In recognition of Health Canada's designated National Mental Health Week, which takes place from May 2-8, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) is encouraging everyone to Practice Mind + Body Fitness.
This philosophy centres on a healthy mind, body and spirit. It encourages people to have a well-rounded and proactive life so that they can meet each day's many and varied challenges with a positive attitude.
This runs counter to some current typical practices, where Canadians take time out from their work environments to concentrate on their physical health at gyms or through other exercises including yoga. Not a lot of time is spent, however, on mental health.
Some of the resultant statistics are frightening. Mental illness affects 1 in 5 Canadians. Of the 10 leading causes of disability worldwide, five are mental disorders.
And there's a price to be paid for all of this-mental illness accounts for 30 per cent of disability claims, which translates into $15-33 billion annually in Canada.
It is estimated that by 2020, depressive illnesses will become the leading cause of disease burden in developed countries like Canada.
In 2003, the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (INMHA), the Institute of Population and Public Health (IPPH), and the Institute of Gender and Health (IGH), all from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), recognized a need to take control of this problem and created a working group to develop a long-term research agenda on mental health in the workplace.
In April 2004, the working group convened a workshop to establish a shared flow of information between stakeholders, everyone from health care providers to union reps to employers, in a collective attempt to establish mental health research priorities. All subsequent information sessions remained consistent with CIHR's continuous efforts to create new knowledge and translate that into positive outcomes for the Canadian health care system.
On April 13, 2005, Federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, along with Drs. Rémi Quirion, John Frank and Miriam Stewart, Scientific Directors of INMHA, IPPH and IGH, launched a $3.2 million health research initiative devoted towards improving mental health in the workplace. The Mental Health and the Workplace: Delivering Evidence for Action research initiative, as it is called, is designed to create a strong knowledge-base in this area, as well as: a) build a solid network among all workplace stakeholders and researchers to ensure that common priority areas of research are pursued, b) develop new policy areas and intervention methods to improve quality of life in the workplace, and c) facilitate access to any new knowledge acquired so that it will translate into effective new actions by stakeholders in the workplace.
Along with INMHA, IPPH and IGH, a variety of external partners are now hard at work to implement this initiative.
A request for applications (RFA) regarding this initiative is being developed and will be announced in June 2005 by CIHR.
While the RFA is still in its draft stages, some of the eligible research areas include:
Funding results for the RFA will be published in fall 2006. The research will, undoubtedly, lead to positive outcomes for an issue that has been overlooked for far too long and has incurred great costs to Canadians as a whole.
