Thank you, Dr. Buckley.
Thank you so much for the invitation to speak today. My name is Daisy Singla. I am a clinical psychologist by training and very much a global mental health researcher at heart. I've worked in some of the most remote areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, only to learn that many of the lessons that we have implemented and learned abroad are completely applicable to our context here in Canada.
As my colleague Dr. Simone Vigod said, one in five pregnant and postpartum women experiences common conditions of depression, anxiety and trauma. If they are left unaddressed, there are long-term negative consequences for the woman, her child and future generations.
In my travels and in my research, I have learned three key lessons to address these common problems.
The first is that brief talk therapy works. Some of you may have heard of cognitive behavioural therapy or interpersonal psychotherapy. These brief talk therapies are among the most effective treatments in medicine, yet fewer than 10% of women have access to these psychological treatments.
The second is the power of telemedicine to deliver these treatments. COVID has catapulted our health care systems to reconsider how mental health care can be delivered. Telemedicine allows pregnant women and new mothers to overcome common challenges of finding transportation and child care and allows for flexibility.
Finally, we will never have enough psychologists or psychiatrists to address the mental health treatment gap. Thankfully, there is a growing literature demonstrating that non-mental health specialists—individuals without a specialized degree in mental health, such as nurses, midwives, peers and teachers—can be trained to deliver these effective treatments.
As I mentioned, all of these lessons can be applied to our context here in Canada. In 2020, we launched SUMMIT, the largest talk therapy trial for pregnant and postpartum women in the world. We are funded by a U.S. organization called Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which asks whether nurses and midwives are as effective as specialist providers and whether telemedicine is as effective as in-person talk therapy.
Our trial is showing promising preliminary results, and the full results will be available in January 2024. The results will ultimately inform the stepped-care model that Dr. Vigod referred to and the delivery of effective patient-centred talk therapy for pregnant and postpartum women.
Today I want to invite all of you to be stakeholders in this exciting initiative to ensure that our results materialize into service and also to invest in the stepped-care models that Dr. Vigod referred to earlier today. Psychological treatments are effective. Innovative solutions, such as telemedicine, exist to improve access.
In summary, I believe we can do better as clinicians, researchers and policy-makers and as a society to serve women and other populations with these effective treatments.
Thank you.