Veterans Affairs committee  I'll shut up because I've had too many lately—

Veterans Affairs committee  —but I have some views on the matter, if I can have a minute later on.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, first of all, you haven't mentioned this, and I meant to mention it earlier. One of the things that you can do—and I'm sure everyone would agree—is recommend the provision of system navigators. It's really important, and a trusted system navigator—not a guy like me, but a g

Veterans Affairs committee  No, there aren't enough.

Veterans Affairs committee  These demands are very difficult. The issue is that you're talking about a specific veteran's trauma activity that the professional may not have been involved in and may not have had boots on the ground for or whatever. If the professional is properly trained they will be able

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

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  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  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  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  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  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  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