Anxiety taking a toll on youth, survey finds
Nearly half report missing school because of mental health issues
At 5 years old, Shannon Nagy told her mother she wanted to die. In Grade 6, she missed almost the entire school year because more often than not, she couldn’t get out of bed.
Nagy, now 20, was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and borderline personality disorder and was never able to finish high school. She spent most of her childhood immersed in a mental health care system that she said “did more harm than good.”
Her struggle to get help, and the impact she says that struggle had on her education, is a trend captured in a new survey commissioned by Children’s Mental Health Ontario and released Tuesday.
It found, of the 18-to-34-year-olds surveyed across the province:
46 per cent had missed school because of issues related to anxiety.
40 per cent had sought mental health help.
Of those, 50 per cent found the experience of getting help challenging.
42 per cent did not get the help they needed or are still waiting.
Parents are also affected when a child has to wait as long as 18 months for mental health care, said Kimberly Moran, CEO of Children’s Mental Health Ontario, the association that represents Ontario’s publicly funded Mental Health Centres and advocates for government policies and programs.
“Parents miss work, and certainly myself, as a parent, I have to take time to look after my daughter,” Moran said.
The provincial Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and Ministry of Children and Youth Services did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment, with Monday being a government holiday.
The study, conducted by research firm Ipsos, surveyed 806 people in October.
The results suggest that a quarter of parents have had to miss work to care for a child because of issues related to anxiety.
When her 11-year-old daughter tried to die by suicide while on a year-long waitlist for mental healthcare, Moran took a four-month leave of absence and then worked parttime. Six years later, she still takes about 10 per cent of the year off to help her daughter.
Half of the parents surveyed found getting their child mental health help was challenging because wait times are long, they don’t know where to go, or service providers don’t offer what their child needs, don’t exist in their community, are too far away or aren’t available at convenient times.
Anxiety is one of the “big frontrunners” when it comes to mental illness in youth, said Lydia Sai-Chew, CEO of Skylark Children, Youth and Families, which offers free counselling and mental health services in Toronto. Wait times at Skylark for in-patient programs can be up to six months.
“The difficulty with wait times is that the youth gets more stressed, but so does the family,” Sai-Chew said. “Anxieties build up. They don’t have the strategies and it just gets worse.”
For 13 years, Michele Sparling of Oakville has juggled owning a business and taking care of her son who was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when he was 10 years old.
“If your child is home from school, you’re not leaving them alone,” Sparling said. “You’re worried when you have to step out for a moment. When a fire truck goes through your neighbourhood, you think ‘not my kid, not my kid.’ That worry is constant.”
She said her family struggled to get her son the help he needed. In between driving him to and from appointments in Toronto, she got used to telling clients she might have to end a meeting at a moment’s notice if a crisis occurred. She watched as her son had to miss school, and continues to care for him now as he struggles with mental illness in university.
“This is not just about this one person, it’s about the bigger picture, the lost potential,” Sparling said. “I think we’re doing young people such a disservice.”
CMHO is asking the province to invest $125 million in communitybased mental health centres, staffing and services for children and youth.