Good afternoon.
My name is Rabiah Dhaliwal. I'm from Surrey, British Columbia, and today I'm representing the federal riding of Delta.
First of all, I would like to say thank you to the committee for allowing me to be here. As a Punjabi Sikh woman, it is an honour to be here today and represent my community.
“She's faking it.” “She's doing it all for attention.” “It's all in your head”. “You'll get over it.” These are all things that have been said to me throughout my battle with mental illness.
I am a survivor. I am a survivor of post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. In the eighth grade, I began to self-harm. On October 2015, at the tender age of 16, I attempted to take my own life twice. On the second attempt, I almost succeeded. I woke up in a hospital bed, unsure why I was still alive and wishing I wasn't. I spent a month and a half recovering in an adolescent psychiatric ward. I hadn't planned on living to see another day, yet here I was. Today, I believe I survived for a reason, and that reason was to share my story, in an effort to hopefully inspire change and bring reform to the Canadian mental health system.
One in five Canadians will experience mental illness in any given year. The national average of the health care budget spent on mental health is only 7%. This, when compared with England's 13%, shows a startling difference that needs to be addressed. I ask you, if you had broken a leg or an arm, there is no doubt you would go to a doctor right away, correct? Mental health is no different. Early prevention is key.
The World Health Organization's constitution promotes the right of everyone to health, and health services, without experiencing financial strain.
My mental health is my right. There need to be comprehensible and clear-cut commitments to funding to battle battling this nationwide epidemic. By the year 2020, depression will become the leading cause of disease in Canada, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. There needs to be some form of legislation, such as a mental health parity act, to ensure that mental health is acknowledged as equivalent to physical health, and that an adequate number of health care dollars are set aside for treatment and front-line services, such as evidence-based therapies, and services by psychologists that should be publicly funded.
There is a dire need for a functioning and organized mental health system in Canada that addresses socio-economic barriers, and makes vulnerable and minority populations a priority. There's a disparity in our Canadian universities in regard to mental health coverage, and a greater one in our universal health care system that fails to adequately and concretely address that there is a mental health crisis upon us.
There are holes in the system that need to be filled. I am more than a statistic. My indigenous brothers and sisters are more than a statistic. We are more than a percentage or a ratio that only ever sees the light of day in a medical paper or a journal, and is never spoken of again. This is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of the well-being of all Canadian citizens. Mental health does not discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender, age or ethnicity. We all have mental health, and we all have the right to care.
Thank you.