Treat mental health problems early, avoid trouble later

Good article in today's Herald by John Gillis.

Mental illness exacts a staggering toll in Canada, but many of its effects on individuals and society could be avoided, says a Halifax expert on adolescent mental health. Caught early, the mental disorders that might otherwise derail young lives can be treated very effectively, said Dr. Stan Kutcher, an IWK Health Centre psychiatrist and Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health at Dalhousie University. But often, that just doesn’t happen. "There is a huge gap between the need and the capacity to meet that need," he said. "That gap is at every single level." Dr. Kutcher said about 70 per cent of all mental disorders appear before a person reaches age 25. And the figures on the fallout of those illnesses are "gobsmacking," he said. The World Health Organization says about a third of the burden of illness among young people worldwide is due to mental disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and panic. The Mental Health Commission of Canada has said mental illness among working-age Canadians drains $51 billion each year from the economy in lost productivity. Yet just a fraction of health spending goes toward mental health. This year in Nova Scotia, it was only about 3.5 per cent of the overall health budget, a smaller portion of which would go to child and youth mental health. "Instead of paying at the back end, why don’t we pay at the front end?" said Dr. Kutcher, who is also a member of the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s child and youth advisory panel. "It’s actually a very simple thing to do." In many cases, mental health problems could be handled by family doctors, but as it stands, they’re often not well-trained or equipped to manage mental illness, he said. And some children experiencing stress or anxiety could even learn coping skills through leaders at community organizations like Boys and Girls clubs or the YMCA, he said. Teachers and other school staff could be trained to identify those with early signs of mental illness and steer them toward care. In the absence of that early system of identification and management, there are few places for young people to get help except through places like the IWK, where services are geared toward the seriously ill, Dr. Kutcher said. "Right now, we’re using very expensive resources to intervene for kids who don’t need that level of intervention and we have kids who need that level of intervention that can’t get it," he said.