Thank you very much. I appreciate being invited to speak with you today.
I am the chair of Mental Health Research Canada, which is a national charity dedicated to advancing knowledge on mental health, and today I offer some comments about mental health in the pandemic. I also want to outline the COVID-19 mental health polling project that our organization has been involved with.
In addition to my brief remarks, I submitted a report to the committee, and my organization would be happy to offer briefings to any committee member on further details.
First of all, let me applaud your committee for focusing these hearings on mental health and for listening to a wide range of views. Our organization is also fundamentally committed to listening to stakeholders as a way of determining what kinds of knowledge need to be developed to support mental health.
For us, stakeholders are not just professionals and researchers but a much wider range of people, including family members, those who directly experience mental illness, indigenous people, and people at high risk for reasons such as racism and discrimination, as well as many other examples.
I am sure that you, as members of Parliament, are hearing a great deal from your constituents about mental health issues, and this is extremely valuable information. Good information on how Canadians are coping is really essential to dealing with this crisis.
When the pandemic hit, we committed our organization to helping with the crisis. We launched the national polling initiative to provide good and timely data to governments and stakeholders on the mental health impacts of COVID-19. To date we have conducted three polls, and a fourth poll is being started today as we speak. When it's done, we will have engaged more than 10,000 Canadians and developed an extensive and complex dataset, and we plan on continuing this work every eight weeks into 2022 to monitor Canada's recovery.
Our work is enabled by its scale, because only with large samples can we be sure to get sufficient data in the many areas we explore. We're looking at a number of things. We're looking at types of distress people are feeling, fears they have, how they're coping, demographic data on such things as family status, income, employment, gender, and access to mental health supports as well as other areas.
Here are some headlines from what we've found. High levels of anxiety have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic and high levels of depression have doubled. Surprisingly, these levels have not moved substantially from April in wave one despite changes between the waves and then the onset of wave two. The levels of distress have remained pretty constant across the country.
High anxiety and depression levels are more prevalent in younger populations and in women, but there's a surge in levels in men at the very highest distress categories when we look at symptoms. We know from other work that men often do not report mental health challenges until they become quite severe.
Treatment is now harder to access. There has been a drop in one-to-one counselling, and visits to family doctors have been dramatically reduced. I should note that we are sharing all of the above information with governments and professional associations across Canada.
Looking broadly, we can see that levels of distress are not evenly distributed in the population. People working in certain sectors such as retail, front-line health care, teaching—and I would add small businesses, having heard Mr. Gustafson—are more anxious. Family situations are also important. We find that people living alone and those with small children are dealing with more anxiety. Finally, lower income levels predict more distress. We are taking and sharing that information with governments, professional associations, school boards and others.
People who are adhering less to social distancing guidelines are experiencing increased depression and negative mental health, particularly around the economic fallout of the pandemic. If we look at coping, we find that social media and watching the news do not help most people. Activities such as reading, exercising or interacting even virtually with friends were rated as helpful in the early stages of the pandemic, but are now losing their positive effect as we exhaust their use and find them repetitive.
Canadians now rate going outside or spending time in nature as the number one helpful activity, and we're sharing this finding with parks and recreation organizations, provincial and municipal governments and others across the country.
It's also important who is delivering the message. Canadians want to hear information about mental health from professionals. This includes doctors like those from the Public Health Agency of Canada or their provincial or territorial counterparts, but also local family health providers and doctors. The messages themselves need to be accurate but to emphasize hope and advice on how to cope.
What do we suggest in the long run or, I guess, in the medium term?
First of all, it's important to keep trust high. Our national response to this, looked at globally, has been quite coherent, especially and dramatically in comparison to the United States.
Also, continue to build knowledge. Our data is part of a mosaic of information that's being built by many organizations. From this, we now have a unique and replicable dataset on how specific groups, including at-risk groups, are responding to mental health stresses during the pandemic. We need to share this and to keep dialogue open. Those living alone, younger Canadians and lower-income Canadians, as well as those with pre-existing mental health challenges, are all groups that we need to focus on.
The work of Wellness Together Canada, which is serving as a hub with information and resources for those who need help and those who care for them, is an important resource that I know is supported by the federal government.
Let me say thank you very much for inviting us to appear. We will work with you in any way we can to help with the response to COVID and to support the mental health of Canadians.
Thank you.