Canadian study shows many people believe mental illnesses "not real"

From Canwest News Service:

Nearly one in two Canadians believes mental illness isn’t always “real” but a cop-out for bad behaviour and personal weakness and attitudes toward people with addictions border almost on religious judgment, a new national survey shows.

One in four is afraid to be around someone with a serious mental illness, and about half of the 2,024 Canadians surveyed online said they would avoid socializing with, or marrying someone with a mental illness.

The Ipsos-Reid survey, commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association and being released Monday at their annual meeting in Montreal, “shines a harsh, and frankly unflattering light on the attitudes we Canadians have concerning mental health,” CMA president Dr. Brian Day said in a release. “In some ways, mental illness is the final frontier of socially-acceptable discrimination.”

The irony is that 15 per cent of adults polled reported having been diagnosed by a doctor as being clinically depressed; another 23 per cent reported feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. Meanwhile, the number of prescriptions dispensed for antidepressants in the country is approaching one prescription per Canadian per year.

Last year, 27.4 million prescriptions worth $1.2 billion were filled for antidepressants, up from 23.4 million in 2005, according to prescription-drug tracking firm IMS Health Canada.

Quebec saw the biggest increase, at 19 per cent, from 2005 to 2007, followed by B.C. and Ontario.

More people could be seeking help, and more doctors asking about it, says Alan Scoboria, a clinical psychologist at the University of Windsor.

But he says many people are being medicated for “normal sadness and normal distress in life”, while “lots of people with diagnosable problems aren’t accessing treatment.”The online survey, conducted in June, might explain why:

• Just half would tell friends or co-workers they have a family member suffering from a mental illness, as opposed to 72 per cent who would share a diagnosis of cancer

• One in four (27 per cent) said they would be fearful being around someone with a serious mental illness

• Nearly half (46 per cent) agreed that “we call some things mental illness because it gives some people an excuse for poor behaviour and personal failings.”

• Two in five (42 per cent) aren’t certain they would socialize with a friend with a mental illness• 55 per cent said they would be unlikely to marry someone with a mental illness

• Most wouldn’t hire a lawyer, someone to teach or take care of their child, a financial adviser, a doctor or a landscaper who has a mental illness.

“I wish I could say I was knocked off my feet. I wish I could say this came as a huge surprise and disappointment,” says Dr. David Goldbloom, vice-chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, which is charged with developing a national mental health strategy.“The reality is, in 21st century Canada, that it doesn’t.”

“If somebody said to you they had a pain in their stomach, you wouldn’t assume it was fake; you would assume they had a problem and had to get it looked at,” says Canada’s mental health commissioner, Michael Kirby. “People aren’t willing to recognize that mental illness is a genuine illness.”

Fewer than half of Canadians think alcohol and drug addiction is a mental illness and only one in five would socialize with someone struggling with substance abuse, according to the survey.

The attitudes reflect “an almost religious judgment of people involved with alcohol or drugs as sinners,” says Goldbloom, senior medical adviser in education and public affairs at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.Whether through genetic vulnerability, social disadvantages or a culture that often glamorizes alcohol, “there are all kinds reasons why people fall prey to these problems,” he says.

Kirby, a former senator, says the stigma towards the mentally ill parallels the early days of AIDS, when a disclosure of HIV sent people “running for cover.”

When former L.A. Lakers star Magic Johnson announced he had HIV, “the other teams didn’t want to play with him anymore for fear that if they had a cut, they would get infected,” Kirby says. “People have come along way.”

Attitudes toward mentally illness can be equally changed “through concentrated efforts” and time.

A psychiatric diagnosis can threaten a person’s sense of identity, and that alone “is a huge source of fear,” Goldbloom says.

But the other way it scares is through media reports of horrific violence -- last month’s gruesome slaying of Greyhound bus passenger Tim McLean, and the multiple-murder suicide in Calgary in May, when Joshua Lall killed his wife, two
of their three children and a tenant, then took his own life.

Goldbloom says violence committed by the mentally ill “accounts for a very small minority of all of violence in our society.”

“As visible as the person on the street corner who is sleeping on a grate and hallucinating is in the downtown core of any city, there is also an invisible army of people walking to work in the office towers around that grate, who themselves have also experienced some form of mental illness and substance abuse, who have recovered, who are back in the workforce, who are back with their families,” Goldbloom says.

“But the message is very clear from this survey: They’re not going to talk about it. They’re not going to disclose. And they’re not going to disclose as long as there is a culture of shame, secrecy and stigma.”

The CMA’s eighth annual national report card on health care also contained a telephone survey. It shows that 66 per cent of 1,002 Canadians surveyed by
phone gave the health system an A or B for overall quality of care, up slightly over the previous year. Areas that most often scored an F included access to modern diagnostic equipment and specialists, access to care during nights and weekends and access to mental health care.Just six per cent graded the federal government’s performance in health care with an A.

The online survey is considered accurate, plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. The telephone research is considered accurate plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.