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August 2008 – Volume 4, No. 4
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Landmark series on Canada's mental health crisis
gets people talkingby Jadranka Bacic
Mental illness is a public health crisis, yet it remains shrouded in misconceptions and misunderstandings. A series published in June by The Globe and Mail is now helping to say what physicians, patients and caregivers have known for a long time—no one is safe.
The week-long series, “Breakdown: Canada’s mental health crisis", examined the toll that mental illness takes on Canadians, their families and their colleagues, and on the nation’s economy and health care resources.
“The tremendous contribution of this Globe series is that it is focused on clearly discussing the needs of the persons who suffer from mental illness," says Donald Milliken, past-president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. “By keeping these needs at the forefront of the discussion, I believe that we can, over time, bring order out of chaos."
The series started with a painful story about a woman who lived most of her life in a Toronto asylum in the late 1800s. Saturday’s popular Focus section was exclusively devoted to the topic of mental illness and included moving accounts of the lives of a trial lawyer in New Brunswick who now suffers from bipolar disorder and lives with his aging mother, a 26-year-old Toronto man whose family saw him led away in handcuffs after his schizophrenia triggered severe delusions, and a prominent Toronto accounting firm executive struggling to overcome crippling anxiety disorders.
Columnists André Picard, Dawn Walton and Elizabeth Renzetti examined critical aspects of Canada’s mental health crisis, including how one-third of general hospital beds are filled with mentally ill patients, how 70 per cent of people with severe mental illness are working despite their illness, and how jails and penitentiaries have become warehouses for the mentally ill.
Dr. Milliken fielded questions during a live online discussion about mental health and a hospital system in chaos.
It began 50 years ago when Ottawa started funding hospitals but excluded asylums, and was made worse in the 1970s when policies of deinstitutionalization forced patients out of care with no investment in community supports for sufferers.
“Canada still doesn’t have a coherent strategy for treating the mentally ill," says Ed Greenspon, The Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief. “As a country, we need to articulate and address mental health issues with a modern sensibility. If we don’t, the consequences can be tragic and severe, for individuals who suffer, for their families, and for Canada."
The Globe and Mail has turned the series into a multimedia project that includes documentary footage, photo galleries, personal narratives by mental health sufferers, and commentary and analysis from experts working in the field. It can be viewed at www.globeandmail.com/breakdown.
“These illnesses are serious, disabling, sometimes crippling, and all too often fatal. They deserve to be treated with respect, and those who suffer from them should not experience prejudice," says Dr. Milliken. “If we treat both the illness and the individual with respect, without fear and in a straightforward manner, then we will legitimately look at trying to provide a range of options to help those individuals recover and resume their place in our families, our friendships, and our society, just as we do for other medical conditions."
© Copyright 2008. Canadian Psychiatry Aujourd’hui. All rights reserved.
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February 08, 2010
