ALLIES AGAINST DEPRESSION
How a Canadian is driving science and business to find a cure
First of a two-part series
European mental health experts have turned to Canada to help lead a campaign targeting depression in the workplace that is snowballing into an international movement to find a cure.
On Wednesday, Canada’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Gordon Campbell, will hold a reception in London for 75 business leaders from among the European Union’s corporate giants, kicking off the European Business Leadership Forum that will lead the charge to make workplaces more “brain healthy.”
At the same time, businessman Bill Wilkerson, one of Canada’s most outspoken mental health advocates, is stitching together what he calls a “business and science alliance” to broaden the campaign against depression at work into a major “rethink” of how mental illness is studied and approached.
He hopes the two initiatives will morph into an international partnership of business and science throughout Europe, Canada and the United States, with pilot projects and clinical trials in workplaces.
“We are going to spell out that our objective is the cure for depression,” Wilkerson, who heads Mental Health International, told Postmedia News.
These initiatives will be rolled out from Canada. Leading the way is Wilkerson, 72, who, with Michael Wilson, Canada’s former ambassador to the U.S. and senior cabinet minister for the former Mulroney government, founded the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addictions and Mental Health.
Wilkerson’s goals are ambitious and controversial. He wants to set a 10-year deadline to reduce the number of disability claims for depression and anxiety to 10 per cent of all claims — compared to between 35 and 45 per cent now.
We have arrive data place in history where senior leaders in business and science across Canada, the U.S. and Europe believe it is important for both sectors to become close allies in the discovery of scientific info and development of new treatments. BILL WILKERSON
He is also asking companies to allow pilot projects with their employees, trying the variety of tools, programs, policies and approaches that have been developed to manage, reduce and prevent depression in the workplace.
These projects will be scientifically validated to determine what works and can be turned into a best practices guide for employers around the world.
Corporate heavyweights have shown some interest. Some, such as Unilever, Shell Europe, Ford Europe, British Telecom, Barclays Financial, the Royal Mail — headed by Canadian Moya Greene, former CEO of Canada Post — and Deutsche Post DHL plan to sign a business charter to help reduce the stresses in the workplace that contribute to depression. Four have already signed up for pilot projects.
The big leap in the EU anti-depression campaign is the consortium of scientists that Wilkerson and Dr. Anthony Phillips, chief of neuroscience at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, are assembling to collaborate on research projects to crack the mystery of the brain.
Some of the world’s top brain scientists — including Thomas Insel, director of the influential U.S. National Institute of Mental Health — are backing the plan for a business and science alliance to accelerate discoveries, diagnosis and treatment around mental illness.
They are betting on a “quiet neuroscience revolution,” which, with the right mix of entrepreneurial investment and scientific collaboration, can accelerate recent breakthroughs.
One of Wilkerson’s key strategies is recruiting employers — including governments — to allow their employees to volunteer for clinical trials on depression, which would reduce the cost and time of testing and bringing new therapies to market. The aim is to encourage scientists to share unpublished data and intellectual property rather than compete with each other. The initiative also aims to attract drug companies, which have all but abandoned the costly development of mental health medications, back into the market.
So how did Canada become a driving force in an international battle against depression?
The key, according to Wilson, was the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addictions and Mental Health. “They (the Europeans) called Bill to see how it all started. He went over to see them and has built this into something quite significant,” said Wilson.
Dr. Peter Hongaard Andersen, director of the Danish National Innovation Foundation and former senior vice-president of Lundbeck (a Danish pharmaceutical giant that specializes in brain illness), was impressed by the roundtable’s work and Canada’s commitment to mental health through the creation of the Mental Health Commission, which is supportive of Wilkerson. Andersen convinced Wilkerson to come to Europe.
“We don’t have anything close in Europe. Canada is so much more advanced,” said Andersen. “I encouraged Bill, saying he couldn’t be satisfied with what he had achieved when there was more to do.”
Wilkerson’s Europe initiative draws heavily on the roundtable, which he and Wilson founded 15 years ago to tackle the stigma around depression in the workplace.
“What the roundtable did was reach into ranks of senior executives and make them aware of the existence of mental illness and addiction in their workplace, the cost of this, and about identifying how to work with it and help people get treatment and once they are ready, get people back into the job,” Wilson summarized.
Through the exercise, they got the ear of corporate Canada, and are credited with putting depression in the workplace on the national agenda as an economic issue.
As they make the same push in the EU, there’s a critical twist: adding science as an ally.
The roundtable wound up in 2011 with a final report calling for an international business and science partnership.
A forum of Canadian and U.S. business leaders and scientists endorsed the approach last year, as did a prominent group of neuroscientists at a summit held in Munich, which was co-chaired by Andersen and Canada’s Phillips.
The recommendations of the roundtable’s final report, which weren’t acted upon in Canada, were sitting there “ready to be implemented,” Andersen said.
But the European campaign has to make that next leap, Wilson said. Mental health must be tackled as an international problem like energy, the environment or security. He argues that is the only way to speed up brain research and find new treatments.
“We’re going at it this way because scientists need help getting their science into pills and treatment for people. They need power, clout — and business leaders can bring that into the fray,” said Wilkerson.
The timing for when Wilkerson began criss-crossing Europe to drum up interest couldn’t have been better. The world was awakening to the economic burden of mental illness as a growing public health issue.
It took the spotlight at this year’s World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, whose study concluded mental disorders are the largest health cost to the economy, with global projections of $6 trillion by 2030 — more than diabetes, cancer and pulmonary diseases combined.
As Canada and Europe negotiated over trade, Wilkerson tapped into what he called the spirit of free trade: Canada’s ambassadors set up meetings with business leaders in Copenhagen, London and Rome to discuss a partnership plan for “brain health in a brain economy.”
Wilkerson also got the backing of both the International Labour Organization and the European Agency for Health and Safety in the Workplace.
Others were also focusing on brain research. The Obama administration gave US$100 million toward a new brain initiative to help develop new technologies. The European Union announced a similar 10-year investment in neurosciences to build a simulation of the human brain.
The report that will be presented to EU business leaders in London — Breaking Through: Brain Health in the Brain Economy — focuses on the 21stcentury economy as brain-based and the world’s workforce as the “brain capital” which is critical for success.
Today, 85 per cent of all new jobs in North America and Europe demand cerebral, not manual, skills. Mental health is critical.
“We have arrived at a place in history where senior leaders in business and science across Canada, the U.S. and Europe believe it is important for both sectors to become close allies in the discovery of scientific info and development of new treatments,” Wilkerson says.
“It’s a great opportunity we can’t let pass us by.”