Thank you and good morning. It's a great pleasure to be in front of this committee this morning.
My name is David Goldbloom. I am a psychiatrist. What a pleasure it is to be here today to discuss a topic that is of the utmost importance to me, both professionally and personally.
I'm here in my capacity as vice-chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, but I'm also here as a psychiatrist who has worked in the field of mental health for the last 30 years, dealing with individuals who are suicidal, and dealing with the aftermath of suicide for those families so profoundly and irrevocably affected by suicide. I'm also speaking to you as someone who's known suicide at a very personal level. Two physicians in my own family died by suicide. In my experience, everybody, in the course of their growing up, their personal lives, and their professional lives, knows someone who's been affected by this tragic outcome. I'm grateful for the opportunity that this hearing provides.
To provide you with a bit of background about the Mental Health Commission of Canada, I understand this is our first appearance in front of this committee as an organization. Just to remind you by way of brief history, the Mental Health Commission emerged from the Senate report on mental health and mental illness “Out of the Shadows at Last”, which came out in 2006, and among its 118 recommendations was the creation of a national mental health commission, enacted by the Government of Canada in 2007.
As a leading national mental health organization, the commission is working with a vast network of people, from mental health professionals like me to policy analysts, researchers, and scientists, but also and importantly, with people with lived experience with mental illness at every level in our organization, from the board to our front-line operations, as well as family members, because we believe that people with lived experience in their families are essential to driving change in mental health.
We have a 10-year mandate. We're now at the five-year point of the Mental Health Commission. It's an action-based organization, charged with collaborating with stakeholders and partners to transform the mental health landscape in Canada.
In our first five years of operation, the Mental Health Commission has focused its effort on several initiatives that were part of our initial mandate from the federal government.
The first is creating and implementing Canada's first-ever national mental health strategy. That mental health strategy is coming out in several months. I'm delighted that Mary Bartram, the director of our national mental health strategy, is seated to my left and has worked tirelessly in this regard.
The second is creating a knowledge exchange centre, whose mandate is to facilitate the development and mobilization of evidence-informed knowledge in the mental health community and in the community at large. Currently, we live in the world of web 2.0, where there's no filter for quality in terms of the information that people derive. This will be one-stop shopping on the web for all Canadians.
Third, our anti-stigma initiative, Opening Minds, is focusing on how to best fight the stigma associated with mental illness. Because until we achieve that kind of fundamental attitudinal and behavioural change in terms of discrimination, we're not going to be able to move the needle on advancing the experience of people with mental illness and their families.
More recently, our homelessness research demonstration project, At Home/Chez Soi, which you may know is the largest project in the world on intervening in the lives of people who are homeless and mentally ill, occurs in five Canadian cities: Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Moncton. That project concludes in 2013, having enrolled over 2,000 mentally ill Canadians, who found themselves homeless, in a really extraordinary intervention.
The commission, through its eight advisory committees, has also undertaken very specific projects in a variety of areas including: children and youth mental health; first nations, Inuit, and Métis mental health; workplace mental health; reforming our service system in mental health; looking at research in mental health; mental health and the law—given that our prisons now constitute the largest asylums in Canada housing people with mental illness; seniors' mental health; as well as issues that families and caregivers face when dealing with a loved one's mental health problems.
In all this work the commission is really fortunate, through its staff, its board, and advisory committee members, to have the input of Canada's leading experts in mental health and mental illness.
By drawing on the intellectual capital that represents, and by collaborating closely with the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, the commission is able to spark change in mental health from coast to coast to coast.
Now with respect to the bill that's being examined today by the committee, the commission clearly and obviously recognizes that suicide is a tragedy with a devastating impact on families and communities. Suicide and mental illness share many common risk factors. Over 90% of Canadians who die by suicide—and that's close to 4,000 Canadians a year—are experiencing mental health problems and illnesses. Worldwide, mental illness is the single most common determinant of suicide. That's why the Mental Health Commission is working now, through several initiatives, in partnership with the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, as well as leading individuals and organizations in the fields of mental health, public health, and health care in general, to catalyze reform and to improve systems in the area of suicide prevention.
We have active partnerships with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse—substance abuse being one of the other big drivers of suicidal behaviour.
In addition, over 50,000 Canadians, coast to coast to coast, have been trained through our mental health first aid program. This program teaches people how to recognize the signs and symptoms of mental health problems and to guide a person to help. All mental health first aid courses include teaching on suicidal ideation. Mental health first aid is an evidence-based approach that we think is going to take off like a brush fire across the country.
So we welcome the focus and attention on suicide prevention, all the way from the local level in the Kitchener-Waterloo area right up to the national level, and we also believe there's an opportunity to address it as part of our national mental health strategy for all Canadians. This report that will be coming out within a couple of months is really unprecedented in scope and unprecedented in input. It's our first ever national mental health strategy, setting out a clear vision and priority for improving the mental health of all Canadians. We used the best available evidence and received the input of thousands of Canadians over the past four years, including many organizations working in suicide prevention. We've also drawn on the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention's blueprint for a national suicide prevention strategy as well as other evidence-informed references in the field of suicide prevention.
We believe that this strategy, when implemented, will significantly advance suicide prevention in Canada, and we have very specific recommendations on raising awareness, education and training, promoting mental health in schools and workplaces, accessing help early when problems first emerge, improving access to treatments and supports, paying attention to the needs of high-risk groups, and strengthening our data collection.
The federal framework that's under consideration today will definitely advance the strategy's recommendations to mobilize leadership, to strengthen collaboration, and to strengthen the infrastructure that's required to improve mental health outcomes in Canada with a particular focus on suicide prevention. The commission is very encouraged by the dialogue happening here in our federal Parliament. We've had the opportunity to meet with some of you personally, and we look forward to working with you, and working indeed with all Canadians, as is our mandate, to catalyze change and to improve mental health outcomes all across this country.
Thank you.