Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, for inviting the commission to provide our perspective on jurors' mental health. Before I begin, I would like to congratulate this committee for focusing on the mental health risks of jury duty, a topic about which relatively little is known but which impacts individuals in a very real way.
When the Mental Health Commission was created in 2007, one of the key priorities was to launch an anti-stigma campaign. Why? Because we recognized that mental health care would remain in the shadows if people were not willing to talk about it and to ask for help. On the heels of Bell Let's Talk Day, it is very encouraging to see the conversation about mental illness, but much remains to be done to move from conversation to action in delivering mental health services when and where people need them. I think it's a broader issue, and now I'll focus specifically on the issues that jurors deal with.
What is clear is that jury duty, in and of itself, is stressful, as the witness from Australia quite competently outlined. We ask regular citizens without any special training to make life-altering decisions about people charged with serious offences. This can be a heavy burden to bear. There can also be serious psychological harm caused by exposure to acts of depravity and to tragic events that are explored during trial. We've learned about vicarious trauma throughout these hearings. This can occur in anyone who has a traumatic experience, and not everyone is impacted in the same way. Since the post-duty experiences of jurors are not tracked, we don't know exactly how many of them experience vicarious trauma or operational stress injuries.
Mr. Chair, a lot of jurors need professional help and should be able to receive it to overcome the psychological distress they feel after performing their duties as jurors. There are many proven methods that help those who access them to recover, and which improve their quality of life.
Access to counselling services, for instance, is important. You will not be surprised to learn that access to those services is clearly insufficient. Recently, we studied various possibilities to help provinces and territories provide better access to such mental health services. As other witnesses have pointed out, these people need someone to turn to for support. The only way of ensuring that mental health stays in the spotlight is to be able to talk about it.
I strongly encourage the committee to study the benefits of prevention and resilience. By “resilience” I mean an individual's capacity to adapt to stress and overcome obstacles and adversity. Resilience is at the heart of the work the Mental Health Commission of Canada does, as is the fight against stigma and discrimination.
In Canada, there is increasing evidence that programs that bolster self-awareness and resilience can greatly contribute to reaching those objectives. For instance, programs like The Working Mind, and Road to Mental Readiness, which we manage and which were adapted from Department of National Defence material, are helpful.
The Liberal and Conservative members of the committee will recognize a good part of the content of these programs, since we provided training to their caucus recently. We still hope to do the same with the NDP caucus.
These programs teach participants to recognize the early signs of distress and to ask for help if they need it. We also have programs adapted for police forces, first responders and veterans. So, it would be simple to adapt these programs for jurors.
Unfortunately, public programming tailored to the needs of jurors doesn't exist—or barely exists. Jurors have often had to themselves navigate the mental health system with its long and longer wait times or pay for services directly. If we ask citizens to provide a public service such as jury duty, they should have access to tailored mental health care to deal with the impact of their public service. This in turn also requires informed decision and research. For all those reasons, the Mental Health Commission of Canada is highlighting five elements around which the committee could consider framing your recommendations.
First, you should consider offering pretrial mental health awareness education to jurors, such as The Working Mind and Road to Mental Readiness, particularly in cases involving serious crimes.
Second, where there is a chance that jurors will be exposed to traumatic images and testimony, courts should consider arranging for access to a mental health professional throughout the trial.
Third, government should seriously consider strategies to ensure timely access to publicly funded diagnostic services and evidence-based treatments for jurors. We can commend what's happening in Saskatchewan. It's a wonderful first start.
Fourth, what can be shared with mental health professionals and others should be clarified, either by addressing section 649 of the Criminal Code or by assigning court-cleared professionals.
Finally, a strategy should be developed to facilitate access to evidence-informed programs and services, and to explore the experiences of jurors after they complete their work. Admittedly, these measures will not put a stop to the challenges jury members may experience after participating in a trial involving extreme violence. However, we believe that publicly acknowledging these issues, as the committee is doing, and hearing from witnesses with a wide range of experience and expertise will go a long way to identifying long-term solutions.
Thank you very much indeed.