02/26/2026
I need to talk about mental illness.
Not as a slogan. Not as a soft public talking point. Not as a passing emotional struggle people are told to “manage” quietly and politely. I mean mental illness as what it is: an illness. It has always had that word in its name, yet for generations far too much of our health system has treated it as though it were somehow less real, less urgent, or less deserving of care than other illnesses. That is not only medically wrong, it is morally wrong. The World Health Organization is clear that mental disorders are real health conditions that can seriously disrupt a person’s thinking, emotions, behaviour, and daily life. (Statistics Canada)
I have lived with mental illness for most of my life. I know what it is to carry something heavy that other people cannot see. I also know what it is to watch a system respond as though invisible suffering is somehow less serious than visible injury. It is not. Pain that lives in the mind, the nervous system, the emotions, and the spirit can shape a life just as deeply as pain anywhere else in the body. And when that pain is minimized, people are left to survive however they can.
I did not turn to self-medication, but I understand why so many do.
When people are hurting and not being helped, they reach for relief. Sometimes that relief looks like smoking. Sometimes it looks like alcohol. Sometimes it looks like street drugs. Sometimes it looks like gambling, overwork, isolation, or any other behaviour that briefly dulls the pain. In too many cases, our system focuses on the coping behaviour and misses the wound underneath it.
Canada’s own federal approach now openly recognizes that substance use harms must be met with compassionate, evidence-based supports, not shame, because these harms are bound up with health, trauma, and unmet need. (Canada)
That is the part we keep failing to face honestly: for many people, the visible behaviour is not the beginning of the story. It is the symptom. It is the smoke, not the fire.
If we treated the underlying mental illness earlier, more consistently, and with real compassion, many of the crises we now call “complex” might never become so overwhelming. Instead, too often, people are forced to deteriorate in public before anyone takes their pain seriously. By then, families are strained, lives are destabilized, and the cost—human and financial—has multiplied.
Canada’s numbers tell a painful story. Statistics Canada reported that in 2022, more than 5 million people in this country met the criteria for a mood, anxiety, or other mental health disorder. Among them, more than 1 in 3 said their mental health or health care needs were only partly met or not met at all. About half had not even spoken to a health professional about their mental health in the past year. That is not a minor service gap. That is a country-wide failure to reach people before crisis takes hold. (Statistics Canada)
And the situation remains deeply troubling. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that in 2024, 41% of adults in Canada with a diagnosed mental health disorder said their needs were only partly met or completely unmet. For young adults, that number rose to 52%. Those are not just statistics. Those are sons, daughters, parents, neighbours, veterans, workers, students, and survivors trying to keep moving forward while the ground under them keeps giving way. (cihi.ca)
We also need to tell the truth about what happened when Canada and other countries closed the old psychiatric institutions. Yes, many of those places were harmful. Yes, they needed to change. But what replaced them was too often not a better road—just a different kind of abandonment. People were pushed into communities that were never properly funded, never properly trained, and never properly prepared to carry that responsibility.
Front-line workers were expected to absorb the fallout. Families were expected to carry what systems dropped. And people living with serious mental illness were expected to somehow survive the gap between what was promised and what was actually built. Evidence from long-standing reviews of deinstitutionalization has warned that community care was too often under-resourced, leaving vulnerable people without the support networks they needed. (cihi.ca)
That gap still shows up everywhere.
It shows up in emergency rooms. It shows up in shelters. It shows up in families already stretched past their limit. It shows up when police become the default response to a mental health crisis because the care system arrived too late—or never came at all. In British Columbia, police standards now require crisis intervention and de-escalation training for front-line officers and supervisors.
That training matters, but the very need for it is also a measure of how often our society meets mental distress with emergency control before it meets it with steady care. (cihi.ca)
And then there are the workers inside the system—social workers, nurses, counsellors, support staff, outreach teams—people who are often trying to do good in structures shaped more by budget lines than by human need. Many are overworked. Many care deeply. But a caring person trapped in a constrained system can only do so much. When policy is governed by scarcity, people in pain start to be treated like cost centres instead of human beings. That is where compassion erodes. That is where trauma deepens. That is where people begin to feel not only sick, but disposable.
A trauma-informed approach would start somewhere very different. It would stop asking why people are “non-compliant,” “difficult,” or “too complex,” and start asking what happened to them, what they have carried, and what they need now to feel safe enough to heal.
Canada has invested in trauma-informed mental health promotion because the evidence is clear that trauma shapes health across a lifetime. But investment without access, policy without capacity, and language without action are not enough. People do not recover because a framework exists on paper. They recover when care is reachable, humane, and strong enough to hold them. (Canada)
This is why I am speaking plainly.
Mental illness is not a character flaw. It is not a weakness. It is not an inconvenience to be managed at the lowest possible cost. And the people living with it are not burdens. They are people already fighting battles most of the world never sees.
Canada is at a precipice on this issue. We can keep pretending that crisis response is care, that partial access is access, and that surviving without support is proof the system works. Or we can decide, finally, that people living with mental illness deserve the same seriousness, urgency, and dignity we claim to offer anyone else who is ill.
I know which road we should take.
We need early care, not just emergency care. We need mental health support that is available before lives collapse. We need treatment that sees the whole person, including trauma, grief, and the coping behaviours that often grow out of untreated pain. We need community systems that are actually funded to do what we say they should do. We need policy shaped by human reality, not just financial restraint. And above all, we need to stop asking people to prove how badly they are suffering before we believe they deserve help.
Because by the time someone is forced to fall apart in public, the system has already failed them.
Key points
• Mental illness is a real health condition, not a lesser form of suffering. (Statistics Canada)
• In Canada, millions live with mood, anxiety, or other mental health disorders, and many still do not get adequate care. (Statistics Canada)
• In 2024, 41% of Canadian adults with a diagnosed mental health disorder reported unmet or only partly met needs. (cihi.ca)
• Substance use and other coping behaviours are often symptoms of deeper pain, not the full story. (Canada)
• Real change means early, trauma-informed, humane care—not just crisis response after the damage is done. (Canada)
So, here is my plea: Change This!
Not with another carefully worded promise. Not with another report that names the problem but leaves people waiting. Change it with funding that reaches the front lines. Change it with systems built around dignity. Change it with care that treats mental illness as illness. Change it before more people are left to medicate pain alone, to unravel in public, or to disappear into the cracks we all know are there.
People living with mental illness do not need to be pitied.
They need to be heard.
They need to be helped.
And they need a country willing to treat their lives as worth the effort.
Funded projects supporting the mental health of those most affected by COVID-19.
