Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this.
Through our advisory committees we have two projects that are specifically focused on the needs of multicultural communities. One of the projects is assessing the barriers to accessing mental health services once people come to Canada. The other project is looking at and is actually developing tools for mental health practitioners to use in a variety of languages, incorporating very culturally appropriate and specific approaches.
The experience of different cultures is very different, both how they experience mental illness and how they interpret it in a cultural sense. In the Chinese language, there isn't even a word for mental illness. So there are some really significant differences. It's one of the challenges as Canada increases the number of people from different ethnic backgrounds in our population. We really haven't shifted the mental health system to provide appropriate services to all of those groups. Through these two projects we're trying to develop materials and to understand what the exact barriers are in more depth.