Veterans Affairs committee  The air force is translating the battlemind training program into a program they're calling “Wheels Down”, using an air force slogan; and the navy Seabees do use the battlemind training during post-deployment at their third location decompression site. The marines do not use it; I should be very clear about that.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, the marines do not use it at all. They don't use any component of it.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, sir, we do. In fact we have several courses in which we do that. The main course is the combat operational stress control course, which is taught in San Antonio, Texas. Every behavioural health care provider deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan has to attend this four-day course.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's ongoing. I don't know if I could ever say it has been fully transitioned. As people turn over and as people change, you have to train more people. We now have a train-the-trainer course in the battlemind training system, and that's being pushed out. Not only do you have to train the soldiers, you have to train the trainers who are training the soldiers.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, sir. That's correct.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. It's on a new website also. The original website was www.battlemind.org, and if you type that in it will take you to our new website, which is www.battlemind.army.mil. Either one of those will take you right to it, and you can download all of the stuff. It's free of charge.

Veterans Affairs committee  Sir, you can have them for free. You can download them for free. There is no cost. They are for everyone.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a very good question. Thank you, Ma'am. Obviously, we think that we need to take a systems approach, so we now have data showing that the pre-deployment training is effective when assessed during the deployment. We do not have good outcome data from the battlemind psychological debriefings that occur during deployment, but we have anecdotal evidence that soldiers and care providers like them, and we certainly know that the post-deployment training is effective.

Veterans Affairs committee  Ma'am, that's a very good question. We just have no idea; we have no data looking at its effectiveness two or three years, or ten or twenty years, or decades later in terms of service members still suffering from mental health issues. My sense is that you would probably need to get them into a one-on-one discussion with a counsellor and work through the stigmatization and self-blame and the view that it's a character flaw, a weakness that you have.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm sure the committee is aware of this, but I have probably been to Canada three or four times to conduct training of Canadian mental health professionals on the battlemind training system. Where it's currently being used is in the third location decompression site in Cyprus. I think Dr.

Veterans Affairs committee  You're welcome. Thank you, Ma'am.

Veterans Affairs committee  Within the Department of the Army and Department of Veterans Affairs there is a tremendous amount of collaboration. Of course I make all of our findings and reports available to everyone, including Canada. As you know, all of this has been presented and given to the technical cooperation panel, which is the five English-speaking members of NATO and Australia and New Zealand.

Veterans Affairs committee  Within the Department of Veterans Affairs, the veterans centres, the folks who are doing the outreach for the Department of Veterans Affairs, have adopted the battlemind training framework as a way of de-stigmatizing mental health and a way to get service members who need help to come in and sort of feel comfortable that the Department of Veterans Affairs knows how to talk to service members about mental health issues.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, on the first question, I think it really is important to understand that a lot of the symptoms and reactions service members have when they are in a combat environment are actually quite adaptive. Being hyper-alert or hyper-vigilant when you're in a combat environment where someone is trying to kill you is actually, I would say, advantageous.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, participation is mandatory now, which makes doing any further studies and evaluations problematic, obviously. What we're trying to do is to see whether or not we can add elements to the battlemind training to even further improve its effectiveness. We're doing that now. I should say that we're also working with the United Kingdom, the Brits, because they don't have any mandated mental health training programs, but are actually in the process of designing a study to look at whether or not the program would be successful with British troops coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.