Thank you.
Good morning, honourable members.
As mentioned, my name is Rowena Pinto, and I am the president and CEO of Jack.org, a national not-for-profit organization with the mission of improving mental health for youth across Canada.
I speak to you today from Toronto, located on the indigenous territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas of the Credit, which is covered by the Upper Canada treaties and is part of the Dish with One Spoon treaty.
Thank you very much for having me here.
Jack.org provides upstream peer-to-peer mental health education and capacity building for youth in their transition years, aged 15 to 24. We believe that the best way to improve mental health for youth is by engaging them directly, precisely because youth are in the best position to identify their mental health needs and speak to the issues they are facing. Jack.org engages thousands of young people across the country to educate their peers and promote mental health in their communities.
As of 2021, around three-quarters of the young people in our network identify as young women, and 60% identify as having lived experience with mental illness or a mental health struggle.
Looking at the broader research around mental health, we know that suicide has long been the leading health-related cause of death among youth in Canada. Youth aged 15 to 24 experience the highest rates of mental health distress of any age group in Canada.
Over the past decade, and especially during the pandemic, youth have been increasingly reporting worse perceived mental health. This trend is particularly true for young women, who experience higher rates of both diagnosis and reported symptoms of anxiety and depression relative to young men, and have also experienced higher increases in these experiences over time. Black, indigenous and LGBTQ2S+ youth also experience particular vulnerability to mental health distress even as they face greater barriers to care.
The factors influencing youth mental health distress are complex; however, since beginning to survey youth in 2019, our network has consistently identified certain factors as common mental health stressors. Perceived and objective financial strain, academic pressure, and lack of employment and educational participation were raised as particularly salient mental health stressors. Youth have raised that we must also not forget about stress related to minority status for equity-deserving groups and the emerging stressor of climate anxiety.
As you can see, the mental health challenges faced by young women and girls in Canada are prevalent. The underlying stressors are persistent, and the impacts are profound.
What troubles us at Jack.org is that the majority of youth do not seek help when they are experiencing mental health distress. While rates of help seeking are somewhat higher for young women than for young men, just 16% of young women seek mental health support from a professional, while 32% seek informal support from friends, family, the Internet or others in their social networks. We need to pay greater attention to this persistent gap in help seeking while acknowledging and addressing the clear preference for young women to seek informal mental health support.
Fortunately, there are some signs of hope. Investment in upstream youth mental health education to destigmatize mental illness, encourage help seeking, and increase mental health literacy can ensure that young women and girls experiencing mental distress receive the help they need.
Our key recommendation is to broaden federal attention and resources beyond clinical mental health services to focus on the larger mental health-promoting environment. [Technical difficulty—Editor] where young women and girls live, learn and work.
What this looks like is efforts to build the capacity of young women and girls to identify signs of mental health struggle in themselves and their peers, engage in effective coping when they experience stressors, and access a range of mental health services when needed. As we bolster their ability to seek help, we must also ensure that they are met with services that align with their needs and preferences. Consistent with youth's preference for informal support, peer-to-peer mental health services can be valuable, provided that youth are equipped with the appropriate education to support one another.
As a final word, too often we speak of these solutions without engaging the voices of the young people we seek to support. We recommend meaningfully engaging young women and girls in efforts to strengthen mental health supports in the way that serves them. They know what is best, what their needs are and what solutions will work for them. There is no substitute for their voices around the decision-making table, and the thousands of youth across Canada who make up our network are keen to offer their insights to better support mental health for themselves and their peers.
Thank you.