Thank you.
I'm very delighted that you picked up on this, because I think we need to invest in research like that. I think there needs to be a centre of excellence, because this is a very important issue and it's not going to resolve itself if you don't pay attention to it.
Just recently I finished writing a paper—it's under submission right now—that talks about the investment in mental health research in Canada. To paraphrase the title, what if mental health were cancer?
I was trying to draw the analogy between the progress made in cancer due to the investments made in that field versus those in mental health. I'm sorry to say that we have less than 16% of the funding that would normally go to cancer, prorated, for mental health, despite the fact that the burden of illness is number one. I think that these areas—and post-traumatic stress disorder is one such condition—really need focused care and attention. I think having a centre of excellence would serve not only people who have served in theatre before but also people in the other walks of Canadian life, such as first responders and people who suffer from traumatic events, because the underlying mechanisms might be very similar and the treatments might be very similar.
We need to have a concerted, focused, and central place where the mission is to solve this issue and to find more effective solutions, which are few and far between right now.