Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s usual for people who have the experience from traumatic events in their lives to have flashbacks, nightmares or intrusive memories when something terrible happens. What I’m talking about is post-traumatic
stress disorder, also referred to as PTSD. It is a mental illness that affects a lot of people. It doesn’t matter which demographic you’re in, it affects people all over the world. It’s exposure to trauma that might be involved in death or a threat of death; it could be a serious injury, an accident, violence, natural disasters, even crime.
There are various symptoms when people are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. I won’t get into all the details there, but what I really want to focus on in my Member’s statement today is those people in our communities who are helping our residents and helping government-run programs: the first responders, the service providers that we think are strong enough to do the work. These are the ones that are going to the accidents, going to the deaths and trying to help people out. Paramedics, physicians, doctors, nurses, firefighters, RCMP, in some cases, the big ones are our coroners across the Northwest Territories. I do want to give recognition to the Department of Justice for the compassionate training they are putting on for the coroners across the Northwest Territories.
In some cases, these are our hard-to-recruit positions, so if we don’t have the services to help them out when they’re dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, there’s a good chance that we will lose them and they’ll go somewhere else.
There’s a need for awareness and education in this area throughout the Northwest Territories and within our own service system and we need people to speak up about their experiences, and as a government we need to provide the proper quality of support to help these individuals with the mental illness that they will be experiencing.
Mr. Speaker, I will have questions later today for the Minister of Health and Social Services on what kind of services are we providing to our first responders and service providers in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.