National Defence committee  That's an excellent question. Again, when we surveyed, we didn't ask the question. We should have asked if you would think less of somebody else who sought mental health care. People said 6%. We didn't ask what you would think of yourself if you sought mental health care. I susp

National Defence committee  I think I have testified here before that the attempts are incredibly difficult to track, because we're never sure that we have a complete number. We have a system in place with serving members. We have a policy in place under which the priority, when somebody makes an attempt,

National Defence committee  I just want to talk a little bit about the stigma. We do have some data that we can forward. When we compare ourselves to our allies, we ask questions of members like a battle group returning...we ask whether they would think less of a colleague who sought mental health care, and

National Defence committee  I think with the whole research, the long-standing.... One of the biggest risk factors for suicide is impulsivity, so even if somebody doesn't have a severe mental illness, you would think that severe depression is the risk, but it's the actual impulsivity of the act. We look at

National Defence committee  That certainly is a challenge. Part of the cooperative work that we're doing with Veterans Affairs is to educate more and more, increase the awareness of mental health professionals in communities, because the shared care model.... While they're within the CF we can manage most t

National Defence committee  Yes, it is a challenge. I use a lot of analogies and examples—sometimes it's difficult with a back injury as well. After somebody has recovered from a back injury and after physiotherapy, it's difficult to say can they stand the rigours? You can test them by having them march 13

National Defence committee  I think there are two issues. There are people who respond perfectly by the book as per the evidence, and after 12 or 13 sessions they get well. However, when I was in the U.S. last week, they were talking about a large centre where their completion rate for the therapy was only

National Defence committee  A lot of our allies and we in particular have developed different types of resiliency training. The idea from resilience isn't to have a shield against stress; it's more that stress is inevitable in life and in deployment, and you can bounce back, so we have a cradle-to-grave, if

National Defence committee  We're not doing anything for this. We're monitoring what our U.S. counterparts are doing and what other studies are doing.

National Defence committee  We cannot study every proposed treatment for every illness that comes forward. We're simply not big enough to do that. We are part of an organization called CIMVHR, which is an research institute to which 25 or more universities have signed on. I'm not sure if you were out when

National Defence committee  Your point is well taken. Is all the evidence out there that we quote perfect? It's probably not, and that's why things change. The thing that changes what we do is the evidence. For years and years people thought that esophageal and duodenal ulcers were a weakening in the lini

National Defence committee  That's a great question. The ultimate measure that we're working on right now is to put in place an outcome management system, to look in a systematic way at the actual clinical progress that people are making. We're working on that. Today we were talking about the same thing

National Defence committee  Wait times and things like that are the hard data we are using right now.

National Defence committee  Sorry; do you mean for outcome measures or for the changes in Petawawa?

National Defence committee  There is a free discussion that occurs. All of our clinicians have different training, different experiences, and those kinds of things. We have uniformed clinicians and civilian clinicians. The way we work is that we bring people in to talk about the issues they have at hand. So