Report examines cost of mental illness
OTTAWA — In a knowledge-based economy, brains matter — and not taking care of our mental health has a negative impact on the bottom line, according to a recent report from the Global and Business Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health, a group of scientists, medical and business professionals established to raise awareness of the economic impact of mental illness.
Depression has a fairly high profile these days you can see TV ads for pills to treat it; Olympic speedskater Clara Hughes has gone public about her experience with it. A viral video campaign, begun in response to the suicide of a depressed gay teenager, features celebrities reassuring depressed teens that things will get better. Recent reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health, among others, have drawn attention to the need to deal with it.
But the taboo surrounding discussing depression on an interpersonal level, and especially in the workplace, remains.
Bill Wilkerson, co-chair of the round table along with Mulroneyera cabinet minister Michael Wilson, who has openly discussed the suicide of his son, who battled depression, says linking depression to other chronic conditions that have an identifiable impact on the workplace through absenteeism and health-care costs will help to remove the stigma. “We’re trying to get to the point of saying, ‘look, this isn’t about mental illness, this is about brain function, our immune system, our cardio-vascular health, our recovery from cancer, our avoidance of Type 2 diabetes, our capacity to have productive brain function in an economy where brain skills will be required in three-quarters of all of the jobs coming on-stream in the next five to 10 years,” says Wilkerson. “This is a brain econo- my, depression is a brain disorder with profound implications for the systemic health of human beings and ironically the systemic health of an innovation-based economy.”
The round table, funded in part by Great-west Life, was established in 1998. Its latest report calls for a business and science partnership “to loosen, lessen and then hopefully remove the grip that depression has on the health and productive capacity of the workforces of three countries — as a starting point anyway: the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada,” says Wilkerson, who has already started making calls and laying the groundwork for the partnership.
The hope for 2012 is to match up major international corporations with research funding agencies in the three countries “and to develop a research agenda through which depression is attacked as a way to save lives ... not merely to improve the mood of people living with depression,” says Wilkerson.