Canada's Emotional Health Breakdown

The Globe and Mail features a five-day Special Report on Canada's Mental Health Breakdown in this week's 'Globe Focus' section. The series aims to lessen the stigma surrounding the issue and bring greater awareness to the situation. As a therapist, it's my heartfelt desire to see an end to the lack of education, stigma and suffering brought on by mental and emotional illness, and I'm always pleased when these discussions are in the spotlight.

To quote Dr. David Goldbloom, a renowned Toronto psychiatrist on why people are reluctant to talk openly about mental illness:

"It can't be because it's a rare phenomenon. The reality is that one in five Canadians over the course of their lives can experience mental illness in one of its many manifestations, and what that ultimately means is that every single family in Canada has in some way been affected by mental illness. There's nobody in our country who can stand up and say, not my family, not my aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents, children, siblings, spouse or self. And yet the reluctance to talk about it, to acknowledge it openly, to treat it as a form of human suffering like any other illness, relates in part to how threatening this set of illnesses is to our sense of who we are."

Today's Globe showcases articles on bipolar disorder (a.k.a. manic depression) , schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), your mental health questions answered, mental health resources, a glossary of mental health terms, Canadian mental health history and a section to speak your mind.

By sharing our humanity we may discover that in so many ways, we're all keeping the same secrets.

What are your your thoughts?