The CMA paints ugly portrait of Canadians' attitudes towards mental health

The CMA's eighth annual National Report Card on Health Care, a national survey released on Monday, suggests that 46 per cent of Canadians think people use the term mental illness as an excuse for bad behaviour.

Twenty-seven per cent of respondents to the poll said they are fearful of being around people who suffer from serious mental illness, while just half would tell friends or co-workers that they have a family member suffering from a mental illness. That compares to 72 per cent who would openly discuss a diagnosis of cancer in the family.

"This year's report card shines a harsh, and frankly unflattering, light on the attitudes we Canadians have concerning mental health," said CMA president, Dr. Brian Day. "In some ways, mental illness is the final frontier of socially acceptable discrimination.

"Can you imagine the public uproar if mental health was replaced with race, gender or religion?"

The survey also found troubling attitudes towards people with drug and alcohol addictions, with less than half of respondents believing addiction is a mental illness.

Only one in five would socialize with someone who has a drug or alcohol addiction and less than five per cent would hire someone who has a drug or alcohol addiction.

"These figures show clearly the insidious stigma still associated with mental health and mental illness," Day in said in a statement released with the report card. "These are the attitudes that have kept mental health on the outside for far too long."

The annual report card also focused on access to health care services and found Canadians' evaluation of the health care system is up slightly over last year.

In 2008, 66 per cent of Canadians asked gave the system an "A" or a "B" grade for overall quality of the health care services available. That's up from 62 per cent last year.

But the disparity in attitudes between Canadians who have a family physician and those who don't appears to have widened in the last year.

In 2008, Canadians with a family physician were 17 points more likely than those without a family physician to give an "A" grade to the overall quality of the health care system. Last year, the difference was 11 points.

"These findings indicate that the worrying trend of 'have' and 'have-not' patients continues," said Day. "Ensuring Canadians have access to a family physician is a key area for action."

The telephone survey by Ipsos-Reid questioned 1,002 Canadian adults between June 10th and 12th, with a margin of error of 3.2 per cent 19 times out of 20.