Thank you. I would like to thank you for inviting us.
I'm going to strive to be efficient and concise. I had an opportunity to review the transcripts from the previous presenters. I'm going to endeavour not to repeat their points, although I did agree with the majority of them. Because you'll be seeing a number of witnesses who are going to present you with numbers and a kind of state of the union, I've decided that I would opt out and give you a first-hand account, but of course, I have to start with a few numbers just to contextualize what I'm going to talk about.
Yesterday I did a search on the CIHR web page to look at the number of dollars that have been spent on operating grants for eating disorders in the last five years. I came up with a number of $7.5 million, which sounds like a lot, but then I keyed in “schizophrenia” and I came up with a total of $86 million. That's more than a factor of 10 in terms of allocation of money. Eating disorders are as severe and more prevalent than schizophrenia, which is why I chose schizophrenia as a comparison. So it's $7.5 million versus $86 million.
There are other numbers I want to highlight.
The rate of obesity in adolescent girls in Canada is 9%. That's Stats Canada data. The rate of eating disorders is estimated to be around 18%. The rate of new cases of restricted eating disorders in children between the ages of five and twelve is four times the rate of new cases of type II diabetes in the same population.
In Canada we have no intensive specialized mental health programs that would specifically treat children with eating disorders. When it comes to adolescents, that is also true in at least three of our provinces and all of our territories where no intensive specialized treatment exists.
Psychiatry residents are more likely to be exposed to negative stereotypes of eating disorders and to be discouraged from treating patients with eating disorders than they are to receive appropriate training and education on eating disorders.
I am here today as one of the senior psychiatric experts in child and adolescent psychiatry, and that is not a good thing. I am still too early in my career to be in a senior position; however, I'm senior because there is no one ahead of me. I started the first-aid treatment program for adolescents with eating disorders while I was still in training as a fellow. Since then I have gone on to help develop two...[Technical Difficulty—Editor]...programs, a second day treatment program, in-patient programming, outpatient programming. I was the founding member of the Eating Disorder Association of Canada and its first president, all because there was no one else doing the work, no one else to fill in the gaps.
A couple of years ago I gave up applying to CIHR for research grants. I've also given up on the idea of academic promotion. I will likely always remain an assistant professor, and more recently I left a full-time position at an academic children's hospital that houses our local specialized eating disorder services. This is not because my work is subpar—I have won awards throughout my career for my work—it's because the barriers are too great and I'm tired of trying to get around them.
Now if this was only my story, I would be wasting your time. The problem is that this is a story of almost every child psychiatrist in Canada who has attempted to work in the field of eating disorders.
The reason there are no psychiatrists more senior than me is that after about 10 years of hitting their heads against the wall—it does seem to be a 10-year cycle—those who came before my generation burned out and went elsewhere.
Now I am witness to the colleagues of my generation as they leave the field. Across the country senior child psychiatrist experts are falling away, leaving...[Technical Difficulty-—Editor]...care programs with vacancies that are filled by new graduates with little training and less experience, or are filled by pediatricians, or remain empty. This has occurred in some fashion in all but one of the seven provinces that could have tertiary or specialized intensive programs for treating eating disorders in adolescents.