22 Wing/Canadian Forces Base hosts mental health expo for military personnel

Mental health expo for military personnel 22 Wing/Canadian Forces Base in North Bay held a mental health expo for its crew members Wednesday. Eric Taschner has more.

22 Wing/Canadian Forces Base in North Bay held a mental health expo Wednesday afternoon for crew members who are always busy keeping their eyes on the skies.

With his words, author Robert Graham captivated the audience made up of the men and women of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and U.S. Air Force on the base.

“For our service people, there's a lot of challenges,” he said.

“From being deployed to being placed or displaced."

Graham had a brief stint with the Canadian Armed Forces and is the founder of Techno-Resiliency. He was the expo’s keynote speaker; speaking to the team about his five-steps to get on the path to what's described as ‘post-traumatic growth’.

He said the five ways to best overcoming trauma are; finding resilience, building relationships, finding thinking traps, having gratitude and not attitude and what he describes as ‘talk, walk and rock’: talking to someone, exercise and finding a hobby.

"How to overcome versus be overcome by some of the challenges when being a service person," he said.

“There are lots of different ways you can try to elevate that mindset.”

There were 25 booths setup at the expo, each full of information for both the public and the military when it comes to available mental health service providers and the programs they run.

“We shouldn't have anyone that suffers in silence and I think that maybe some people they are strong enough and that they don't need help," said the base’s commander Col. Richard Jolette.

Jolette took some time to speak to the crew about the Sentinel Program which initially started in 2007. At present, there are 45 trained sentinels on base. These Canadian Armed Forces members are trained to identify distress in peers and aid them in finding appropriate support.

Sentinels encourage dialogue and networking in order to reduce the effects of isolation. Instead of being trained in specific areas of expertise, sentinels act as guides to resources, support programs, as well as tools available to CAF members and their families to facilitate identification and access.

The last few weeks have been stressful for the Canadian Armed Forces, as NORAD shot down an unidentified object in Canadian Air Space flying over Yukon. Three other objects were spotted flying over the U.S. in a matter of days.

“Whether it's a Tuesday night or a Saturday morning, we need to have our people ready to go and ready to support the mission and mental health is the first aspect of that,” said Jolette.

He told CTV News the people on the base have an important job where both physical and mental health needs to be top of mind in order to keep our country safe.