Overseeing a largely unseen war against mental illness in the military, the Canadian Forces top doc says the battle is winnable.
Commodore Hans Jung, the commander of the health services and Surgeon General of the Canadian Forces, told the Sun Media he's confident in the military mental health system built up over the last decade to combat mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder. But despite the optimism, Jung said ground still needs to be gained in overcoming the barriers that keep the troops from seeking help.
Last year, the interim ombudsman for the Department of National Defence found military members who suffer from operational stress injuries are not being diagnosed and not getting the care they need. While crediting the system in place to help those that seek help, the ombudsman highlighted some aspects of the military's approach that left confusion and discrepancy.
In an exclusive interview Friday, Jung argued the state of mental health care in the Canadian military is good, pointing to the fact that six times more is spent per capita on mental health care by the military than the per capita spending on mental health care for the Canadian public.
"Mental health is obviously a big thing on everybody's mind," Jung said. "I'm trying to set the record straight, I don't perceive the way it's been portrayed as necessarily up to date information."
He worries that if the state of mental health care in the Canadian Forces is portrayed as hopeless, it could act as a barrier to those needing to seek help.
Jung admits in the 1990s as military spending and particularly military spending on health care was significantly slashed mental illness was left largely ignored.
The story of Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire and his battle with post-traumatic stress brought the issue into the spotlight and helped spur spending, including establishing five PTSD clinics across Canada.
Deadly damage
"We actually have now a very robust mental health capacity," Jung said. "In fact, we probably have the best-resourced mental health system in Canada."
Looking south of the border, it's hard not to see the deadly damage that can be done when possible mental health issues intertwine with criminal intent.
With few details emerging about what allegedly drove US Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to massacre his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, the spotlight has again been cast, rightly or wrongly, on mental health issues in the military environment.
Jung said he sees the massacre as "clearly a criminal activity, not a mental health issue."
But he said he's appalled by what he sees as a double betrayal of the alleged shooter's oath to the military as an officer and to the medical profession as a physician to first "do no harm."
Jung believes the biggest reason keeping soldiers from seeking care is that they just don't realize they need it.
"The majority of the people who are not seeking care, are not seeking care because they have no idea they need it," Jung said. "They just muddle through life."
Of the soldiers that seek treatment, Jung said studies show a third will come out completely better, a third will be sufficiently better that they can live a normal life with occasional bumps and a third will continue to have a significant disability.
Stigma of having a mental illness is the second most common barrier to seeking care, Jung said. While he admits soldiers could have a stigma about admitting a mental illness, he stresses it's not just a military problem.
"The military has no monopoly on stigma," he said. "Every member of the military joined as civilians before, all of us arrived with our value and our perspective of stigma already established."
Looking to the future, Jung is planning for the future of health services after the Afghanistan mission is over.
With the mission set to end in 2011, part of that future will include preserving the gains made in the past decade in CF health services in general and mental health in particular, Jung said.
