Senator Michael Kirby and the Mental Health Commission of Canada

The Record coverage of the Senator Kirby talk on Mental Illness, Sep 23 2008:

“Even people in the health care professions are inclined to have the same negative opinions of someone with a mental illness as the general public,” said Kirby, the retired Liberal senator who, in March 2007, was appointed by the federal Conservatives to be chair of the new Mental Health Commission of Canada.

Speaking to a crowd at the Kitchener Public Library last night, Kirby said not much has improved in the last 50 years when it comes to treating the mentally ill.

Yet there are economic reasons to make changes. Mental illness costs Ontario as much as $17 billion a year in lost productivity, he said. A full half of all employee sick leaves are related to mental illness.

And consider that one in five Canadians will suffer some sort of mental illness. Or that researchers have established that mental illness can cause physical illness, and vice-versa.

Despite this enormous toll, the vast majority of care for the mentally ill is not handled by hospitals or doctors — it’s done by families, peer groups and clinical psychologists, who don’t receive any taxpayer money for the work.

Read more here

Posted via web from Renjie Butalid