Mental Health Research Canada Vice-President of Development and Strategic Initiatives Michael Cooper at his home on April 5.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
As Michael Cooper began examining Canada’s youth mental-health crisis several years ago, one fact above all became frustratingly clear to the Toronto-based researcher.
There is a dire shortage of publicly available data in a single spot that could guide policy makers, assist researchers and help young people themselves, said Mr. Cooper, vice-president of development and strategic partnerships at Mental Health Research Canada, a charitable organization.
Data could be key to unlocking an enormous problem – one in four young people have been diagnosed with a mental illness as of 2022.
“The big takeaway on youth mental health is that it’s not a monolith. There are lots of groups within the youth population that are struggling at significantly different rates than others,” Mr. Cooper said.
To help policy makers and other stakeholders better understand the particular issues young people are facing, Mental Health Research Canada is launching what it says is the most comprehensive collection of data on youth mental health in Canada.
The Youth Mental Health Data Hub, developed in partnership with GreenShield, a not-for-profit benefits provider that paid for the more than $250,000 project, will launch Wednesday and features a “Data Dashboard” that allows users to search for information on very specific factors.
Those include such things as the age range of people, their gender identity, the province they live in and household income along with factors such as whether or not they are racialized, 2sLGBTQIA+ and students.
The dashboard also provides insights on the barriers to accessing mental-health services different groups face as well as what sort of supports people are accessing.
The information in the tool was gathered from interviews with more than 25,000 Canadians surveyed online, along with several other sources such as Kids Help Phone and the youth mental-health charity Jack.org.
“It’s really about advancing our dialogue and our conversations so that we can make better informed decisions,” Mr. Cooper said.
For example, Black youth are significantly more likely to use community-based supports for mental-health issues compared with non-Black youth, Mr. Cooper said.
That is owing to a combination of factors, including that Black youth typically have lower rates of having access to a family doctor and that they tend to have more trust in community-based organizations.
“So if you’re trying to support Black youth, your best investment is to invest in those community organizations that are local to where they are,” Mr. Cooper said.
Digging even deeper, the data show that 18 per cent of racialized youth can’t find culturally sensitive care, said Zahid Salman, president and CEO of GreenShield.
That is just one example of how the data reveal gaps in the mental-health care system that need to be addressed, Mr. Salman said.
“We’re hoping that the tool can help us convene a discussion between policy makers and other organizations around, what should we do from a service perspective?” he said.
In Canada, 70 per cent of people with a mental illness see their symptoms begin before age 18, and yet as youth approach age 18 less than 20 per cent of them will receive appropriate treatment, according to the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
Those figures point to a need to deliver more targeted mental-health supports to young people, said Sarah Kennell, director of public policy at the Canadian Mental Health Association.
“There’s just the obvious need to ensure we are catering services and directing resources toward programs and services that support young people,” she said. “The challenge is we don’t have the data to demonstrate who is accessing what, why they aren’t accessing it and what’s going to make the difference in terms of directing resources in a way that is evidence-based.”
Ms. Kennell praises the new hub, saying it will help young people push for change.
“Having open access data for young people not only validates what they’re experiencing but creates an opportunity to turn their frustration and lived experience into advocacy to say there’s a huge inequity problem here. Young people are getting the short end of the stick,” she said.
Perhaps more importantly, it will help organizations that provide mental-health supports to call for more funding.
“It creates an incredible resource for community agencies in particular who want to make the case for greater investment,” Ms. Kennell said.
The hub will be updated quarterly, and the dashboard will soon feature new categories such as information on newcomers as well as issues faced by young people living in rural communities compared with those in urban centres, Mr. Cooper said.
Governments and mental-health providers can use the tool to identify areas of need and businesses could use it to make decisions about where they want to make investments, Mr. Cooper said.
Ultimately, the tool will help anyone trying to tell a story about mental health in Canada, he said.
“Anyone who wants to tell a story about mental health and what’s happening should be intertwining it with the actual data about what’s going on.”
