By Meagan Kelly
When her daughter Leah was five years old, Susan Hess felt there was more to her girl’s tantrums than simply getting what she wanted.
As Leah got older, her fits grew into episodes of rage. However, it was the day when the young girl held a knife to her own mother’s throat that Hess knew something had a grip on her daughter.
“If you’ve ever looked at an animal caged against its will, it was that look. You could see the fear in her eyes and I knew she had no control over what she was doing,” says Hess.
Leah was diagnosed at 12 years old with chronic depression, but wasn’t able to get treatment until she was nearly 14 because there were few psychiatrists and waiting lists were long. Twenty years later Leah is a healthy adult, but her mother’s memories are still fresh in her mind.
Hess used her experiences to found Parents for Children’s Mental Health in 1994, a Toronto-based volunteer group of parents who help families with children struggling with mental illness.
According to the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, there were 800,000 children and youth in Canada in 2005 that had a significant mental illness, such as depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders.
Of those, fewer than 25 per cent get specialized treatment. Waiting lists are unpredictable, ranging from weeks to even years, and a shortage of psychiatrists, and stagnant funding for youth’s health is not helping.
On Nov. 28, Ontario’s minister for child and youth services announced that the province is creating its first comprehensive children’s mental health policy. Meanwhile, the federal government remains indifferent about committing to children’s mental health. It appears they are content leaving the burden of youth mental health services on the provinces.
The federal government doesn’t seem to realize that the costs of intervention at an early age are small in comparison to the costs of anti-social and self-destructive habits in later years.
It seems they are too busy cracking down on gun crime to concern themselves with getting at the root of the problem.
Charlotte Waddell, an expert in children’s mental health policy at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University, says the federal government should not just be leaving the responsibility of children’s mental health to the provinces.
“Even though children’s mental health is a provincial responsibility, where you have a problem that is so clearly being neglected, it could be a place where there is leadership and they could try to get some agreement across the country,” says Waddell.
Waddell says investment and political leadership at the federal level would set the bar for provinces to implement improved prevention and treatment programs. She says previous federal initiatives, such as one for early childhood education, prove the power of federal leadership.
She adds a national strategy that kept statistics on the mental health problems facing Canadian children would make it easier for experts to monitor trends and cater treatment programs to children’s mental health needs.
The Canadian Pediatric Society has long advocated for federal action on children’s mental health services, and after 25-year-old Kimveer Gill opened fire on students at Montreal’s Dawson College in September, the debate for early intervention was reignited.
Rahul Saxena, a pediatrician and member of the society, says there is no solid evidence proving that having better mental health services for children and youth would prevent tragedies like the shooting at Dawson College, but that there is a link between the two that is impossible to ignore.
He says the complicated connection is why most governments don’t focus on prevention, even in the case of children’s mental health.
“There’s going to be funding to help someone who’s having an acute psychotic break, but there may not be increased funding to provide services in public schools to identify kids at risk,” says Saxena. “Preventative measures that would affect gun violence or that would affect long term mental health illnesses don’t have short term measurable outcomes.”
Reducing mental illness has not only social, but economic benefits as well. It puts tremendous financial strain on the health-care, justice and welfare systems.
Waddell says the government’s inaction despite these costs points to a society that is still overcoming the stigma that mental health is something that is within an individual, or a parent’s, control.
Hess says she saw this first hand when she asked professionals for help with her daughter.
“It was very hard to find the help that we needed [for Leah]. People would blame me for what was happening, saying I wasn’t strict enough,” says Hess. “They would say ‘Oh just put a gold star on a chart’ when she’s good.”
Terry Brennan, the project director of policy at Children’s Mental Health Ontario, which has long worked with community health agencies and the government, says Ontario’s new policy framework will help change attitudes towards youth mental illness.
“Everybody has to recognize they play a part in promoting the well being of our child and youth,” he says.
And that includes the federal government. The delivery of children’s mental health services is a national problem that requires national attention, and should not just be left to the provinces.
The Conservatives need to understand that behind every ‘bad’ kid as a threat to Canadians’ safety, there are “bad” circumstances. This is their chance to do something about it.