Thank you very much for your question. I will try to answer the various parts of it.
Certainly your initial comment about this being important to address upstream is critical.
With regard to historical events impacting mental health and mental illness, you're absolutely right on that one as well. That stigma, while we have certainly gone a long way to reducing it, is still alive and well. I think that is impacting, in particular, structural stigma. It's impacting why we aren't making the important decisions that are needing to be made, particularly during a pandemic.
If I could reference the previous question in answering yours as well, with regard to the Wellness Together portal, it's based on a stepped care 2.0 model. I want to point out that was piloted in one province first, and it's now available in three others, including Nova Scotia. In that first province it was shown to decrease wait times by 68%. That's a very significant number, particularly when you're looking at wait times in Canada of about 18 months for youth and adults.
I agree that with serious mental illnesses, it does need to be dealt with differently. There is a big concern that the pandemic is probably impacting a lot of vulnerable populations, but in particular people with serious mental illnesses. There was a study that came out this morning that showed that people with schizophrenia are dying more from COVID-19 than are other populations.
I do believe that suicide rates are avoidable. The difficulty with suicide rates is that we don't have very good data. We know that approximately 4,000 people every year in Canada die by suicide, and those rates supposedly have not increased, but they haven't decreased either. In order to address suicide, we need to know exactly what the rates are to begin with. There is a community program to speak to avoidable suicides, which is now being rolled out and piloted in eight communities across the country through the Mental Health Commission of Canada. A number of others are now joining that provincially.
It's a very complex question that you've asked, but I do believe that there are definite ways to ensure that suicide rates do not increase, but we do have to look at the plight of people with serious mental illnesses and chronic illnesses.