If mental health professionals are wary of the Ontario government’s latest plan to transform supports and services in the province, it’s not without cause.
Over recent decades, governments of various stripes have produced so many “roadmaps” and “pathways,” so many proposals for “navigating the journey,” that it’s been like an endless study of wartime aerial reconnaissance photos.
Words have come easily; funding and results less so.
So the crisis has built year after painful year, the cost in both human and financial terms immense.
This past Tuesday, Health Minister Christine Elliott announced the PC government’s “Roadmap to Wellness: A Plan to Build Ontario’s Mental Health and Addictions System,” the better to help clients find their way in a “system defined by its complexity.”
The plan will create a Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence to standardize and monitor the quality of services across Ontario.
Elliott also announced a $20-million investment in cognitive therapy that aims to treat 80,000 people in the first year through a program called “Mindability.”
That program, for those over age 10 suffering from anxiety and depression, is said to be the first of its kind in Canada. It will be funded like OHIP, with no out-of-pocket costs for clients.
A coalition of mental health groups promptly said that without substantial and immediate funding of $400 million in the spring budget, the plan will amount to little more than words.
That concern is born of hard experience.
Too many of the predecessor documents of Elliott’s plan have said the right things, with little to show in the long run.
As a result, her report said, “there is a clear and pressing case for action.”
But it, too, contains a salad of buzzwords.
It promises “four pillars.” It speaks of “roadmaps” and “clear paths” and designing a system “easier to navigate.”
Mental health providers would likely be more enthusiastic in response if they hadn’t heard it all before.
It’s been almost exactly 10 years, after all, since a select committee report on mental health titled “Navigating the Journey to Wellness: The Comprehensive Mental Health and Addictions Plan for Ontarians” was issued.
That committee had been struck because an auditor’s report had estimated that total economic costs attributable to mental illness – a decade ago, mind you — was about $22 billion a year, that alcohol and drug abuse alone cost the province an estimated $8 billion annually in health care, law enforcement, motor vehicle accidents, crime and the indirect costs of lost productivity.
Chief among the committee’s eventual recommendations – the language will be familiar — was creation of Mental Health and Addictions Ontario, an umbrella organization to ensure that a single body was responsible for designing, managing and co-ordinating the system, as well as a “core basket of services in all regions” and “access to a system of navigators.”
Elliott, then an opposition MPP and a member of the committee, said at the time she hoped “these recommendations will result in wellness, dignity and opportunity for all Ontarians.”
Tempus fugit.
“We need to take the guesswork out of finding support,” she said on Tuesday, 10 years on.
If the coalition has cocked a leery eyebrow her way, perhaps it was due to the dissonant signals coming this week from Premier Doug Ford.
Ford, locked in a contract battle with teachers across the province, fumed that teachers “have held the province hostage for 50 years.
“We aren’t going to roll over like we’ve seen over the last 15 years of billions and billions of dollars, and extra bonuses, signing bonuses, and pizza lunches, and everything else that the previous government gave the teachers.”
The outburst was somewhat at odds with Elliott’s stated goals.
In many respects, classrooms have been where the crisis in childhood mental-health issues has most shown up in the last decade.
Teachers have increasingly been required not merely to educate – which is job enough — but to triage complex special needs in classes where students are essentially the guinea-pig generation of new technology’s assault on young brains.
Yet the government’s chief goals in negotiations with teachers have been cuts that would increase class sizes, reduce special-needs supports and require mandatory eLearning courses – all measures likely to work against mental-health issues being identified and addressed.
It was, after all, a Senate report on mental health headed by Michael Kirby more than a decade ago that called mental-health care for children the worst part of the system – “the orphan’s orphan within the health-care system.”
This week, the government relented on some of its aims. But the climb-down does not erase suspicion of where its heart is. Or isn’t.
Provincial history shows that words have never been in short supply. It is the will and the wherewithal that have been lacking.
Those on the front lines are wise to hold their applause.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2020/03/06/on-mental-health-words-come-easily-action-less-so.html
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