(OTTAWA) Concerns about the mental health issues of young Canadians have grown greater over the past two years of repeated disruptions and lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Posted at 10:33 a.m.
But experts say we don’t have the tools to properly assess the pandemic’s toll on children’s mental health. Creating standards for how mental health is measured could help capture the magnitude of the problem.
Children’s Health Canada, a national organization representing health care providers, warned that hospitals are reporting higher numbers of children admitted for suicide attempts, substance abuse and complex eating disorders.
Young Canadians contacted Kids Help Phone about 4.6 million times in 2020, up from 1.9 million in 2019, according to a report from the organization.
Keith Dobson, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Calgary, explained that while certain measures such as hospitalizations and doctor contacts are well recorded, there are no standardized screening tools for assessing mental health in the country, and that even within the same health care system, different organizations often use different tools.
“It makes it really difficult to know what the rates are and how to compare them from place to place,” he said.
Paul-Émile Cloutier, President of HealthCareCAN, argued that standards are also important to ensure that the money invested in the health care system will actually improve it.
According to him, the provinces and territories are engaged in a “disjointed approach” to mental health care, where each province has a distinct way of not only providing these services, but also of collecting data.
“And once they have that data, they don’t share it with other provinces,” he said.
One Tool
Professor Dobson suggested that an already existing tool could be used as a standard for assessing depression: the Patient Health Questionnaire, which is a diagnostic tool for common mental disorders.
The Dr Tyler Black, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia and a suicidologist, however, thinks that this tool is not suitable because it is too complicated.
“I prefer more easily interpretable data that kids can respond to a bit more easily,” he explained.
Mr. Cloutier, for his part, thinks that the selection of Carolyn Bennett as Minister of Mental Health is an important step forward.
Minister Bennett said in an interview with CTV News, which aired Jan. 18, that mental health transfers proposed by the federal government could depend on provinces demonstrating that standards are being met.
The development of mental health standards is one of the priorities listed in the Minister’s mandate letter.
His cabinet said in a statement that the government allocated $45 million in last year’s budget to develop national standards for mental health services.
The cabinet did not say whether the minister would create standardized assessment tools.
This article was produced with the financial support of the Facebook and The Canadian Press News Fellowships.