Ontario mental-health services struggling to keep up with youth demand, report finds – The Globe and Mail
Jun. 07, 2017
A new report on children and youth mental health and addiction in Ontario paints a bleak picture of the challenges facing today’s youth and the difficulties the health-care system has had in adapting to increased demands.
Youth visits to doctors and emergency departments, as well as hospitalizations, have risen sharply in the province from 2006-14, highlighting the need for more mental-health care and addiction services that are easier to access, speedier and more geographically dispersed, according to the 2017 Scorecard of Mental Health of Children and Youth in Ontario.
“Historically, it’s been an ocean of unmet need and the number of kids accessing services has increased,” says Dr. Paul Kurdyak, a psychiatrist with Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and a scientist with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, (ICES) a non-profit research institute that released the report. “The system is becoming more responsive to the need … but we need to learn lessons from other areas of the health-care system, where real progress has been made in defining who needs services and then creating an actual system to meet those needs.
