Tag: Canadian Journal of Psychiatry

Reading of the Week: Cost and Mental Illness

June 2, 2016 /

From the Editor

When we think about mental illness, we often think about loss – loss of friendships, loss of opportunities, and, in some cases, loss of life.

From a societal perspective, mental illness is often accompanied by another loss: economic.

Here are two papers that consider the long economic shadow cast by mental illness.

In the first, the authors consider mental illness and high-use consumers of health care. Specifically, the paper asks a simple if important question: looking at people who heavily use the health-care system, what percentage have mental health and addiction problems? The second paper, which draws on US data, calculates the cost of treating mental health disorders compared to other disorders.

DG Continue reading

Reading of the Week: How Successful Are We at Treating Canadians with Depression? And More

March 10, 2016 /

From the Editor

How successful are we at treating Canadians with depression? How could Canada’s health care system serve these patients better?

This is the ‘all Canadian’ issue of the Reading of the Week.

Readings don’t necessarily follow a theme – but we do this week. The two papers are written by Canadian authors; they tackle Canadian topics; they were published in a Canadian journal, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

The first paper considers depression in Canada, looking at prevalence and treatment over a decade. The second paper champions more effective care for Canadians. Both are readable and relevant.

DG Continue reading

Reading of the Week: Psychiatry’s Dirty Little Secret?

November 11, 2015 /

Stigma has repeatedly been identified as a major barrier to help seeking for mental health problems across various disorders and across the lifespan. Stigma is also an obstacle to community reintegration and rehabilitation in people suffering from severe mental illness. Moreover, people with psychiatric diagnoses suffer the effects of discrimination in health care settings. Not only do people with mental illness have diminished access to primary care, there is evidence to suggest that physicians perform fewer physical examinations and laboratory investigations, provide less preventive health care, and undertake fewer therapeutic interventions in this population. Researchers are increasingly framing the problem of stigma as a public health issue.

So begins a new paper that considers stigma and mental health.

This week’s Reading: “Explicit and Implicit Attitudes of Canadian Psychiatrists Toward People With Mental Illness” by Dr. Layla Dabby et al., which was just published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

This paper shows that members of the public demonstrated relatively negative explicit attitudes towards mental illness. In fact, Canadians reported a desire for greater social distance from the patient with schizophrenia as opposed to the patient with diabetes, even though the study describes the patient with schizophrenia as well-controlled by medication. Wow.

Except here’s the twist in the tale. The paper actually didn’t look at the public. The paper looked at psychiatrists and residents of psychiatry. In other words, the relatively negative explicit attitude wasn’t from the uninformed small businessman in Edmonton or the teacher in Halifax; it reflects the biases of people like… me.

Is this psychiatry’s dirty little secret? Continue reading