WORKING FROM HOME and staying home all day long. Staring at screens. The blurring of work-life boundaries. Inability to meet up with friends and family. Anxiety about one’s future and financial worries. Uncertainty about when — or if — we will ever return to normalcy. Worries that anxiety is a sign of personal weakness. These are just some of the issues facing citizens around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is little doubt about the massive scale of mental health challenges brought by the pandemic. Unfortunately, mental health was already a looming crisis before the pandemic, accounting for 22.8 per cent of the global burden of disease. COVID-19 has only accelerated the rate at which this parallel crisis has taken root in our society.
As mental health policy experts and healthcare strategists develop plans to deal with this, we call for a radical rethink of how to help people with their mental well-being. The ongoing conversation in the health policy community in Canada and elsewhere revolves around the need to improve access to mental health services. These conversations often culminate in a call for additional resources — training more providers, scaling up service delivery, and improving the quality and quantity of services offered. In particular, there has been a fair bit of work focused on developing new treatments and therapies, investing in larger programs and policies, designing innovative delivery methods, and increasing the number of clinics, clinicians, and services with an effort to reach a larger percentage of the population.
These efforts focus on the side of the equation and are consistent with a quote by : “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” This loosely translates to the idea that if we build better products and services, people will automatically flock to consume them. However, as one by ), the ‘better mousetrap’ argument is fallacious because the builders of the new mousetrap haven’t thought of:
