How is the mental health of Canadians right now as we near the middle of 2024? Based on the latest data from Statistics Canada, it’s not good. From 2021 to 2022, the incidence of mental health disorders in Canada increased dramatically. The incidence of major depressive episodes nearly doubled. The impact of the COVID-10 pandemic on fear disorders was even more dramatic: social phobia more than doubled in one year, from 3.0% to 7.1%.
More concerning is the fact that people are not getting the help they require. 36.6% of people who were diagnosed as having a mental health disorder indicated that they were unable to access counselling, information, medication, or all three.
Partly, this reflects the fact that we have not made dramatic strides in the development of novel treatments for mental health disorders in decades. The last major development in the pharmaceutical field of neuropsychiatry occurred in 1987, almost 40 years ago, when Prozac—the first SSRI—hit the US market. Subsequent development of SNRIs and other derivative drugs provided significant benefits, but there has not been a true “revolution” in mental healthcare since then. The problems, meanwhile, have only gotten worse.
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