We can improve mental-health care by fighting poverty – The Globe and Mail
May 08, 2017
Historically, Canadians embraced medicare as part of an effort to separate personal wealth from individual health. But, in defending our rights to enter hospitals without risking financial ruin, did we swallow a bitter pill?
Mental-health care continues to stymie health-care providers and policy-makers with relatively few clinical advances and growing numbers of sufferers; especially alarming are the high rates of suicide among Indigenous people. Canada’s Mental Health Commission maintains that the system is sorely underfunded, resulting in annual losses of $50-billion in productivity. Individuals with mental disorders are more likely to live on the margins, compounding conditions of illness and disability, creating a vicious cycle of poverty and mental distress. For a growing contingent of ex-patients, families and clients of the mental-health-care system, the solution is not medical: It is political.
We know that smoking is linked to illness, and we have anti-smoking campaigns. We know that poverty aggravates our mental health, but we are not investing in anti-poverty strategies. Why is that?
