Canadian Mental Health Association makes a pledge for change

Bringing the same consideration to mental ailments as we do physical ones, is an ongoing challenge. 

Now, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) has a new plan of attack. They’ve outlined a 5 year plan to try and change the way we treat mental health issues. 

Anita Hopfauf is the Executive Director with Regina’s Schizophrenia Society. She says she sees the system fail people all the time, including herself. She lives with clinical depression. 

“I would sort of think, oh everybody gets depressed sometimes, but for me it wasn’t going away,” she recalls. “It was a really deep depression.” 

After getting the proper treatment, her life returned to normal. Now she takes great pride in helping people turn their own lives around. 

On Thursday at the National CMHA Conference, she was part of a panel of people with “lived experience” of mental disorders (her brother is also diagnosed with schizophrenia). 

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CMHA CEO, Peter Coleridge, says stories like hers are vital to the research process. The organization is determined to make changes on a national scale. 

“We have a very fragmented system in Canada, and it’s missing a number of treatment and mental health promotion options,” said Coleridge. 

He wants to completely overhaul the mental health system by changing how the funding is allocated, how we organize the system, and most importantly by improving access. 

In Regina a patient can wait months to see a Psychiatrist, and even Saskatchewan’s Health Minister agrees that has to change. 

“I’d be the first to recognize that we need to do more work,” said Health Minister Dustin Duncan. 

He says he’s made mental health care a personal priority. The province has promised to do a better job of reducing outpatient wait times, which could be through recruiting more staff, but in the meantime they need to look at other options. 

“What Regina Qu’Appelle and other health regions are doing is asking, are there better ways to utilize the resources we currently have,” said Duncan. 

CMHA realizes that scrapping the system and starting from scratch will take a lot longer than their new five year plan. First on their agenda is to overcome the stigma that created this fragmented system in the first place. 

“We can build a great mental health system,” said Coleridge. “But if we don’t change society’s views and behaviours towards people with mental health problems and improve their understanding about mental health, people will still not access the services.” 

Hopfauf has experienced that stigma, with her brother and herself. 

“You can just feel maybe people are thinking a little bit differently about you,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.” 

She hopes that attitude will turn around with time.