Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the committee and fellow Canadians.
Before I make a few comments—I have provided speaking notes—I want to make a number of defining comments for you. Before I do that, I want to make it clear that I honour and respect all of my peers and fellow mental health servants in this field. Their value and contributions are not the issue I'm discussing. What I am discussing is.... I'm a professional engineer. I have a master's in psychology and a number of other credentials. My evaluation is based on the critique of the process. That's what's most important here, so I want to just underscore that.
Twenty-five years ago, I had a defining moment at an international police conference as the police chaplain in our city, when the keynote speaker got up and asked if we realized that every year in North America, a police officer will take his or her life. At that moment I did not know that, but as an engineer, I couldn't help but grapple with the question of why.
Since that conference and for the four or five years previous—almost 30 years now—I've sought to discover the enigma of suicide, for which I have an answer for you today.
Part of this, I've devoted to the statistics, which I'm sure you've all heard. Almost every hour, just in North America, a military personnel will take his or her life. That's every hour. That's terrible and it's shocking, but every 43 seconds, globally, someone's taking their life. We often talk about there being no silver bullet and I'd like to argue that I believe suicide is a silver bullet.
I'm going to describe how it gets there. When I think about these statistics, they're not just statistics; they're souls. I am specifically talking about the soul because that is the breaking point that a person gets to when they decide to take their life. When you think about this, the soul is the one part in the human design that's absolutely missing from psychology and psychiatry. It's ironic that five letters of both of those terms in the Greek mean “study of the soul”, yet neither of them address the soul when it comes to trauma.
I'm here to declare that the soul is actually the missing link in resolving trauma. When you think of science.... From all of creation to present day, there is a triad formula. I'll make it simple with the fire triangle. Most people are familiar.... You need oxygen, combustibles and an ignition source. I can stand here for quite a bit discussing the science of how that triad exists absolutely everywhere.
As an engineer, when I'm trying to solve a fatal failure of some design, the first thing I consider is the materials, the structure and what's available for the design. From studying suicide, what do we have available to overcome? We have a soul, a brain and a body, which is the triad I'm talking about.
If I was to get each of you to take a pen and draw three or four triangles on your paper, I would say, at the peak, I want you to put the soul. On the bottom left-hand corner, I want you to put the brain and at the bottom right-hand corner, put the body. This is our design. It's perfect, by the way.
Say you go to a medical doctor and are asked the question that they're asking, they would ask where it hurts. Of the three components of design, which of those three is the medical doctor addressing? It's the body.
Let's go to psychology now. Psychology talks about behaviour. I have a master's in psychology. These are my peers. I care about them desperately, but it's not a science and neither is psychiatry. The fact that they don't meet these three criteria on the triangle.... They are addressing the brain. The soul's left out. The body's mostly left out. For both psychology and psychiatry, they're dealing with one-third of the solution.
If I go into the theology component, they would deal with the soul, but now they're leaving out the brain and the body.
My point is that none of these approaches, even if I had all four practitioners in the room, could actually resolve trauma. The only way to solve trauma is.... Unresolved trauma is ultimately the number one issue that leads to suicide.
Where is the trauma occurring? It's occurring at the soul level. Trauma is an offence and that offence goes to the soul. The target of trauma is to degrade and dehumanize a person's self-value and self-worth. The system that is created has actually driven suicide by the nature of the way we treat or do not treat.
One day, I was driving my vehicle, and I phoned Dave Bona—because I worked with Dave. I said, “Dave, I just thought of something. I had an epiphany moment.” The epiphany moment was that, in wartime, strategy is torture. There are four components for a successful torture: mental anguish, physical anguish, emotional anguish and spiritual anguish. When you achieve those four, you will end up with death, and suicide is the answer.
That's the answer that people get to. Every day, our military—every second, every minute, every hour, 24/7—is under those four. Unresolved trauma leads to the majority of illnesses and diseases, and as a result of that, it includes mental illness. This is the missing link for resolving trauma: the soul. Neuroscience, near-death experiences.... All of these point at the fact that not only does the soul exist but also it exists beyond death, which means that in order for consciousness to be beyond death, you must have the constituents of a soul, which are your mind, emotions and free will.