Proceedings of the Subcommittee on
Veterans Affairs
Issue 8 - Evidence - November 19, 2014
OTTAWA, Wednesday, November 19, 2014
The Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day, at 12:03 p.m., to continue its study on the medical, social and operational impacts of mental health issues affecting both serving and retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces, including operational stress injuries, or OSIs, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Senator Joseph A. Day (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Honourable senators, today, we are continuing our study of veterans' operational stress injuries and other mental health problems.
[English]
Our witness today is Dr. Ron Frey. Dr. Frey is a registered clinical and organizational psychologist. He has held a number of senior positions, including RCMP acting chief psychologist. Dr. Frey has been recognized as a subject matter expert in the area of psychological assessment by the RCMP, the Department of National Defence, Veterans Affairs Canada, Correctional Services Canada, the Transportation Safety Board, the courts and numerous police organizations and insurance companies.
Dr. Frey, you have extensive clinical background, which will be very helpful for the work that we're doing. We very much appreciate your being with us, and we look forward to your presentation, after which we will go into a question and answer session.
Ron Frey, Clinical and Organizational Psychologist, as an individual: I would like to thank the Senate for the opportunity to present to you today on this important topic. My intention is not to talk to you about how post-traumatic stress disorder or other related occupational stress injuries are experienced by our valiant police officers, soldiers and veterans. You have already heard from a number of experts who provided excellent testimony of what it is like for these men and women to experience the paralyzing effects of occupational stress injuries.
My mission today is to provide you with an explanation as to why our Armed Forces and our national police agency continue to struggle in the management of the risks associated with protecting our nation. I will then conclude by suggesting a courageous, yet timely, solution to the problem of operational stress injuries that plague our fine serving men and women.
As you may recall from previous testimony to this subcommittee, our nation has, over many generations, taken our youth, in the prime of their lives, and shaped them into formidable soldiers and police officers. Trained to do not what normal human beings do in the face of death and destruction, our soldiers, police officers and veterans have been conditioned to fight, not to flee, to show no sign of weakness when the rest of us cower in fear and uncertainty.
Although these characteristics have been proven, over centuries, to be the desired characteristics of any nation's armed forces or national police force, little thought has been given to managing the risks that result from creating such effective fighting machines.
In an earlier time, there was little appetite to manage the psychological risks associated with policing and soldiering. The weak were quietly removed from the ranks and replenished with new recruits and the soldiering and policing carried on.
However, times have changed. Soldiering and policing have changed, and recruitment and retention have become significantly more difficult, as the public has become increasingly aware of the double edged sword that is created by the demands we make on our Armed Forces and national police force.
With the now very public and social media-driven plight of our soldiers, police officers and veterans struggling with occupational stress injuries, the military and our national police force have recently, and thankfully, attempted to better manage the prevention and treatment of OSIs.
Specifically, they have enhanced screening, developed peer support groups, sent psychologists like myself to some of the most dangerous and remote areas of the country to spend time with these courageous men and women. They have opened assessment and treatment centres, engaged academics and built bow ties and dashboards. In short, the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP have adopted what they think are the best practices to mitigate the psychological risks of protecting our nation. And yet, our soldiers, our police officers and our veterans continue to experience the devastation of OSIs in often suppressing and suppressive silence.
From my perspective and the perspective of many of my colleagues, the continued prevalence of OSIs is the product of a governance system that simply has not developed the capability to performance-manage the risks associated with modern soldiering and policing.
To further compound this deficiency, there is a culture, deeply rooted in at least policing, of promoting excellent traditionally skilled officers with less than adequate understanding of human and organizational factors that significantly contribute to the overall operational effectiveness of policing in the national and international landscapes.
Such a culture means that those few leaders within the RCMP who recognize and vocalize the liability of not objectively identifying, analyzing and mitigating the systemically based causal factors that contribute to OSIs are either penalized for vocalizing these thoughts, promoted out of their positions, poached by private enterprise or even by other parts of the government, including the Senate.
In short: The OSI problem is the military and paramilitary culture. The recurrent honing of only one side of the blade of operational readiness is what is ultimately preventing these organizations from realizing effectiveness.
The solution to this problem of culture has been alluded to many times and well before my testimony today. The solution is a progressive transformation of culture through performance-based oversight at the governance level and the systemically driven management of risks at the operational level.
To make this transformation, the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP must engage with independent professionals — professionals who have the experience of enabling safety and security critical organizations to performance manage all their risks, including OSIs, to a level as low as reasonably practicable.
In closing, I wish to emphasize that we have to recognize that ultimately the operational readiness of our Armed Forces and our national police force is predicated by how effectively their oversight bodies govern and how effectively their senior officers manage their systemic-based human and organizational risk factors.
It is only through the honing of both sides of the blade that our men and women will have the capability to continually serve our country honourably and resiliently. Thank you.
The Chair: Dr. Frey, thank you very much. That's a pretty straightforward series of comments and we look forward to giving you the opportunity to expand on these.
For the record, could you clarify what you meant by ''built bow ties and dashboards''?
Mr. Frey: Bow ties and dashboards are common risk mitigation strategies or techniques used by some risk managers and senior managers in organizations to get an overview of how risks are basically being managed by an organization. Sometimes they'll use a colour scheme. For example, a green light means all systems are good or good to go, a yellow light means there are some things that need to be addressed and red means things definitely need to be addressed.
The problem with a lot of these techniques is that they are kind of off-the-shelf techniques so they've been bought or borrowed from other organizations and have been poorly analyzed before actually being implemented into organizations. They typically address known risks and one of the factors which we typically see a psychologist treating are the unknown factors that soldiers and police officers experience during the course of their careers. That's what I'm talking about when I'm referring to bow ties. They're management tools, essentially.
The Chair: Thank you. That will be helpful. I will start with Senator White from Ontario.
Senator White: Great seeing you here, Dr. Frey. We worked together in the North, so it's good to see you again. I think when you referred to the far reaches of this country you were referring to Nunavut in some cases. Thank you for your comments.
I asked a question of a witness previously about psychological tool building. As I always say, catching them down river may not help us much if they continue being thrown into the river. Could you walk us through how the psychological tool building can help police officers and our military in preparation for what they will face and in preparation for what they will have so that when they end up with OSI they actually have some tools to deal with it to find themselves in the right place?
Mr. Frey: That is a question that is very timely and it is pointy ended as to when someone has an operational stress injury and how to treat it. There are many different techniques that psychologists use. Probably the most important thing is making the police officer aware of what they have control over and what they don't have control over when they are actually operational.
As you know, I've spent many years, probably almost a decade, going to Nunavut and, in a very preventative type mode, meeting with police officers, understanding how they actually operate in these environments and talking about what they have control over, their thinking, and what they don't have control over when in fact they are experiencing sleep deprivation and are making mistakes, or when they are using hardware, that is their weapons, their guns or gloves.
There is a classic case where a police officer took his position in a part of Nunavut where the appropriate kit wasn't available to this individual and his hands froze on the hood of a truck as he was taking a position to prevent being fired upon. That's a very vulnerable situation to be in when you're a police officer. These are difficult circumstances and police officers typically beat themselves up over those types of experiences.
It's important that before officers are deployed that they understand the environment in which they are being deployed, they understand the hardware they are given to carry out their tasks and they understand the importance of relationships between the people commanding them and the people who are their stakeholders, that is the communities in which they serve. Getting them to develop that awareness and getting them to develop the ability to manage stress and emotions are all important tools to develop before a crisis happens. Unfortunately, many police officers never have the opportunity to go through a process like that, which then leaves them vulnerable to experiencing stress. And then you have a culture that suppresses the explanation of difficulties of mood and difficulties of performance on a job.
When I was in Nunavut, I was given a hotel room to see police officers, and these police officers would not go through the lobby to see a psychologist. They would take the stairs. They would come through the back door. They would have to be ordered to come in to do proactive counselling because the stigma of engaging with a psychologist is still very prevalent in the RCMP. And when I was with the DND, working out of their OSI clinic, it was the same thing.
I know and I mentioned in my testimony that the RCMP, for example, have done a lot of things to help facilitate officers talking about what they're going through with the emotional stress and trauma. But just think about it: The problem is if you're doing an operational debriefing after an incident and your staff sergeant asks, ''Anybody need to talk to Dr. Frey?'' you will be hard pressed to see a constable raise their hand in these types of situations. It takes real leadership to permit officers to actually engage with people that can help them, both proactively and reactively, and that permission is missing in the culture for individuals to engage in the types of behaviours that promote resiliency.
Senator White: A book was written the late 1980s called The Shattered Badge by a police officer and a psychologist from Boston PD. It talked about the fact that in a specific precinct of Boston, every police officer had to see the psychologist every year — it didn't matter if you were on admin duty at the front desk or a drug officer. Their focus was that if everyone saw a psychologist, everyone was getting their head read, the stigma eventually would go away. And they would argue that it did go away. You said ''permission.'' Would it be a form of permission as well, if everyone is seeing Dr. Frey at some point, the front lobby is just one place you happen to go through to see Dr. Frey because everyone is going anyway? Would it be a form of permission as well, obligating everyone going to Afghanistan, to Iraq or to Nunavut to understand that you will see a psychologist before each deployment?
Mr. Frey: That would be a very important component. I met with a veteran not too long ago who went through something like that because he was highly specialized. This is in the DND context. He was physically injured when he drove over a bomb and sustained other injuries swimming through the remains of his comrades. He was drummed out of the military and not taken care of. When I was in the reserves, and remember, I am a warm and fuzzy psychologist, I learned pretty quickly how to basically lose that warm fuzziness and live within the culture.
The example that you're giving is wonderful, but the problem is that it takes courageous leadership to experience it. I'm talking about leadership at the top; but I don't see that currently in the RCMP or, in my limited experience, in DND. There is a lot of talk and many great officers are saying and trying to do the right things, but culturally it's still not accepted. You can talk but if you're not walking the talk, your subordinates, soldiers and police officers, will definitely pick up on that. It creates an unsafe environment to engage meaningfully with clinicians or providers that can help to maintain your resiliency.
Senator Frum: To follow along that line of questioning, as a civilian who has tremendous admiration for front-line RCMP and the military, it seems that it would be almost unnatural and unhealthy not to develop an OSI when confronted with violence, death and destruction. Can one assume that any front-line worker is going to end up with an OSI?
Mr. Frey: There was a great CBC documentary with Dr. Bradford, a forensic psychiatrist, who worked on some of the most high profile cases. He freely admitted that at one point he was hit with post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a wonderful CBC program to watch. You will see that even the people you think are the most resilient, the ones conditioned to manage that part of their personality so they can do the job they need to do, sometimes, for whatever reason and we don't understand why, are hit by OSIs and PTSD.
Also, there is great underreporting. I think you've heard from some witnesses that DND would say that the RCMP has a higher suicide rate than DND has. I would argue with that as I know first-hand that there is a much higher suicide rate in DND than is known about because it's not reported.
Senator Frum: I'm not saying this to be subversive as I'm highly respectful of the very essential jobs people do and the protection they offer their country. However, the conditioning to suppress feelings is, to me, the psychological twist that perhaps is less healthy than having an emotional response to things.
Mr. Frey: Yes. I want to speak more about police officers than soldiers because I have more experience with police officers. Their psychological profile is typically a little different than that found in the general population. Certain types of personalities and psychological profiles are drawn to policing, just like certain profiles are drawn to accounting. We like to have Type A accountants, but we like to have Type B undercover operators because they can mix and mingle with the criminal element. Culturally, organizations reinforce those parts of the personality so they can engage with those undesirable elements of life. There are numerous problems but one is that the demographics of policing — the type of people coming into police organizations — are different than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
As I mentioned in my testimony, the environment that police officers and soldiers work in is vastly different and changing ever so rapidly. When organizations use best practices, for example to compare themselves with other organizations that do similar types of work, those best practices typically are already five years out of date. In the 1970s five years was not a big deal but today five years is a pretty big deal. Soldiers and police officers are confronted with having to deal with these parts of the human element that they are not normally accustomed to dealing with. That makes it particularly challenging. It requires a language that they're not comfortable using — emotions. What psychologists and I try to do in a preventive way is to encourage officers to engage in those types of behaviours through the course of their career so that when they retire they are not left with a skill set that they desperately need to have to engage with the rest of society.
One of the saddest cases I have ever seen was that of a police officer who came to see me in desperation. I had known him for years. He said, ''Dr. Frey, I'm retiring soon, and I've experienced XY and Z.'' We're talking about nasty things. He continued, ''I thought by the time I hit retirement all these things would go away.'' He threw himself into work. He said, ''I drive by Dow's Lake and I don't see the tulips. I see the bodies that I fished out of that river or that I cut off that tree. When I drive by that mall, I don't see the kids enjoying themselves having ice cream. I see other things.''
To see an officer carry that type of trauma for 20 to 30 years and know that he is exiting his career with that type of baggage is extremely disturbing. It would be nice for me as a clinician not to have to go through that process. It would be much more satisfying for me, my clients, my patients and organizations to proactively manage these images, thoughts, emotions, smells and sounds at the time when they're much more manageable. Unfortunately, at the very high end of the organization that capability is not there.
Senator Frum: Sometimes they warn civilians not to look at graphic images. I don't look because I know that once something's in your head, it stays there forever, I think. Do you think, once somebody has seen the bodies in the river, they can ever erase that from their mind?
Mr. Frey: It's very individual. I think for you and myself, perhaps, no. There are things I go through before I see a body, for example, or when I'm going to be listening to a story or seeing images, which I have to prepare myself for. I go through a routine. To say that everybody's experiences, images and trauma are the same would be an overgeneralization.
I just came back from a large sex crimes conference in Niagara Falls. We're talking about officers — and the RCMP are involved as well — where they used to look at one videotape of sex crimes a day, and now they have to look at terabytes of information. They are engaging with other countries that don't investigate sex crimes the same way. They tell me often it's not the sex crimes that erode their resiliency as police officers, but it's the organization which makes it much more difficult for them to do their work.
In the RCMP, I'll give you an example. When I was in Nunavut, the amount of overtime these officers work is crazy, and yet many of them never report the overtime they do. It's almost seen as a badge of honour. They don't understand the consequences of not getting sufficient sleep or rest, because they don't understand the human factor psychology part of policing. The organization doesn't see the organizational factors that contribute to that type of behaviour. Therefore, it opens up risks to making mistakes on the job. They get investigated and the whole cycle starts to begin where it makes it very difficult for the police officer to do their job resiliently. I don't know if I've answered your question.
Senator Frum: You've said a lot of interesting things.
The Chair: There is one point you made that we should try to clarify. You were talking about one of Senator Frum's questions in relation to suicide. The note I made was that you said it's a much higher suicide rate in DND, but it's not reported.
Mr. Frey: Yes.
The Chair: It's not reported because these are individuals who were in DND and have moved on or that there's actually a suppression of that information within that organization?
Mr. Frey: I would say there's a culture that encourages suppression. Think how proud those men and women were in the Airborne Regiment. Look at the pretend soldier that we saw over Remembrance Day and the rallying cry, and appropriately so, which came from all of those people in the regiment, the RCR. Nobody wants to embarrass their family, and for these soldiers, officers and the RCMP — and you've heard this from a previous witness — their regiment is their family. It's part of their family. To show this part of yourself does a disservice to the name of the regiment you're assigned to or have been with, or the organization with the RCMP.
I received an email three weeks ago from a veteran. He said: ''Dr. Frey, we just lost another guy. He tried it a few times before. We just lost him.'' But none of this gets reported. It's not going to end up in the death column in the newspaper. This is not unique to DND or the RCMP. This happens in the general population as well, but it happens more often in military and paramilitary organizations.
The Chair: We'll make note of that. It's an important point that you're making.
Senator Neufeld: I haven't participated in any of the discussions on this issue up until now. I'm standing in for another senator. Did I understand your presentation correctly — I just want to make sure I did — that you more or less said there is not the preparation done with men and women who are going into the military, police force or any of those kinds of things, prior to them experiencing any of the things you spoke about? Do I understand that correctly?
Mr. Frey: Yes.
Senator Neufeld: That is what part of the problem? Is it the whole problem? Is it part of the problem? Is it two things? The second thing you're saying is that when you deal with them afterwards, it's much harder to get some positive results, to put it that way.
Mr. Frey: That's right. As a clinician, I'm working on the pointy end, once the OSI has been experienced. Obviously it's much more difficult, once you've experienced an OSI, to treat an OSI. We have success, but it would be much better if we can prevent the OSIs from occurring. The preparation that I've seen in police organizations, and to some extent in the military, is focused on the activity of policing or soldiering. There's very little focus on how well and how proactively you're mitigating the psychological risks associated with those types of tasks.
When we talk about effectiveness, military and paramilitary organizations will think: How many tickets have you written? How many missions have you completed successfully? But there's very little talk about how we are doing as an organization in mitigating the psychological risks, which can arise by engaging in these types of activities. You have a lot of silos. You have a lot of complex operational environments, but the hazards and risks associated with those types of operations are not analyzed at the systemic level. You're basically treating symptoms and not actually treating the causes. The causes are typically at the organizational level.
I was going to bring a slice of Swiss cheese in today, but I didn't know if I would get it past security. I will use the Swiss cheese analogy. There's a theory by James Reason, which some of you may be familiar with. We put in a number of mitigations to prevent a certain type of accident or hazard resulting in a trauma. If you put in the right type of mitigations at a very high level, where you have very good strong statements of safety and security and the right type of capability and capacity to proactively manage all the risks and hazards associated at the policy level, then you're going to have fewer holes in these pieces of Swiss cheese for that chain of events to occur.
The RCMP is a classic example, because I lived this. The problem is that they put policies in place, but the policies they have in place to help prevent an OSI aren't relevant to the officers doing policing, for example, in Nunavut. They may be relevant to the officers doing policing in ''O'' Division or ''E'' Division, but not necessarily relevant. I remember getting this from an RCMP officer when I was writing policy at the national level: ''Dr. Frey, you do realize that policy is only a guideline.''
That makes it very difficult. If policy is only a guideline, then you're left with interpretation. Then you're left with practices and sometimes procedures, which may not be conducive to managing the risks associated with policing.
Senator Neufeld: I assume, then, that you've written numerous papers in regard to how some of this should perhaps be changed to deal with OSI in a different fashion. Would that be correct?
Mr. Frey: I haven't written numerous papers. I'm presenting more and more now, and I'm engaged with other safety-critical organizations in helping them proactively manage the risks at the regulatory level and at the senior executive level. I have been trying to make inroads for many years to move police organizations in that direction, but what's missing in the police world is the right oversight to encourage that type of change. It's also missing at the very senior executive level within the organizations to facilitate that.
It would be a dream of mine to engage in that type of a process with the Canadian Armed Forces or the RCMP or any other police organization. It's very hard to find the right type of leadership that understands the value of systematically understanding the organizational and human factors to these types of injuries as opposed to just focusing on the symptoms.
Senator Neufeld: It's interesting. I would have thought, with your extensive experience, you would have written some papers on how you, and others like-minded as you, think some of these things should be dealt with. I thought maybe you would be able to share some of that with us, but that's fine.
Have you then had the opportunity at all to work with any police officers to try to do what you're telling us should be done, to work with police officers before they get to the point where they're dealing with all of these issues at the front line? Have you ever had that opportunity to work with a police officer or a military person before they go to battle, before they go to Nunavut, those kinds of things? Have you had that opportunity?
Mr. Frey: I have, yes. He's a senator now. That was my one experience with the RCMP. I've had other RCMP officers who I really found understood what I was talking about, but now they work for a bank. They don't tend to stick around in the organization.
There was another officer whom I highly admire. I can't reveal his name. When he brought this type of thinking up to the Commissioner of the RCMP, he was penalized. He was penalized for nearly six months. He was put in the penalty box.
It's very threatening to go through cultural change because the organization at the very high end sees that it's going to actually compromise its operational readiness. They don't see the value in it. They see it as threatening. It's not a natural process. It's not a natural language for them. That's what I'm trying to develop. It's very difficult to find that type of leadership.
Senator Neufeld: Can you tell me of other jurisdictions, countries — maybe states — that do it the way you are talking about, as we speak? Is that in practice? If it is in practice, at a broad level and from a fairly high level, could you tell me some of those countries?
Mr. Frey: I can't, unfortunately, tell you any country that does that with its police agencies or with the military. I can tell you that the company I work for currently, Soteira Solutions, we've worked within the aviation agency, which is a very safety and security conscious organization. They cannot wait for the next accident, the next incident, to manage those risks. They have to manage those risks proactively because there is no business recovery plan.
What I'm proposing is to take an organizational human factors approach, which has worked effectively at the regulatory level and within the aviation industry, for example, and use these concepts and these principles, adapt them, and build the capacity and the capability of the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP to proactively manage their risks as opposed to managing them reactively.
Senator Neufeld: Let's say you deal with a police officer after the fact, which you've done lots of, I assume, from what you've spoken about. The files, the notes that you would make that deal with this person, are they kept in confidence or do senior officers have access to that information simply I guess to have a look and see or even speak to you, without having notes, about: ''I've actually interviewed this officer and I think that that person is going to have some problems''? Does that happen? If it does, I can understand why they're afraid to come see you.
Mr. Frey: Yes, of course.
Senator Neufeld: I think that would be normal, not the trauma stuff, but even in a regular business. If there was a psychologist coming to interview your staff, and your superior had access to that information, it might not go well for you.
Mr. Frey: That's right.
Senator Neufeld: I want to know whether that is completely confidential or do you have to report?
Mr. Frey: When I first started working at the RCMP I was sat down by a more senior psychologist and she told me: ''Ron, don't forget who your allegiance is with. It's with the college. If you ever breach confidentiality, you lose your licence. And if you lose your licence, you lose your position.''
That is something that psychologists take very seriously, and physicians as well. Have there been breaches in confidentiality? Absolutely. When I was brought in to the RCMP, I was brought in because there had been breaches that occurred in ''O'' Division between the physician and the commanding officer.
Senator White: Ontario.
Mr. Frey: I'm sorry. So confidentiality is very important. It's extremely important amongst the military and the paramilitary because they naturally are much more suspicious than the general population about things like confidentiality.
To answer your question, yes, confidentiality is absolutely assured, unless an officer makes a statement that they are going to harm themselves imminently, and not just fantasizing, they are going to kill themselves or kill somebody else, or if they disclose during the course of an interview or an assessment that they're having a sexual relationship with a minor. Those are the two exceptions. Aside from those, it is confidential, yes.
Senator White: Thank you, Dr. Frey. I've heard people say in the military in particular: ''Do you realize how many people are seeing psychologists right now or are under psychiatric care, have OSI?'' almost as if it's a negative thing. I realize it is negative that people are sick. I guess I'm asking your perspective. When someone says: ''How many people are seeing a psychologist?'' I want to say: ''Every one who needs to.'' The negativity, the stigma are still there, even when we acknowledge people need help, when we're concerned about the number.
I know you'll remember when you were conducting your visits that we saw a dramatic increase in use of the Employee Assistance Program, and the financial department of the RCMP was extremely concerned about the number of calls. I said: ''Hopefully they are going up.'' That was my hope, that people would look for help when they need help.
Can you explain how that stigma has to be overcome, not just by people? Organizations have to look at the fact of people reaching out as a good thing, and many people who are sick are not reaching out. That's the negative part of this.
Mr. Frey: I agree with you totally. It comes down to communication. It must come down from the top, and it has to be believable. You're right; obviously, if we can get them to engage with providers who can help them when they're going through some difficulties before they get inflamed, to a point where they're really struggling — and typically, from what I recall of the literature, that happens around that 13-year mark of a police officer's career — then everybody benefits from it. I don't know if I answered the first part of your question.
One of the things that always disturbed me was this observation that you made, and that I felt, that the RCMP was taking a very kind of business approach to treating something that you really can't apply that kind of a business model to.
I've seen officers promoted by demonstrating to the organization how efficient they can make the organization, but there's no real analytical thinking going on about how it impacts the effectiveness of the organization in the long term. That's the problem. They manage their costs like a private enterprise would manage costs, and they don't realize the long-term consequence that efficiency has on effectiveness in the end.
The Chair: Doctor, this year there's a tremendous amount of work and research going on, and you've had a chance to review some of the other witnesses that we've had, and they've been very good, as you've indicated. To manage the risk of operational injuries and to have this oversight and governance that you believe is the main feature of handling the problem, is it your view that techniques are well enough developed that that could be passed on to management? It's a matter of changing the culture so they will start using these techniques, or is there still a lot of work to be done in the detection and the management techniques?
Mr. Frey: No. As you've mentioned, we have very good interventions for the detection and treatment of many OSIs. I have tried to share with you today a capability that would be developed at the governance and senior management levels so that these OSIs don't occur. That capability has been developed for other industries. There's no reason why it can't be developed for the RCMP or for the Canadian Armed Forces.
The problem is that we need vision and leadership at the very high level saying, ''Yes, this is the direction we want to move the ship.'' Because then it will build the capacity and capability of the organization to actually move in the direction they need to move so that they are managing all of the risks in the organization, not just some of the risks.
The Chair: You talked earlier about certain individuals are attracted to policing or the Armed Forces.
Mr. Frey: Yes.
The Chair: Is there any scientific basis for saying this individual, having met with him and talked to him and listened to his hopes and aspirations, as a psychologist, I can tell that you this person is more likely to need help for an operational stress injury than somebody else?
Mr. Frey: This would be an individual, case-by-case assessment that I do quite regularly for high-risk parts of policing. For example, for the ERT teams or sex crimes unit or forensic idents. I don't do it much for the RCMP but for other police organizations. Psychologists are engaged in those types of behaviours or actions, but again it's at the pointy level; it's really at the operational level.
So yes, to answer your question, we have that capability. We're able to make some general statements about what factors may exacerbate some parts of a personality which would lead to, for example, an OSI. I can't say that we can do it convincingly in every case, but we're pretty good at it. Where most of the work needs to be done is at the much higher end, because that's only one small part of addressing OSIs. The other part is more at the senior level.
The Chair: I'm thinking in terms of it being a recruiting tool.
Mr. Frey: Yes. I had heard once, and I don't know if this is true, that DND did put a lot of resources into psychological assessments of recruits. I understood they stopped that process because they weren't actually meeting the requirements they needed to man their positions.
When I was at the RCMP, every officer went through a psychological assessment, using the MMPI, which is the gold standard; it's an excellent scale. What's tragic in that exercise is that we have thousands of profiles, but yet we can't access the data. We can't analyze it, because nobody had the foresight to think about things like privacy, access to that information, how it's going to be analyzed, all those things which play into privacy. That's because there's no proactive, ongoing capability in the organization to engage in that type of thinking. If the RCMP had the capability of doing that type of work, they could have probably had some really interesting research data generated, which could predict the right types of personalities for certain types of jobs and deployments.
The Chair: I'm trying to follow through the individuals who are joining policing or the military, and there's a recruiting aspect; and then once they're in there, you're advocating and urging the culture of the institution to accept that operational stress injury is like any other injury.
Mr. Frey: Yes.
The Chair: And we can manage this and manage the risk by training the individuals, helping them to prepare for the environment that they've placed themselves in or they're likely to be placed in?
Mr. Frey: That's correct. That's all individual, not just the foot soldier on the ground, but their managers, the sergeants, the warrant officers, the lieutenants, on and on. It would permeate the whole organization, that's correct.
Senator White: One follow-up primarily in relation to your response. So we're clear, if the MMPI-2 information today started to be gathered and kept, and at seven years comparative studies were done on everyone who had completed the MMPI-2, and in 2014 we look at what number of the individuals were involved with — to be fair, in Ontario in policing we did it in relation to professional standards complaints, actually. We tried to figure out whether there was a bad recruiting year.
You're suggesting we might actually be able to figure out an MMPI-2 test which would allow us to preempt some of the issues we're seeing years or decades later, but we don't do that because we didn't collect it in a proper manner in the first place, and be able to use it for the right reasons in the second place?
Mr. Frey: That's right.
Senator White: You were in the RCMP as a civilian employee. Is it possible to go back and do that?
Mr. Frey: I don't think so.
Senator White: The RCMP is going to recruit 1,000 people this year. It's never too late.
Mr. Frey: No, it's never too late to start.
The Chair: The past information that would help us in predicting and determining a procedure is not available to us.
Mr. Frey: Don't forget that the MMPI-2 is only valid for a certain amount of time. It's not a life-long profile, right? It's usually a couple of years. We know that as police go through the course of their careers, they get married, they have different expectations, and there are different sociotechnical factors that feed into their occupation. So it's not a static measure. You don't want to put all your marbles on that particular instrument, but certainly you can use the information and feed it into an overall system and then generate some interesting hypotheses which you can then test to see if you should be putting in new mitigation or not, as opposed to waiting for something to go off the rails and then trying to address it with another mitigation, which then transfers risk over to a different part of the organization.
The Chair: Just for the record, this is MMPI-2?
Mr. Frey: That's the MMPI-2, yes.
Senator White: The MMPI-2 is offered many times. When you move on to an ERT team, a tactical team, you are given the MMPI-2. If you are transferring north, you are given it again. I've had it three or four times. I don't think I've done well any of those times, when I think back, in my mind, anyway. The reality is you would also be able to see those experiential things that happen in your life that change the way you reacted in the MMPI-2, like marriage, as you have said, jobs, and responsibility would also be helpful.
The Chair: I was thinking in terms of looking at all the recruits. I understand that for the individual that could well change. If he or she was tested five years later then there are a lot of other sociological factors that might change, but for all recruits coming in, it could be interesting to see what information you could take out of looking at the global information.
Senator White: Dr. Frey, I'm sure you have information on the MMP-2. Could you provide it to the members of the committee so they could have a look at it and would have an understanding of what it is? How many questions are there, 500?
Mr. Frey: There are 567.
The Chair: It would complete the record nicely for us.
Thank you. We've run out of time and we've run out of senators who wish to intervene. Dr. Frey, on behalf of the Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, we're a subcommittee of Defence and Security, always hoping that we will become a separate committee in due course, but we are very interested in RCMP veterans and veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces. We very much appreciate your helping us to understand, in a very clear way, the issues that involve operational stress.
Senator White: Mr. Chair, I want to thank Dr. Frey as well for the work he has done, particularly with the RCMP in the North, over the last decade. Plus, he's always been there for the membership. I want to thank him for that.
The Chair: Absolutely. It's nice that you have that information, which you can share with us and that you shared some time together.
Thank you very much doctor, we appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
The meeting is now concluded.
(The committee adjourned.)