National standards would help track the mental health of young Canadians, experts say
OTTAWA — Concerns about the mental health issues of young Canadians have grown during the nearly two years of disruption and repeated isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But experts say we don’t have the tools to properly assess the toll of the pandemic on the mental health of Canadian children. Creating standards for how mental health is measured could help capture the magnitude of the problem.
Children’s Health Canada, a national organization representing children’s health care providers, said children’s 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 by the Youth Health Service.
Keith Dobson, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Calgary, said while some measures such as hospitalizations and doctor contacts are well recorded, there are no standardized screening tools for assessing mental health in the country.
Dobson, who is also a researcher at the Mental Health Commission of Canada, said different groups and organizations, even within the same health care system, will 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, said standards are important to ensure that the money invested in the healthcare system will actually translate into positive outcomes.
“If you don’t have standards, you won’t be able to assess whether you’ve improved the health care system for these people who have mental illness,” Cloutier said.
Currently, 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 collecting data, he said.
“And once you have that data, they don’t share it with other provinces, which I think is a major unfortunate situation, because I think they should,” Cloutier said.
Dr Tyler Black, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, said: “We haven’t done a great job regularly surveying, or even monitoring national collections of this kind of data.
Black, who is also a suicidologist, said large national datasets are needed to make decisions about childhood suicides because it’s less common, but it can take years to get that data. in Canada.
“We’re not good at bringing these types of things together with modern, responsive, dashboard-like data. We receive data dumps every year, which makes it very difficult to know what is happening at the moment. »
Dobson said one existing tool that could be used as a standard for assessing depression is the Patient Health Questionnaire Depression Module, which is a diagnostic tool for common mental disorders.
He said this measure is used more internationally and can be used for both adults and children.
Black said that because this screening tool was designed in a very specific way, he would prefer one that is “unambiguous” to interpret, such as asking a patient outright how they are doing right now.
He said that while he appreciates researchers who want to create complicated scales, they simply turn a subjective question into a scale that acts as a proxy for asking the question directly.
“I prefer more easily interpretable data that kids can respond to a bit more easily,” Black said.
He added that he would like to see child patients and their families give feedback on the types of measures used for children’s mental health.
“There really isn’t a big one, unfortunately, for anxiety, because anxiety comes in different forms,” Dobson said.
“But if there was a standard tool used across the country, that would be fantastic.”
Cloutier said the selection of Carolyn Bennett as Minister of Mental Health is an important step forward in creating these kinds of national standards.
Bennett said in an interview with CTV News published Jan. 18 that the federal government’s proposed mental health transfers to the provinces could be tied to demonstrating that standards are being met.
Developing mental health standards is one of the top priorities listed in Bennett’s mandate letter.
Bennett’s office said in a statement that the government committed $45 million in last year’s budget to develop national standards for mental health services.
The office did not respond to questions about whether the minister would create standardized assessment tools.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on January 30, 2022.
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This story was produced with financial assistance from Facebook and the Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Erika Ibrahim, The Canadian Press