I totally agree with the need for community-based mental health service delivery. Right before the pandemic, we did a study in Alberta to look at the mental health of Black youth. We did one before the pandemic, and we did one after the pandemic.
We engaged about 129 Black youth in conversation cafés and also interviews on their mental health. On the last day of the conversation cafés, Black youth took us through what an ideal mental health service delivery would look like: culturally appropriate, delivered in spaces that are accessible to Black youth, and also provided by Black mental health practitioners.
Youth took that data, and they used it to create the mental health clinic—the first mental health clinic for the Black population in western Canada—during the pandemic.
One of the challenges, of course, is that a lot of the funding for mental health is put into acute care, which usually is a downstream approach to mental health service delivery. If we're able to address some of the upstream approaches.... Before, I talked about the need, for example, to look at community-based mental health service delivery, to build and capitalize on the strengths of community leaders, religious leaders, while also understanding that not everyone goes to a religious leader. We need community support and community to be able to address some of the mental health issues, and also community-based service delivery.
I've interviewed immigrant service providers before. They've talked about the backlog in terms of the long wait-list for people to be able to see mental health psychologists, counselling psychologists and practitioners. We just need much more investment in that in the community.