.
Our family has not experienced the level and frequency of violent episodes since Marc got off the heavy psychiatric drugs. He had so many negative side effects that he was prescribed more medication to try to combat those side affects. I just don't understand why it's so common to prescribe medication with side affects of rage, violent episodes, and suicidal or homicidal thoughts. Marc has not tried to kill himself once since he has been off of these drugs.
The whole family is impacted by this trauma. We looked for help when our children were younger, and we were told that they were too young. This should never be told to anyone because there's research showing that trauma impacts even an unborn baby.
What I really want to take this time to do is speak about the hope that is out there. There are three programs that helped bring it back into our lives. The first I will speak about is Can Praxis. I found this out from the social worker I was doing my weekly trauma therapy with at the OSI clinic in Fredericton. We contacted Steve Critchley, one of the co-founders, and got on the program. It was such an easy process and it felt amazing. We didn't have to jump through hoops to get on to this program. It was eye-opening, which is kind of funny because I was blindfolded for the exercise that brought the most clarity.
I could do exercises with a stranger that I had just met that weekend, but when it came to doing the exact same exercise with my husband, the horse wouldn't move because 90% of communication is non-verbal, and that horse sensed the tension between us, and it wouldn't move. That was very eye-opening. We had been in couples therapy since 2009 and we took Can Praxis phase one in 2015, and we finally had something we needed to work on.
The second program that came into our lives was in the winter of 2016 was the veterans transition program. The VTP changed our lives for the better. It was 100 hours of therapy over 10 days, and this was the first time Marc got to work on his trauma within a therapeutic circle of all men—and to think he was almost talked out of going by his case manager because of the cost involved. The money for the VTP is a lot less than some of the other programs that aren't as effective.
Out of the VTP came COPE, Couples Overcoming PTSD Everyday. The same psychologist working on the VTP also led the COPE program that we were on. It was so much therapy within just a few months of each other, and COPE has a similar model to the VTP where you sit in therapeutic circles, this time as couples, all with the diagnosis of PTSD.
COPE saw the need for continued intervention past the five-day course, and that's why there are six months of life coaching that follows for their phase two. Wounded Warriors Canada pays for these programs. The level of connectedness, understanding, and compassion from other couples has helped build lifelong friends and bring back that sense of community that gets shattered when you're released from the military.
This is why I say there needs to be a plan. All of these programs have structure and a well-thought-out, designed plan. Every specialist appointment is expensive. Without a plan, where are they going? What are they accomplishing? We need to be working as teams to better service our veterans and their families. We need more programs like Can Praxis, VTP, and COPE, and we need them to continue until the processes taught become habits and a regular part of everyday life. Therapy needs to continue until the trauma has been processed. For any intervention to be successful, there needs to be a plan. It needs to be case managed, evaluated, and adjusted.
If it were not for Can Praxis, the veterans transition program, and COPE, Marc and I wouldn't be together, and if we weren't together, he wouldn't be alive.
I'm going to conclude with a few bullets. I'm going to ask you to remember what the “s” stands for in PTSD. People are already living with an excess of stress. What can we do to relieve or reduce some of the stress?
Also, please consider the financial struggles that add more stress. Families have to become caregivers. I have six years of post-secondary education and I was not able to work. When considering the earning loss, it's not only the veteran's income that is impacted. The spouse sometimes has to give up their career to become a full-time caregiver, which only adds to the financial hardships.
If I hadn't taken a job in December, I wouldn't be able to speak in front of you today because we couldn't have afforded up-front costs to get me here.
This is the same for many who take part in these charity-paid-for programs. Veterans shouldn't have to pass up an opportunity to get better because they financially can't afford it. It rings especially deep and gets me a little bit angry when I think that they're being run by Veterans Affairs certified providers, and Veterans Affairs will not pay for travel.
New veterans have different needs, and mental health injuries need to be taken just as seriously as a physical ones because both are debilitating. The shame of being diagnosed and released before your contract is up, think about what that does to a person.
We need to work on finding veterans' strengths because they are already aware of what they can't do.
Another consideration needs to be the wording when formulating letters to veterans. A letter from VAC can trigger more trauma for families. Marc was injured in a LAV in Afghanistan on patrol. We have a letter from VAC that says that, while they recognize he sustained injuries on tour, it's not related to regular service duty. I don't understand how these sentences can be formed.
Veterans should never have to be told they need to be stabilized before treatment can start. We need to be helping people in their moments of crisis, when they need us most. Why wait for someone to get better before we'll help them? VAC only looks at where you are when the assessment takes place. There are lots of ups and downs that come with mental health diagnoses, and all of the struggles that have brought someone to today need to be taken into account. Listen to families and spouses more. A more accurate picture will be provided than when only relying on time spent in offices with professionals.
I want to say thank you once again, and I urge you to take 10 minutes of your time to watch psychologist Hector Garcia's TED talk, “We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too”. Think about all the time, money, effort, and resources that Canada has put into our serving Canadian Forces members. What have we done for them since they've been home?
4:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
Thank you, Stephanie, for your excellent testimony. Time-wise, I'm probably going to have to make it about four minutes each so that we'll get through this. We'll start with Mr. Kitchen.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Ms. Thomas, for coming today and having the courage to talk to us. I could take up this whole conversation, so I'm going to lose time here. I don't know where to start but I'm going to ask a couple of quick questions. If you feel at any time that you can't answer, then by all means please say so.
Your husband served in Afghanistan. One of the things we've talked about here is the issue of an antimalarial medication. Was your husband prescribed that, and did he take it?
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Did he have side effects when using it?
4:55 p.m.
As an Individual
He had side effects initially while he was on tour. It was affecting his sleep while he was on tour. Am I not allowed to say that?