Finance committee  I'm Phil Upshall and I'm very happy to be here with you today. Thank you, Chair, particularly for your intervention in allowing Mike to join me at the table. Thank you very much to the clerk and all the members here who have been so generous in their time for us. I certainly a

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Louise. Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chair and members, to be with you today. My name is Phil Upshall. I'm the national executive director of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada. Before I start into my quick remarks, I'd like to point out the fact that Syd Gr

Public Safety committee  Thanks very much for the opportunity. I'm happy to respond to any questions.

Public Safety committee  How about the fact I got a call yesterday that a first responder had killed himself? That's a pretty big impact. How about a family that's broken apart with six kids? The person involved with PTSD is totally unable to cope with life, after asking for three or four years for hel

Public Safety committee  There's no doubt that corporate cultures have to change from the ground up, but when you start changing corporate cultures and you start asking people to be prepared to talk about their stories and discuss these issues, a lot of it boils down to the fact that maybe we need to get

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to appear before you. My associate executive director is with me. Just at the outset, I'd like to say I've appeared before a large number of standing committee meetings over the last 40 years of my activities in Ottawa, and I am so happy to

Veterans Affairs committee  We would agree to a certain extent, in the sense that PTSD and depression impact people generally the same way in the brain. You probably heard this from your researchers. There's a 5% issue for veterans, and there's a 5% issue for first responders, but that 5% is very important.

Veterans Affairs committee  This is very difficult to keep short.

Veterans Affairs committee  One of the things you do is you get patients, in our case veterans, involved in the discussion and educate the researchers as to who they're dealing with, who they're working for, and who needs that information. In the vast majority of cases, it's the health care provider. We w

Veterans Affairs committee  There has been an effort to do some screening and particularly when members are close to discharge. Russ would be a better person than me to answer this. The reality is that a lot of PTSD doesn't show its ugly face until many months and sometimes years after a person is discharge

Veterans Affairs committee  A very brief response would be we should encourage them, we should identify those that are out there that are doing a good job and replicate it and provide the funding. It's very cheap to provide peer support, provided it's recognized. And again as a patient community, one of the

Veterans Affairs committee  They're self-medicating.

Veterans Affairs committee  It comes up, but it's not a principal goal of ours, to be frank. It would be if we had more money to provide the services. Then, we could. One of the issues with emergency physicians, who I love dearly.... However, with the triage pyramid, the difficulty was, unless you were suic

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, exactly. We're on the same page. We support the federal government in its efforts to push the provinces to put more effort and money into mental health resources. What we're hoping, with the minister of Health and her efforts on mental health issues, is that the minister he

Veterans Affairs committee  I agree absolutely. We go further than that, however. We've approached the Royal Society; we hit a brick wall on that. But it's important for the entire spectrum of health care providers to understand mental health issues. I'm outside the veterans side of things now, but we've