At the moment, through the annual suicide report, looking at deployment as a variable is very difficult. When we deal in epidemiology or statistics, there's a concept called “power”. In essence, you have to have a certain number of individuals to be able to parse the information. Although we've been collecting suicide information for upwards of 20 years now—and let's be clear, one suicide is one suicide too many—statistically speaking, we have very few, so we cannot parse that information. For me to be able to answer whether Afghanistan is or is not a factor, is something, from a purely mechanical point of view, I cannot do at this point.
However, if I may elaborate, through CF CAMS 2, we have a cohort of nearly 250,000 individuals. Obviously not every one was in service during the Afghanistan years—some predate those years. Nonetheless, we're able now to look at basically everyone who's been in Afghanistan and who enrolled post-1975.
We hope to be able to start looking at specific deployments, as opposed to just looking at deployment as a dichotomous yes or no.