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The realities of women’s mental health | The Social
With 1 in 5 Canadians experience mental illness, Dr. Liisa Galea explores how women are disproportionately affected, and how we can help.
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we don't believe in Outsiders Here We Stand Together we bring one another strength search for answers that don't yet exist and if we can't find what we need we build it welcome back that was a clip from a powerful new commercial spot in support of Cam H's no one left behind campaign it's the world's largest fundraising campaign to support hospital-based mental health research here to tell us more about this important initiative please welcome camh senior scientist and the inaugural to living family chair for women's mental health Dr Lisa Galia thanks for being here thank you so kmh for people who don't know it's the center for addiction and mental health and it is Canada's largest mental health teaching hospital and really the world one of the world's leading research centers in its field so why is there no one left behind campaign so important well we're facing a global Mental Health crisis at the moment in Canada one in five of us experiences Mental Illness but that by the time we're 40 years old it's one in two so that's 50 percent of us have had or experienced mental illness and that's why I'm so surprised and astonished that it still has such a stigma because we all know and love someone that has experienced mental illness and so the campaign that no one left behind campaign is to raise 500 million dollars for life-saving new Research into mental health disorders as well as a new research and Discovery Center let's talk about that Center because the renderings of the new research and Discovery Center in Toronto look absolutely incredible take a few look at a few of them here so how do building things like this help Advance Mental Health Care yeah so right now I know it's beautiful right now chem H is on two different campuses the main one is on the Queen Street West location but many of us are many scientists and researchers are at a different location many kilometers away it's a bit of an old building really hard to you know meet people and collaborate with people why is that so important mental health disorders are complex as I like to say if it was simple we would have figured it out already so we don't know where the next great discovery is coming from but we do know that diversity Breeze Discovery and diversity in terms of who we invite at the table but the num the disciplines that we invite it's people with lived experiences psychiatrists neurologists psychologists and other researchers neuroscientists all need to become at this table to to advance mental health research and so that's why it's important to have this new building yes so as you say we're experiencing a global Mental Health crisis right now and I think we can think all of ourselves or some of the reasons for that but yeah talk about why you think that is yeah well the I mean in the office one is the covid-19 pandemic um all of us it was like I'd say a perfect storm for mental health challenges right so many of us lost jobs um but I think it also uh beared witness to all the inequities that there are in the world in terms of uh you know our supports that we need to do our work in this uh in this life um so we did a survey it turned out that and it's probably going to be no surprise to anyone that uh the people that said that they were more likely to be depressed and have anxiety and have more stress were women and gender diverse individuals during this time period so that's why it's so important to do their research on Health Equity who's falling behind and that's why this campaign is so important um well Dr Galia you are a senior scientist at cam age but your focus is on women's mental health specifically can we talk about sex hormones for a second because um how do they in your research actually affect our mental health more specifically and and how does that then differ from for example a man a man's experience with mental health yeah there's so many things I could talk about here but we do know that the who gets different disorders is very dramatically different between men and women so boys for example are more likely to be diagnosed with autism uh women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression than men are but it goes beyond who's getting it it's also how it manifests so the symptoms can be very different between men and women boys and girls and that suggests that treatments need to be different too in terms of sex hormones the time of Bravest risk to develop depression in a person's lifetimes postpartum pregnancy associated with huge changes in hormone levels really high and they're withdrawal on from the postpartum period so these these sort of hormonal transition times are times of high risk in a person's lifetime to be diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and there was a study that came out a couple of years ago they looked at over a thousand different diseases and they found that women had a delay in diagnosis of two years or more for the very same disease um so I suggest that we need more research into why that might be I mean that was my next question is is that's a significant lag in time which means a significant leg and help for her so what are some of the reasons um that you can think of that it takes two years plus for a woman's mental health illness to be diagnosed I think there are many reasons but the big one to me is that most of our medical knowledge and in fact how we diagnose different diseases has been based on men and male physiology so much so that women are said to for a variety of diseases are said to have atypical symptoms like atypical for whom not obviously atypical for the woman or gender diverse individual that's experiencing that illness and so that's why again the research is so important to understand the health and equities particularly in mental health and how how that might manifest differently so we can diagnose people earlier so if you could give women one piece of advice to help protect our mental health and prevent future issues what would that be one piece of advice would be exercise I know what's not our favorite thing to do but there's really great evidence to support that it doesn't have to be a lot you don't have to train for a marathon it can be as little as 10 minutes a day do things that interest you like dancing yoga walking the dog you can even do uh you know weights while you're watching your favorite TV show there's a great evidence that it supports sleep reduces your stress and there's another acronym if I can bring it in it's dress so all of these we know support your mental health diet reducing your stress exercising your body and mind as well as social support and sleep I love a good acronym every darn time I'm in and I won't forget that now yeah okay so let's talk about you know part of the fact that the Mental Health crisis at least in this country is partially due to lack of access to care this is a big country and so you have remote communities you have communities that don't even have doctors let alone mental health professionals so if someone is needing help and it's very hard to access care I mean what kind of advice can you give them if they don't have a cam H which is like literally down the street from here for example so first of all say I think the world needs camh and it's research now more than ever research is going to help us find those new and innovative ways to diagnose disorders it's going to find that personalized treatment it's going to give us those tools that we need to prevent mental illness even from occurring and research it takes time but we will get there and it doesn't just affect us locally it affects us nationally and globally as well but obviously if you are experiencing or know somebody who's experiencing mental health distress at this moment really important to talk about it talk to your family and friends talk to your health care provider if you don't have a family position go to walk-in clinic go to emergency the more we talk about it the less a shame we are the less stigma they rise around there and the more we realize mental health is Health mental health is Health great great note to end on uh Dr Delia thank you so much uh for this discussion and also all of the important vital work that you're doing for mental health and especially women's mental health we really appreciate it thank you so much so we hope you get you and we're asking you uh to give as much support as you can to the no one left behind campaign we'll be right back after this thanks for watching we've got lots more discussion and debates on everything from food and fashion to pop culture and current events don't forget to click like And subscribe
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I really agree with her point about women being harder to diagnose with different things, one clear cut example is autism is women being underdiagnosed because autism has only been studied in men.