#BellLetsTalk is fine, but real action is needed for mental illness, too

Posted on January 30, 2015 in Health Debates

TheGlobeandMail.com – News/Politics
Jan. 29 2015.   André Picard

The final tally is in: There were an astonishing 122,150,772 tweets, texts, calls and shares for the Bell Let’s Talk initiative on Jan. 28.

Each interaction triggered a five-cent donation from Bell Canada so, all tolled, the highly publicized campaign (and the agile thumb work of Canadians) generated a donation of $6,107,538.05 from the telecommunications giant.

There is no question that Bell Let’s Talk was a marketing success.

In recent days, it was virtually impossible to navigate Canadian cyberspace – or open a newspaper, or drive a highway or walk through a subway station in this country – without being bombarded by the brand, seduced by the charismatic spokesperson Clara Hughes (and other faces of the campaign like Howie Mandel, Mary Walsh, Michael Landsberg and, in Quebec, Michel Mpambara and Stefie Shock), and consumed by the hashtag #BellLetsTalk.

But does all this talking and tweeting actually make life any better for the millions of Canadians living with mental illness?

That’s a much more elusive calculation to make than counting up virtual nickels.

But the answer is: Probably.

There has been a sea change in the public discourse surrounding mental health and mental illness in Canada in recent years, for a whole host of reasons.

For time immemorial, there has been a stigma that accompanied mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

The way to combat stigma is to talk openly about issues, and that process has been facilitated and driven by the advent and embrace of social media. The conversation about mental health has changed not because of prudish, conservative mainstream media but because young people starting telling their stories without shame on blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter and so on.

Bell Canada has tapped into that – just as CIBC did years ago when it launched the Run For The Cure to woo professional women who were tired of the patronizing, hush-hush approach to breast cancer.

Good for them.

It’s easy to be cynical – and that’s a particular specialty of journalists – and say: The evil corporation Bell is exploiting people with mental illness to create a feel-good event for profit, and the money raised is a drop in the bucket for a business whose parent company BCE Inc. has annual revenues of $20.4-billion and a profit last year of $2.1-billion. But let’s not forget that Bell went out on a limb by making mental health its charitable initiative of choice and, after an initial commitment of $50-million, it has now donated more than $67-million and counting.

Sure, the company (and its charitable foundation) play it safe by promoting talk, rather than action.

But, let’s be frank, we can’t expect corporations to be bold agents for social change.

Action needs to come from elsewhere – from the state, from elected officials through to administrators of the health system.

Mental health patients have always been the orphans of medicare, for a host of historical, social and political reasons.

When the Mental Health Commission of Canada was launched in 2007, followed by the country’s first mental health strategy, it was a commitment to correct that injustice.

Changing ingrained attitudes is an enormous undertaking and it had to start with addressing the pervasive stigma in society.

But when you send out a message to people with mental illness that it’s okay to be open and come forward, you also make an implicit promise that there will be help.

That’s where we’ve fallen down. We have broken the promise.

Medicare still does not cover psychological care, and the waits for psychiatric care can stretch for months, especially for children. Young people who are literally starving to death because of eating disorders can wait months for admission to hospital and the waits for addiction treatment are even longer.

Imagine that a loved one – a daughter, a husband, a grandmother – is so depressed that they are unable to attend school or work, and they are suicidal, but deemed “not sick enough” for hospital admission and sent back into the queue. That is the everyday reality in large swaths of Canada.

We know too, from the indicators that were recently published by the MHCC that one in four Canadians don’t get prompt care for mental illness; that when they are hospitalized, the re-admission rate is high; that caregivers face too great a burden; and that the economic impact of a mental illness can be crushing.

Those are just some examples of public policy failures that we need to address urgently.

Those are the conversations we need to have.

We can’t expect the #BellLetsTalk initiative to solve those problems, but we can hope that the day of conversation has emboldened us all to speak more loudly and make more forceful demands.

What we need now is to move beyond the stigma busting, to invest in mental illness prevention programs and in improving the delivery of care and support for those who are sick, and those who care for them.

In short: In addition to talk, some concrete action.

You can even give it a hashtag: #TakeActionNow.

André Picard is The Globe’s public health columnist.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/globe-politics-insider/bellletstalk-is-fine-but-real-action-is-needed-for-mental-illness-too/article22697876/ >

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2015 at 10:00 am and is filed under Health Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “#BellLetsTalk is fine, but real action is needed for mental illness, too”

  1. Andre has led the way to report on mental illness. As for Bell making a real difference, well yes on the talk front perhaps , but in real terms will there be any difference for those needing serious medical services, I doubt it. The best stigma busting I know of is real treatment for those in such dire circumstances on our streets and in our jails. The biggest problem is not stigma it is acknowledging the medical nature of so much medical illness. There is ignorance out their . Life’s stresses are not exactly equal to having a serious mental illness.

|

Leave a Reply