I'm Jody Mitic, a city councillor here in Ottawa. I was in the military for 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, and was wounded in January 2007. I am an advocate for mental health. Although I was surprisingly cleared by three different professionals to be mentally stable, I think my wife would question it.
I got into politics to advocate for my brothers and sisters. I believe the more of us that are at any table as elected officials will help. I'm lucky right now that my MP is Andrew Leslie, a former commander of the army.
Overall, mental health is as much a veterans issue as it is a military issue, two different departments with the same goal of having people with mental stability throughout a career that asks a lot of them. When we take a guy off the street or a girl off the street, and put them into basic training, we teach them RICE on day one almost.
Do you guys know RICE? Anyone? Doctor? It's rest, ice, compression, and elevation. If you sprain your ankle, we need you to know that stuff because the medics are busy. Every little scratch can't be something where you run to the doctor and get a band-aid. You have to be able to take care of yourself.
What is RICE for your mind? Anyone? Right. We don't have that in our society overall. This is also a public health issue. I can go down to the Shoppers Drug Mart with a cold, get advice from the pharmacist, and ask, “What medication or home remedy would you recommend?”, and they usually have a pretty good answer. We can't do that for mental health at any level: military, veteran, or civilian.
We have to go back to the drawing board and train our people from day one to deal with mental stress. I believe there was a colonel, he wrote On Killing. I forget his name. He was an American, a green beret. He called it stress inoculation, and a lot of the experts do.
I noticed, in my career, that it was something we didn't do a lot of, specifically to prep mentally. We did a lot of push-ups, chin-ups, running, and target practice, but we didn't really train for the day that we would see our buddy vaporized in front of us by stepping on an IED—