Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It's an honour to be here.
I'm Samuel Veissière. I speak as a behavioural scientist and professor of psychiatry who specializes in the study of the impact of screen time on mental health and in youth mental health generally. I also speak to you as a parent and a professor who is very concerned for the mental health of our youth, as Professor Latif mentioned.
Because there is little time, I want to specify that the take-home message is that there are really two pandemics going on at the same time, with almost diametrically opposed risk and protective profiles. As we know, old age is by far the biggest risk factor for mortality and complications linked to the COVID-19 disease, while young age is the primary risk factor for poor mental health, but not for mortality and complications due to the COVID-19 disease.
In the acute early phase of the pandemic, I participated in a study led by Professor Rébecca Robillard at the University of Ottawa, where we surveyed 6,000 Canadians on pandemic-related stress, anxiety and worsened mental health. I'll mention some of the risk factors that we found, and then I'll go on to talk about some missing data that would really help us identify at-risk populations and also identify prevention strategies.
What we found is that the biggest risk factors for worsened mental health during the pandemic were, of course, pre-existing mental conditions and female sex, as Professor Latif mentioned, although it's important to point out that women are more likely to report mental health problems. Men, unfortunately, are less likely to report mental health problems until it is too late. We know that they suffer from significantly higher suicide rates, particularly in the context of an economic recession and job loss, but also divorce. We know that family relations have often been very negatively impacted by the pandemic. We also found that alcohol consumption and drug consumption were associated with worsened mental health. Certain personality traits like extroverts and people who suffer from neuroticism....
Interestingly, and very controversially, we found that a very strong predictor of more COVID-related anxiety was left-wing political beliefs. The point here is not a partisan political point. It is an empirical observation. The understanding of the crisis has unfortunately been very polarized and very politicized, with COVID-denying positions associated with the right, leading to a certain bias in the liberal media for more “alarmist” perspectives, thereby perhaps conferring higher anxiety for people who are on the left of the political spectrum. We know, however, that this is a predictor.
What else did we find? We found that poor family relations predicted worse mental health, as did less time spent exercising or engaging in artistic activities. We found, however—although we're still looking at the data—that socio-economic status did not necessarily predict mental health in the way that we thought it would. We found that people from the upper-middle class and higher, particularly younger people, often seemed to suffer from more anxiety, so it may be that people who are working remotely have a different sort of stress profile and perhaps worsened family relations.
That was an interesting finding, because we found that by far the strongest predictor was age. People under 40 and people in their twenties reported much worsened mental health. We also found that increased screen time and social media consumption—even reading political news—was associated with worsened mental health.
I will point out that many of us in the mental health research community were already very concerned with the mental health of our youth prior to the pandemic, in that a confluence of risk factors, many of which are associated with increased screen time and isolation, were a cause of major concern prior to the pandemic and have been gravely accentuated.
It would be very helpful for us in planning prevention strategies to have better public statistics on the incidence of suicide, of psychiatric emergencies, of drugs and alcohol consumption and so on.
To conclude, because I really want to leave time for discussion—I could go on at length to shed more light on these risk factors—given the diametrically opposed risk profile, it is important from a mental health perspective to find focused protection strategies and to restore opportunities for youth that we know are conducive to better mental health: human touch, participating in collective activities, participating in the community and in religious and athletic activities, finding safe ways for those who are not at risk to return to class, particularly for university-age populations. It has become a public health emergency.
I think that's about the gist of what I want to present. I'll be happy to answer any questions.
Thank you again, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.