Thank you.
Our first message is that the pandemic has negatively impacted the mental health of most Canadians. When we look at life satisfaction as an overall measure of positive mental health, we see that it has declined to the lowest since 2003. Whereas before the pandemic almost three-quarters of Canadians rated their life satisfaction as high, only 43% indicated such a level during the pandemic.
Finally, fewer Canadians are reporting being in very good or excellent mental health, with young Canadians showing the largest declines. The top graph in slide 3 illustrates that youth have experienced the largest declines in life satisfaction since the start of the pandemic. Focusing on the bottom graph, there are some suggestions of emerging inequalities for immigrants. Whereas levels of satisfaction were generally similar among immigrants and Canadian-born before the pandemic, it was lower for immigrants in June 2020.
Slide 4 looks at self-rated mental health, which is a powerful indicator of overall mental health status. As previously noted, a consistent finding across studies is that the impact on mental health has affected more youth.
The graph on slide 5 shows that the proportion of Canadians reported an increase in their cannabis, alcohol or tobacco use during the pandemic compared with before the pandemic began. This is an interesting fact, because it shows that, compared with other age groups, youth report increasing their use of cannabis the most. About 12% of them reported increasing their cannabis use during the pandemic. As well, the greatest increase in substance use was reported among those aged 35 to 54, with an increase in alcohol use.
Turning to slide 6, since the pandemic we see from crowdsourcing results that gender-diverse individuals were substantially more likely than female or male participants to report fair or poor mental health. Gender-diverse Canadians also were twice as likely as females and three times as likely as males to report some symptoms consistent with moderate and severe anxiety.
Looking at slide 7, past studies suggest that, generally speaking, immigrants arrive in Canada with better self-perceived mental health than Canadians, but this perception declines after a period of time in Canada. Results from our crowd-source survey suggest the opposite pattern during the pandemic—that is, 28% of recent immigrants who participated in the crowd-source survey reported fair or poor self-rated mental health, compared with 20% of established immigrant participants and 24% of Canadian-born participants. Recent immigrant participants were also more likely to report symptoms of anxiety than other Canadians.
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