Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you so much for the invitation and the opportunity to be here. If I get any formalities wrong, I apologize. This is my first time, but it's a real pleasure to be here.
I'm going to go through each of the questions that were sent to me and respond to them in turn. I will basically be speaking about the results of an ongoing study that I'm leading here in Montreal. It's an international study called iCARE and I'm going to focus primarily on the Canadian data.
I'm going to report on what we've been seeing from the study basically since the outset of the pandemic in late March. We have data currently on 6,000 Canadians through a representative sample, and we have data on over 14,000 Canadians from a convenient sample.
The first question I'm going to address is any sex differences in the mental health impacts among Canadians. An analysis of our data reveals that women appear to be shouldering more of the emotional and behavioural burden of the pandemic, as well as experiencing greater job and income loss. As a result, they may or seem to be experiencing greater negative mental health impacts.
From the start of the pandemic through to the end of November, more women than men believed that adhering to public health measures is very important. This is when I'm speaking about the emotional burden. They also have greater COVID-19-related concerns, whether we're talking about the health impacts to self or others, personal financial impacts of the pandemic and its policies, or socio-economic impacts, for example feeling socially isolated and separated from family.
However, this potentially explains why women appear to be twice as adherent to public health measures or public health policies relative to men. When I'm speaking about the public health measures, I'm speaking about the big ones—handwashing, social distancing, avoiding social gatherings and self-isolating if they have COVID-19. This is what I'm referring to when I speak to the emotional and behavioural burden.
Now I'll speak more directly to the mental health impacts. Between June and November, significantly more women than men reported experiencing severe mental stress. By this I mean anxiety, depression, loneliness and frustration, as well as interpersonal stress. In our study, this was defined as experiencing more verbal and physical fights with family.
Rates are twice as high among women across all of these variables and appear to be getting worse over time. Again, I'll remind you that the period is between June and November. Significantly more women than men have cancelled medical appointments or avoided presenting to the emergency room due to concerns about COVID. After the first wave, more women than men reported losing their job or having their job hours cut.
To give you an example of the absolute percentage differences between men and women, in June 25% of women reported experiencing severe anxiety—and this is in the upper quartile—versus only 12% of men. In November, 27% of women reported experiencing severe anxiety versus 14% of men.
Speaking to how it is impacting various vulnerable groups, the pandemic seems to be exacerbating pre-existing health, mental health and socio-economic disparities across many vulnerable populations. This was evident in our study in June and has persisted or worsened through November.
Young people—I mean the 18-25 group, compared to those over age 25; visible minorities—that is, non-white; and those living under the poverty line, defined as having a total household income of less than $60,000 a year compared to over $60,000, report experiencing significantly more severe mental stress, such as anxiety, depression and loneliness, and higher interpersonal stress, such as verbal and physical fights with family.
To give you a sense of what this is among young people, in June, among those aged 18-25, 31% were in the upper quartile for anxiety, versus 23% of the 25-50 age group and only 10% of the over-50 age group. Across the board, rates of severe mental stress among young people are more than three times those of people over age 50, and it is worsening over time. Significantly more young people, visible minorities and those living under the poverty line also report consuming more drugs and alcohol, and this is again in the upper quartile range.
Significantly more young people, visible minorities and those living under the poverty line have had trouble or reported having trouble accessing non-COVID-related medical care. The same three groups report having lost their jobs, having their job hours cut or losing income and having trouble paying for housing. Again, these are all the upper quartile extremes.
It's unclear how accessible or well adapted mental health services are for these groups, but I suspect there are probably considerable knowledge gaps about what services may be available.
In terms of the next question, the availability of programs that can support mental health services and provide mental health services to people across Canada, what I want to speak about is the survey of psychologists in Quebec. This was run by the Order of Psychologists of Quebec. Across the board, psychologists here have been reporting that their patients are more distressed, that there's more anxiety, more depression, more requests for emergency services and a lot of requests for consultations for drug and alcohol abuse. Seventy per cent have been contacted by former patients, and 34% have increased their hours since the start of the pandemic. However, what I wanted to highlight is that 50% reported being willing to provide emergency services, and it was estimated that 7,000 hours per week could be added to aid the population.
This was done in the context of Quebec, but it brings me to the next question: How could virtual or teletherapy perhaps be leveraged to meet the needs of Canadians? Offering teletherapy options could be done, given the fact that there are so many psychologists in Quebec. We have a high volume of clinical psychologists in Quebec, and maybe we could consider leveraging the availability of these specialists to expand the reach and accessibility of needed services across Canada.
The last thing I want to mention is a program called Wellness Together Canada. This is a federally funded program to provide mental health services to people across the country. In my speaking notes, which I shared with the committee earlier today, I wanted to mention that it's something that I think we could do better at leveraging to get more of these needed services to people across Canada. As it stands, only 10% of Canadians surveyed had any awareness whatsoever that this program existed, so I think we can do a lot better there.
Thank you very much.