National Defence committee  Again, thanks for that question. I've worked for DND since 2003, so when I started working there I was certainly seeing a lot of people from Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia. Those were most of the people I saw. Now, of course, the majority of people we see in the operational trauma

National Defence committee  In terms of risk factors for PTSD, what the research has shown us is that, first of all, we understand about half of what they are about. There's a lot that we still don't know, but out of the risk factors that we do understand, generally they tend to be divided into three groups

National Defence committee  There are a couple of things that come to mind. At least one of them has been mentioned already. One of our big lessons learned there was the importance of the leadership's role, the role of the chain of command, in dealing with mental health issues. When the leadership supported

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for that question. PTSD is of course considered a mental condition or a mental illness, and it has a certain number of symptoms that we look for. Then there are a number of other things. We have to rule out certain things. We look at the person's level of fun

National Defence committee  There's a couple of things. First of all, before we deploy people, they go through a medical, which includes an evaluation. We don't test people, but they are seen by a family physician who looks at their history, both their medical history and their psychological history. We do

National Defence committee  It's in the recruiting process. Again, people have a medical history taken, and that includes their psychological history—

National Defence committee  At the recruitment stage, yes. It's done by a physician's assistant or a family doctor.

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  I think the general was referring to Vietnam when he mentioned the Americans. That really did not work well, so we developed this idea of doing a third location decompression. Anecdotally, people talk about it having helped, about having that space with their buddies, with their

National Defence committee  It's the geographic area of being not in the war zone anymore, but not home, so yes, that's the first thing, and it's both social and educational. People are there with the troops they deployed with. We also have quite robust mental health teaching that goes on there, reminding

National Defence committee  I have just one thing. In the OTSSCs, as part of our assessment when we do our diagnostic assessment of the military member, we routinely ask the member to bring in his or her spouse. We will also interview the spouse. For many reasons, that's very helpful. First of all, we get

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. First of all, when I was talking about combat stress reaction, this was something we were doing in Afghanistan. The idea was about trying to keep people near their colleagues, to not separate them, because there's always a lot of shame involved. It w

National Defence committee  First of all, I can't speak to individual cases—

National Defence committee  Right. Certainly, we would never recommend something like that. People who are given medical employment limitations...sometimes they work part time. Of course, there are also times when people are taken out of the workplace because their symptoms, at that time, are so severe tha

National Defence committee  As to psychotic breaks, I have to say, again, that this isn't something we have researched in terms of how many people have had psychotic breaks, but from my experience, it's pretty rare. If we look at people with serious and persistent mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipo