National Defence committee  Just to be clear, the telemental health is a connection between clinics. An individual goes into a clinic at one base and then can be cared for—

National Defence committee  No, it's not that. Regarding your question about virtual reality, I'm not 100% sure if the Veterans Affairs OSI clinics have those in place, but there's no reason they couldn't. I think they, in fact, might. We do communicate regularly with Veterans Affairs clinical personnel and we are looking for opportunities to do joint research with them.

National Defence committee  I was just going to add that it's not so much the deployment that counts; it's what happens. There are many people who went to Afghanistan and were not exposed to any significant psychological trauma, and there were some, obviously, who were. Even so, the majority of those who were did not sustain mental illness as a result.

National Defence committee  That's right, yes. Ideally, there would be a blood test or something that we could use to identify people at high risk, and then know exactly how we were going to manage that. Mental health conditions generally around the world are not that well understood to that level of sophistication.

National Defence committee  Screening is not 100% accurate. It's based on a questionnaire. We ask people questions and how they respond isn't always 100% truthful. Sometimes they minimize things, and so on. Another thing is that somebody could be fine today, but at the end of the week their relationship is falling apart and they've got into trouble, and things could happen.

National Defence committee  We call that “postvention”. It's sort of an official part of what we do when there's been a suicide. We don't provide health care to the families, of course—they would need to see their own medical care providers for that—but we do offer some support programs. Our CFMAP program, which is our equivalent to the EAP program, does offer a bereavement service to family members for whatever reason.

National Defence committee  I'll just add that in the last year we've rolled out a road to mental readiness program for military police, as I mentioned earlier. A significant part of that is how to deal with people with mental health issues and how to police people in crisis. I'm not aware of a similar program in other police forces in Canada, so I feel that we are leading the way in that area because we do recognize that this can be an important issue.

National Defence committee  Suicide in 15- to 34-year-olds in Canada is the second leading cause of death in males. We're talking about the young military male population group of people. Suicide is a very common phenomenon in terms of cause of death. We haven't specifically targeted them based on age, but as we've discussed, we do have mental health education programs right from the second week of basic training.

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. I haven't mentioned apps. We are working on a road to mental readiness app that we're hoping now will be ready for launch in May. We're hoping that appeals to young members of the Canadian Forces.

National Defence committee  We have that. We call it an “ad hoc incident review”. After a potentially traumatic incident there will be a discussion of the event led by the chain of command and an opportunity for people to speak about it, and information is shared with them about where to go for care should care be required.

National Defence committee  It's at the discretion of the leadership of the organization to decide when it's appropriate to do that. In some incidents it would be very obvious to do, but then there might be some incidents where the leadership and members of the unit would have a sense as to whether something such as that is necessary.

National Defence committee  Our 2009 expert panel specifically looked at the U.S. Air Force program, which is one of the few programs that actually showed a reduction in suicide rate. Even at that time, we had nearly all of the components of that program. We've included some of the others and done other things as well to enhance what we currently do for people.

National Defence committee  Certainly, I'm happy to answer that. Road to mental readiness is really a suite of about 36 different programs, I think. The first module, as General MacKay already mentioned, is given during basic training. There are other modules that are given at different stages in an individual's career as they move up in rank.

National Defence committee  Would you like me to answer that?

National Defence committee  It's interesting to consider the situation of reservists. In many ways, reservists actually have an easier time because they're returning to communities where they have established support networks, where they have health care already set up, where their families are already well integrated.