Thank you very much.
I think we all know and all heard about the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of Canadians. I want to focus my remarks today on two specific areas where I think the federal government can help. I was very pleased to see that the federal government assigned a new Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. My remarks will be specific to some of the deliverables of that position.
Our research shows that one in five Canadians felt that they needed help with their mental health through the pandemic, but they didn't receive it, because they didn't know where to get it. They didn't think help was available, or they couldn't afford to pay for it. Beyond just building more services, I want to talk today a little bit about “how”.
The first topic I want to talk about is youth services. One of the deliverables was to introduce a new fund for student mental health that will support the hiring of new mental health care counsellors, improve wait times for service, increase access overall and enable targeted supports for Black and racialized students at post-secondary institutions. This is critical. Twice the number of children and adolescents have experienced depression and anxiety since the pandemic began; 11% of all people who experience homelessness are youth; one in four youth has clinically elevated symptoms of depression; one in five has clinically elevated symptoms of anxiety; and 70% of all mental illness starts in youth at the ages of 12 to 17. However, what I'm worried about is that the government will give the money to colleges and universities to hire mental health counsellors, creating yet another silo of care that is not integrated. We all hear that the major challenge is that people don't know how to get services.
Rather than funding an already established system of care.... I want to show an example of how this works. In its wisdom, the federal government, through IRCC, funded our agency to provide holistic mental health care through settlement agencies and through welcome centres since the pandemic. Since the start of that program, we have served 292 clients. Of those, 85% experienced an improvement in their depression-related symptoms, and 89% experienced improvement in their anxiety-related symptoms and remain connected to their settlement services. Integrating care is vital, as opposed to establishing a whole new section where we have to then build relationships rather than connect them into a whole system of care.
The second area I want to talk about is the increase in substance abuse. I want to position this, though, in terms of a population perspective. COVID did not affect the genders or the populations the same. In fact, it was men who had higher rates of problematic alcohol abuse, up 28%, whereas for women it was only 18%. Men had problematic cannabis use, up 39%, and women just a little bit less. Overall, we also saw that females, especially females with children at home, had higher rates of anxiety and depression than men. They reported that men had more issues with social isolation and finance, where women had more issues with finance and caring for children. The situations are very different. “One size fits all” is not the solution. I urge the federal government, when it is designing a system of care to deal with substance abuse, to look at local solutions rather than broad public health strategies. It needs to invest in local communities where it can target populations directly.
I want to give another example of how this can work. Whether you look at OHTs or at health authorities, most of them have population-specific groups that bring together agencies who come together to deal with these issues. We have to leverage these and provide small community grants to be able to access these populations rather reach the norm through a broad scale, because COVID, as we know, impacted the mental health and the health of newcomers and minority populations far more often, or in far greater rates, than it did for white Canadians.
Really in summary, what I want to say is to integrate care with local existing, and do hyper-local responses.
Thank you.