Making Mental Health a Priority

Dear Leona Aglukkaq , Minister of Health and Social Services of Canada,

As a student of pure and applied sciences, I’ve been encouraged during my two years of college to explore the world of sciences. It led me to discover that I had a strong interest for health and social services, but more precisely for mental health. I know people who have such health problems and who don’t receive appropriate health care, so I’ve decided to get involved to help them. I know that there is approximately half the budget of the country that is spent for health and social services each year. Even though mental health is as important as physical health, it doesn’t seem to get the same financial support: the World Health Organization (WHO) says that most middle countries (including Canada) only devote about 1% of the health budget to mental health. My goal is to show you the urge to invest money in the mental health field to prevent suicide and to provide better health care and support to the mentally ill ones. I hope these facts will show you the emergency we are facing.
By surfing on a website named TakingItGlobal, something caught my attention about this particular subject: mental disorders often lead to suicide. The WHO website made me learn that each year, nearly 1 million people die from suicide worldwide, and between 3000 and 4000 of these deaths happen here, in Canada. Obviously, not all of these suicides are committed by mentally ill people, but the majority is: bad mental health is the greatest risk factor for suicide. In fact, about two thirds of suicides are linked to mental illnesses (source: WHO). I’m persuaded that this type of death is part of the category of the preventable ones. By providing good mental health care, the rates of suicide among people with a mental disorder should decrease. That’s one of the reasons why I firmly think the government should invest money in the mental health field: to prevent suicide, a preventable public health problem, by producing awareness campaigns and by increasing the amount of services mentally ill people can receive.
The other reason why I think you should invest more money in the mental health field concerns the lack of resources for good mental health care in Canada. Rick Laundry, who’s the head of the Open Arms Patient Advocacy Society, affirms that there is «a lack of hospital beds in psych wards» in Canada. I learned that having a patient in a bed for one day in a hospital costs about $800 to the government. That could explain why a lot of psychiatric hospitals in our country only have half their beds opened, ready to receive a patient: it costs a lot of money. The WHO also says that quarter of the people entering a health service of any kind worldwide surely have one mental disorder or more, but that most of the time these illnesses aren’t treated because of a lack of resources. This particular situation doesn’t only happen elsewhere: it happens in Canada too. That is simply caused by a money gap in the mental health field. If enough money was devoted to psychiatric hospitals, everyone could receive good mental health care because there would be enough free places in hospitals!
To conclude, I hope you’ve seen the urge to increase financial support for mental health services in our country. Suicide rates are constantly increasing while the amount of services that the hospitals are able to offer to patients doesn’t get any better. I expect that more money will be dedicated to the mental health field to provide better treatments to sick people. Also, I think that it would be a good idea to save a part of this money to create an awareness campaign (on television, radio, etc.) to inform the public about the ways they can support suffering relatives and to fight against prejudice people may have against the mentally ill ones.
I hope that this society problem is as important to you as it is for me.

Sincerely,
Rose Clavel
Message for TIG readers:
If you feel concerned by this issue just like I am, I encourage you to get involved too! You can write a letter to the government just like I did. By sending a lot of letters about the problems caused by the financial hardship in the mental health field to the government, we have stronger chances to make things change. Help me raising awareness by spreading those facts about suicide and closed beds in your entourage and by getting involved.