Health committee  Thank you very much. I would like to thank the committee for this invitation to speak to you about the government's investment in the Canadian Depression Research and Intervention Network and about my perspectives on mental health research in Canada. The global cost of mental il

Health committee  You are raising a very good and very important issue right now in terms of prevention. The issue with mental illness, as you know, is that all our diagnoses to date are symptom-based. How do you feel? You express your symptoms. You may or you may not express all your symptoms to

Health committee  We're looking at all those fronts. We're looking at EEG, just as we look at the EKG for the heart. We're looking at the electrical brain activity using relatively cheap devices to measure the electrical activity and getting signature patterns. We're looking at brain imaging. We'r

Health committee  I think that's a very good point that you raised. One of the things that we have done in partnership with the Mood Disorder Society of Canada and CDRIN is to develop curriculum—maybe I'll have Dave talk about the specifics—that actually helps clinicians identify PTSD much more

Health committee  Really?

Health committee  Yes. I think that is exactly the case in the sense that early or repeated exposure to stressors predisposes you to PTSD, for sure. Then who develops PTSD and who doesn't? We still don't understand that really well, but we know some of the issues and incidents that trigger the res

Health committee  Precisely.

Health committee  It's a good question. It's hard to tell if that really puts you at greater risk. What you're describing is a situation where there is repeated exposure to high trauma. That in itself is a risk factor. But I think at the end of the day it's an interaction between your personal bi

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. It's a real honour to be presenting and discussing this issue with you. Rather than making a major formal presentation, I'm going to leave some room for a dialogue, because I know that over the course of your deliberations you have had a lot of presentations

Public Safety committee  I tend to agree with Dr. Aiken. Next week I'm off to the United States, where they have an organization called One Mind. It's led by a retired army general, Peter Chiarelli. He tells me that in the United States they wish they had the same approach we have here in Canada. OSI get

Public Safety committee  Let me ask you in exchange what you would say in the realm of cancer. There's a huge amount of investment and there are definite milestones that have been achieved, but there's a long way to go there as well. It's the same with mental illness. It's hard to come up with a figure o

Public Safety committee  I think that we're banking very much on brain imaging. The reason is that the symptom expression in depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, among other mental illnesses, is very variable. We need to better understand the genesis. Where are those circuits in the brain that a

Public Safety committee  I think we're making a lot of progress on that front. The fact is that these steps or tools have not been easily accessible for people doing research in mental health. That's why the scanner we have at The Royal is going to be dedicated to mental health and neuroscience. It's pro

Public Safety committee  Absolutely.

Public Safety committee  Yes, it is starting to show. It has taken a while. What is interesting to see is that the genetic aberrations that you see in mental illness seem go with a whole bunch of genes simultaneously. It has not been a simple situation of one gene, one illness. That's what we were hoping