The number one worry is what people are going to think.
The importance of reducing stigma is actually like opening a door or a floodgate, and there is a wave attached to it. When we reduce stigma, we get early intervention. We get a better prognosis and outcome. We increase productivity. Oftentimes, we hear about absenteeism. There is also what we call presenteeism, where somebody shows up at work, does about three tasks for the day, and is done. Why? It's because that person feels obligated to go to work, but is not well enough to be at work. Essentially, there is the positive financial impact of increasing productivity.
There's also a cultural shift in thinking and attitudes. When we introduce this program, especially to managers, what I notice is light bulb moments. The shift in thinking and attitudes is not just black and white. We'll show you a little bit about that later on in the slides, but there is a shift because it's not a black-and-white topic. There's a lot of grey in the middle. Basically, there's a continuum model that is colour coded to simplify and to increase the anti-stigma, and there are positive outcomes for those with mental illness because they're a lot more open and they feel safer and comfortable in disclosing to their peers, to their managers, what's truly going on inside them.
This is a great analogy. People often ask, “Why does it take so long for somebody with a mental illness to come back to work?” Quite frankly, they don't know that they're not well for a very long time. You look at an incident, let's say a sprained ankle or a broken leg, and you're looking at the injury. Well, the injury can happen simultaneously. If a police officer goes to a car accident and gets injured at that car accident, he has a physical injury and he has a mental injury, because of the trauma he was exposed to. However, that physical injury is going to be looked after, diagnosed and treated, and he's likely to go back to work. But is he well when he comes back to work? Has he dealt with the trauma? Maybe not.
You see a very much longer line that goes under the mental injury going to the diagnosis. Why is that? There's a lot of reasons: they don't know themselves; they haven't identified it; they don't know where to go; they don't know what to look for. Essentially, when it gets to the diagnosis, there's a longer term of being not well emotionally that is going to take quite some time to get better, compared to a physical injury where it's one thing after another and you're back to work. The treatment will happen and there will be a return to work. However, it takes that much longer based on the fact of not knowing what to identify, not knowing what to look for.
Some numbers and figures that are quite alarming is that 500,000 people in Canada will not go to work this week, based on the fact that they're struggling with symptoms or signs of mental illness. There's a $51-billion cost to that. If you were to compare a mental illness to a physical illness, like a respiratory illness, you're looking at a cost of $8,000 to $9,000 for respiratory care and 11 days off. If you were to compare that to a mental illness, you're looking at $18,000 per case and 65 days off. How do we fix that? What's the solution?
These are some stats. Oh, I skipped one. This research was done by a group, a case study, and again I've really explained the difference between respiratory and mental illness. You're looking at the number of days, which is 11 days, based on a respiratory infection as compared with a mental illness.
Do you have any questions so far?