Michael lost his son Cameron to depression and suicide 22 years ago. He remembers the turnout at his son’s funeral was overwhelming, and many of Cameron’s friends said to him, if only we had known he was suffering, we would have done everything we could to help.
The Canadian Mental Health Association ‘s #b4stage4 campaign asks a thought-provoking question: What if we waited until Stage 4 to treat cancer?
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2017 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Health Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Yes, mental health is not treated to the same degree as physical health in our society – as clearly stated by the Canadian Mental Health Association’s #b4stage4 campaign – and mental health is as serious if not more serious than physical health, especially for students. Engaging the students on campus is a wonderful goal, but the entire problem of stigma and level of resiliency is outside of the campus environment. Stigmatization begins with all areas of social learning and categorization – at the elementary school age when children are taught morally acceptable behaviours. Building resiliency is affected by the various factors and intersecting variables within everyone’s lives, e.g., income, family medical history. The only true way to ensure everyone’s mental and physical health are optimized would be via mass screening to know everyone’s mental and physical health and well-being, but such would be highly intrusive. Ignoring society outside of the campus, can the institution guarantee each student access to a social worker or psychiatrist on a regular or emergency basis? Providing pro-bono therapy to students via a campus health centre is great, but what happens when students are not able to receive adequate therapy and must resort to off-campus? As a student I know one of the largest stressors is financial, which is also the largest social determinant of health, so will the school decrease tuition costs or provide funds to students to fulfill the goal of increasing students’ mental health and well-being?