The Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health Launches 11th Annual Faces of Mental Illness Campaign

May 13, 2013 By

The Cana­dian Alliance on Men­tal Ill­ness and Men­tal Health (CAMIMH) is launch­ing the 11th annual Faces of Men­tal Ill­ness cam­paign and seek­ing nom­i­na­tions from the public.

CAMIMH is proud to orga­nize this impor­tant cam­paign, which fea­tures the faces and sto­ries of Cana­di­ans liv­ing in recov­ery with men­tal ill­ness. The cam­paign selects five indi­vid­u­als and enables them to tell their men­tal health sto­ries through pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als, in pro­file videos and through media engagement.

“The Faces of Men­tal Ill­ness are advo­cates within the men­tal health com­mu­nity. Their lived expe­ri­ences allow them to engage the pub­lic and polit­i­cal deci­sion mak­ers in a very effec­tive way,” said Dr. Karen Cohen, CAMIMH Cam­paign Chair 2013. “Their’s are sto­ries that, when shared pub­licly, help to edu­cate, reverse stigma and dis­crim­i­na­tion, and help oth­ers in recovery.”

The Faces of Men­tal Ill­ness cam­paign is a key com­po­nent of Men­tal Ill­ness Aware­ness Week (MIAW) run­ning from Octo­ber 6th-12th 2013. The cam­paign is made pos­si­ble by the gen­er­ous sup­port and com­mit­ment of Bell, CAMIMH’s Pre­sent­ing Spon­sor, as part of Bell Let’s Talk. CAMIMH is also glad to wel­come and appre­ci­ate Lund­beck Canada Inc. for their gen­er­ous con­tri­bu­tion as Pre­mier Sponsor.

“Men­tal ill­ness affects so many Cana­di­ans and their need for help is great. Although we have treat­ments, ser­vices and sup­ports that work, these are not suf­fi­ciently avail­able to peo­ple who need them. Canada must do a bet­ter job invest­ing in treat­ments, ser­vices and sup­ports and mak­ing them acces­si­ble where and when peo­ple need them. The Faces of Men­tal Ill­ness cam­paign shows Cana­di­ans that men­tal ill­ness has many faces – faces famil­iar to all of us and the faces of peo­ple who deserve respect, admi­ra­tion, and most impor­tantly, our atten­tion. The cam­paign reminds us that recov­ery is pos­si­ble, and that access to ser­vices and sup­ports is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of this recov­ery,” con­cluded Cohen.

CAMIMH Call­ing for Sub­mis­sions from Mem­bers of the Public

To nom­i­nate a Face, please visit camimh.ca. Nom­i­na­tions will be accepted until May 31st, 2013. The 2013 Faces will be announced in late June. CAMIMH would once again like to thank their gen­er­ous spon­sors who make this cam­paign pos­si­ble: Bell, Lund­beck Canada Inc., Impact Pub­lic Affairs and Janssen.

Estab­lished in 1998, the Cana­dian Alliance on Men­tal Ill­ness and Men­tal Health (CAMIMH) is an alliance of national men­tal health orga­ni­za­tions com­prised of health care providers and orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ing per­sons with men­tal ill­ness and their fam­i­lies and care­givers. CAMIMH’s man­date is to ensure that men­tal health is placed on the national agenda so that per­sons with a lived expe­ri­ence of men­tal ill­ness and their fam­i­lies receive appro­pri­ate access to care and support.

For more infor­ma­tion, please con­tact:
Kalene DeBaere­maeker
Faces of Men­tal Ill­ness Com­mit­tee
Tel: 613–233-8906
Email: faces@miaw.ca

To nom­i­nate a Face, please visit camimh.ca.

 

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How can we help?

The Healthy Work­places blog is brought to you by Home­wood Human Solu­tions. We are part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion with a focus on men­tal health and addic­tions, employee and fam­ily assis­tance, dis­abil­ity man­age­ment, and long-term care for older adults. How can we help?

Home­wood Human Solutions

Nation­wide EFAP and Dis­abil­ity Pro­grams

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Program

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Home­wood Health Centre

Nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion facil­i­ties

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Schlegel Vil­lages

Con­tin­uum of care facil­i­ties for older adults (long-term care and retire­ment homes)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

 

Recapping the DSM-5s criticisms. How did we get here?

May 9, 2013 By

Let’s recap the DSM. How did we get here?

We wrote about the his­tory of the DSM in an ear­lier blog post (http://www.healthyworkplaces.info/a-brief-history-of-the-dsm/). But it’s worth recap­ping some of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’ It’s not enough to say the DSM is sci­en­tif­i­cally unsound. We need to delve deeper than this and seek ‘full dis­clo­sure’ from critics.

What is inspir­ing Allen Frances, who was chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, to be so highly crit­i­cal and lack­ing any con­tri­tion for his remarks? What is fuel­ing boy­cotts of the DSM, includ­ing the most sig­nif­i­cant of these “Boy­cott DSM-5” (http://boycott5committee.com/)?

Susan Whit­bourne, PhD, has pro­vided a nice sum­mary in the Psy­chol­ogy Today arti­cle “Ful­fill­ment at any age” (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201305/what-the-dsm-5-changes-mean-you) and we’ll take acknowl­edged lib­erty to sum­ma­rize her key points here.

DSM-5 the good?

  • DSM-5 is elim­i­nat­ing the five “axis” diag­nos­tic sys­tem that requires clin­i­cians to rate clients accord­ing to cri­te­ria other than their cen­tral psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der, thereby free­ing DSM users from under­stand­ing “axis” (dimen­sion?) and the rather strange com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al­ity dis­or­ders and “men­tal retar­da­tion” into one grouping.
  • Elim­i­nat­ing the col­lec­tion of unre­lated dis­or­ders that ‘orig­i­nate in childhood.’
  • Stig­ma­tiz­ing is less­ened by replac­ing stig­ma­tiz­ing ter­mi­nol­ogy such as “Men­tal Retar­da­tion” with more accu­rate, some would say polit­i­cally accu­rate, terms (“Men­tal Retar­da­tion” is now “Intel­lec­tual Dis­abil­ity”, “Hypochon­dri­a­sis” is now “Ill­ness Anx­i­ety Disorder”).
  • “Autis­tic Dis­or­der” (now “Autis­tic Spec­trum Dis­or­der”) and “Asperger’s Dis­or­der” are elim­i­nated as diag­noses. The changes have ral­lied foul cries from many groups, but the move towards a spec­trum con­cept poten­tially drowns out these cries.
  • Karen notes “another good set of changes involves reor­ga­niz­ing and elim­i­nat­ing some dis­or­ders that no longer made sense in the new frame­work” cit­ing “Obses­sive Com­pul­sive Dis­or­der” fit­ting into its own group­ing and not included with the anx­i­ety dis­or­ders. PTSD is now part of “Trauma and Stressor-Related Dis­or­ders”, thereby ensur­ing the shared nature of these disorders.

New guide­lines assist in eval­u­at­ing sui­ci­dal­ity. This will pro­vide clin­i­cians with a poten­tially more reli­able and valid means of assess­ing risk of self-harm. It will also pro­vide a bet­ter foun­da­tion for ensur­ing com­pli­ance with our pro­fes­sional ethics duties.

And speak­ing of “Schiz­o­phre­nia”, clin­i­cians may rate the sever­ity of a client’s symp­toms in more mean­ing­ful ways (note, we can­not say we agree with Karen’s trite remark ‘this is par­tic­u­larly good news for the legions of under­grad­u­ates who no longer have to mem­o­rize these some­what con­fus­ing terms’).

DSM-5 the bad!

Includ­ing “Mild Neu­rocog­ni­tive Impair­ment” has a very real poten­tial to pathol­o­gize nor­mal age-related cog­ni­tive changes and “lead peo­ple with slight mem­ory prob­lems to rush to the con­clu­sion that they have demen­tia.” We also note the rise of reported concussion-related head injury in sports and ques­tion whether the neu­rocog­ni­tive impair­ment in these sit­u­a­tions would war­rant clas­si­fi­ca­tion as a men­tal disorder.

A gen­eral broad­en­ing of the “noso­log­i­cal net..making what’s nor­mal seem sick.” For exam­ple, broad­en­ing the diag­noses of major depres­sive dis­or­der (elim­i­nat­ing the “bereave­ment exclu­sion” where a griev­ing per­son has 2 months to expe­ri­ence sever symp­toms of depres­sion and not be pathologized.

Two new depres­sive dis­or­ders are intro­duced that some believe pathol­o­gizes tem­per tantrums: Pre­men­strual dys­phoric dis­or­der” and “Dis­rup­tive mood dys­reg­u­la­tion disorder.”

The cat­e­go­riza­tion sys­tem of per­son­al­ity dis­or­ders remains unchanged despite ral­ly­ing cries for a dimen­sional system.

The major­ity of child­hood dis­or­ders are reclas­si­fied, and some cri­te­ria broad­ened to the point of poten­tially includ­ing more chil­dren with mild or bor­der­line symp­toms (e.g. Atten­tion Deficit Hyper­ac­tiv­ity Dis­or­der). “The prob­lem with the rela­bel­ing, accord­ing to crit­ics, is that it places empha­sis on the bio­log­i­cal causes of ADHD, min­i­miz­ing the behav­ioral con­tri­bu­tions. As a result, the crit­ics main­tain, peo­ple with this diag­no­sis may turn to phar­ma­co­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions instead of what many believe are the more effec­tive (and side effect free) behav­ioral strategies.”

Sage words

As Karen remarks in clos­ing her commentary:

My advice is that you keep an open mind as you read arti­cles in the press or in the self-help sec­tion of the Inter­net (this blog included).  You have the abil­ity to eval­u­ate the evi­dence rel­e­vant to your own con­cerns. As they say, “talk to your doc­tor,” but in this case I would add “talk to your psy­chol­o­gist.” We’re listening.

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How can we help?

The Healthy Work­places blog is brought to you by Home­wood Human Solu­tions. We are part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion with a focus on men­tal health and addic­tions, employee and fam­ily assis­tance, dis­abil­ity man­age­ment, and long-term care for older adults. How can we help?

Home­wood Human Solutions

Nation­wide EFAP and Dis­abil­ity Pro­grams

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Program

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Home­wood Health Centre

Nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion facil­i­ties

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Schlegel Vil­lages

Con­tin­uum of care facil­i­ties for older adults (long-term care and retire­ment homes)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

 

NIMH withdraws support for DSM-5

April 30, 2013 By

Just released. And we con­sider this big news.

In a move that has been called humil­i­at­ing and a “kill shot” to the DSM-5,” the National Insti­tute of Men­tal Health (NIMH), the world’s largest men­tal health insti­tute and fund­ing resource, has with­drawn its sup­port for DSM-5.

Two weeks before the for­mal release of the DSM-5, the NIMH is stat­ing it will no longer fund research projects that rely exclu­sively on DSM cri­te­ria, instead “re-orientating its research away from DSM categories.”

Thomas R. Ins­tel, MD, Direc­tor of the NIMH bit­ingly comments:

The weak­ness of the man­ual is its lack of validity…unlike our def­i­n­i­tions of ischemic heart dis­ease, lym­phoma, or AIDS, the DSM diag­noses are based on a con­sen­sus about clus­ters of clin­i­cal symp­toms, not any objec­tive lab­o­ra­tory measure…patients with men­tal dis­or­ders deserve better.

Addi­tion­ally, the NIMH reasons:

The diag­nos­tic sys­tem has to be based on the emerg­ing research data, not on the cur­rent symptom-based cat­e­gories. Imag­ine decid­ing that EKGs were not use­ful because many patients with chest pain did not have EKG changes. That is what we have been doing for decades when we reject a bio­marker because it does not detect a DSM cat­e­gory. We need to begin col­lect­ing the genetic, imag­ing, phys­i­o­logic, and cog­ni­tive data to see how all the data – not just the symp­toms – clus­ter and how these clus­ters relate to treat­ment response.

This is not the first we have heard from the NIMH crit­i­ciz­ing the DSM-5 or diag­nos­tic man­u­als in gen­eral. Last month, the insti­tute pub­lished a com­men­tary crit­i­cal of all DSMs, remarking:

The strength of each of the edi­tions of DSM has been “reli­a­bil­ity” – each edi­tion has ensured that clin­i­cians use the same terms in the same ways. The weak­ness is its lack of valid­ity. Unlike our def­i­n­i­tions of ischemic heart dis­ease, lym­phoma, or AIDS, the DSM diag­noses are based on a con­sen­sus about clus­ters of clin­i­cal symp­toms, not any objec­tive lab­o­ra­tory mea­sure. In the rest of med­i­cine, this would be equiv­a­lent to cre­at­ing diag­nos­tic sys­tems based on the nature of chest pain or the qual­ity of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diag­no­sis, once com­mon in other areas of med­i­cine, has been largely replaced in the past half cen­tury as we have under­stood that symp­toms alone rarely indi­cate the best choice of treatment.

What is also inter­est­ing here, is that this with­drawal of sup­port helps shed light on the NIMH’s single-minded focus on bio­log­i­cal psy­chi­a­try as the rep­re­sented solu­tion to these ambi­gu­i­ties and confusion.

Whereas the NIMH is leav­ing some room for dis­cus­sion of envi­ron­men­tal and psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors in the eti­ol­ogy of men­tal dis­or­ders, inter­ests in these fac­tors take a back seat to the brain as the alleged seat and cause.

Given how broadly incon­clu­sive the research into bio­chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal fac­tors is and the com­plex­ity of these ele­ments, many pro­fes­sion­als are dis­mayed at the NIMH’s deci­sion and position.

In tomorrow’s blog, “What are the poten­tial impacts of NIMH’s rejec­tion of DSM?”

Infor­ma­tion sources:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3015842/posts

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-dsm5-ignores-biology-mental-illness

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-nimh-withdraws-support-dsm-5

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How can we help?

The Healthy Work­places blog is brought to you by Home­wood Human Solu­tions. We are part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion with a focus on men­tal health and addic­tions, employee and fam­ily assis­tance, dis­abil­ity man­age­ment, and long-term care for older adults. How can we help?

Home­wood Human Solutions

Nation­wide EFAP and Dis­abil­ity Pro­grams

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Program

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Home­wood Health Centre

Nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion facil­i­ties

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Schlegel Vil­lages

Con­tin­uum of care facil­i­ties for older adults (long-term care and retire­ment homes)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

 

New Poll Ranks Chronic Pain Well Below Drug Addiction as a Major Health Problem

April 24, 2013 By

Med­ical News Today — April 12, 2013

A new national pub­lic opin­ion poll com­mis­sioned by Research!America shows only 18% of respon­dents believe chronic pain is a major health prob­lem, even though a major­ity of Amer­i­cans (63%) say they know some­one who expe­ri­enced pain so severe that they sought pre­scrip­tion med­i­cines to treat it.

Chronic pain con­di­tions affect about 100 mil­lion U.S. adults at a cost of approx­i­mately $600 bil­lion annu­ally in direct med­ical treat­ment costs and lost productivity.

Other poll highlights:

  • 60% say chronic pain tends to be dis­missed by doc­tors and the public.
  • More than half (54%) say doc­tors are not dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­ity of devel­op­ing depen­dence or addic­tion to pain med­ica­tion enough with their patients.
  • 52% believe doc­tors should have lim­its on the amount and dosage of pain med­ica­tion they are allowed to prescribe.
  • Based on their expe­ri­ence or what they have heard, respon­dents say they would use the fol­low­ing treat­ments to try to relieve chronic pain: phys­i­cal ther­apy (64%), over-the-counter pain med­ica­tion (55%), diet or lifestyle change (54%), chi­ro­prac­tor (49%), pre­scrip­tion pain med­ica­tion (47%), herbal reme­dies (38%), and acupunc­ture (36%).
  • When asked what per­cent­age of drug over­dose deaths involve physician-prescribed pain med­ica­tion or pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion obtained ille­gally, responses var­ied widely. In fact, 75% of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal over­dose deaths involve an opi­oid pain medication.
  • Only 4% say it’s the respon­si­bil­ity of law enforce­ment to address the pre­scrip­tion drug abuse problem.

Read more here.
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How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

Canadian Alcohol Pricing Research Makes Waves Abroad, Not So Much At Home

April 24, 2013 By

Healthy Debate — March 7, 2013

Cana­dian research that shows how alco­hol price poli­cies can reduce alcohol-related harm is mak­ing waves in the United King­dom, Aus­tralia and the United States—but not yet at home.

Inter­na­tional atten­tion has far out­stripped domes­tic atten­tion for a surge of pub­lic health-related alco­hol research com­ing out of the Uni­ver­sity of Victoria’s Cen­tre for Addic­tions Research of British Colum­bia (CARBC), the Cana­dian Cen­tre on Sub­stance Abuse (CCSA), and the Toronto-based Cen­tre for Addic­tion and Men­tal Health (CAMH).

A BC study pub­lished last month in the jour­nal Addic­tions received cov­er­age from the BBC, the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald and Reuters, but only min­i­mal expo­sure in Cana­dian media.

That research sug­gested that a 10% increase in the aver­age min­i­mum price for all alco­hol bev­er­ages in British Colum­bia might be asso­ci­ated with as much as a 30% drop in deaths wholly attrib­uted to alco­hol such as alco­hol psy­choses, alco­holic car­diomy­opa­thy and alcohol-induced pancreatitis.

Accord­ing to the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, alco­hol is ranked sec­ond only to tobacco as a lead­ing fac­tor in death and dis­abil­ity in high income coun­tries, and many pub­lic health offi­cials feel alcohol-related harm has been down­played by governments.

Read the arti­cle here.

————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

In the news: Test to detect marijuana use, Medication abuse strategy

April 4, 2013 By

Thank you to Kasia Skoup­ska of Home­wood Health Cen­tre, for draw­ing our atten­tion to the fol­low­ing men­tal health news happenings.

CAMH First Facil­ity in Canada Offer­ing Test for Syn­thetic Cannabis

TORONTO, March 27, 2013 /CNW/ — The Cen­tre for Addic­tion and Men­tal Health (CAMH) is the first clin­i­cal lab in Canada to offer a test to detect the pres­ence of syn­thetic mar­i­juana in the body. Health Canada recently issued a warn­ing about the dan­gers of herbal prod­ucts com­bined with cannabis-like chem­i­cal com­pounds, sci­en­tif­i­cally known as syn­thetic cannabi­noids, being sold in stores.

More potent and result­ing in more adverse effects than more nat­ural mar­i­juana, syn­thetic cannabis has been linked to hal­lu­ci­na­tions, hyper­ten­sion, chest pain, acute psy­chosis, seizures, and even sui­cides, accord­ing to Health Canada. Such newly cre­ated chem­i­cal com­pounds require new tests to detect them. Until now, syn­thetic mar­i­juana could not be detected in the body of con­sumers with­out send­ing their urine away to a U.S. lab­o­ra­tory for testing.

“CAMH’s new capac­ity to test for syn­thetic mar­i­juana will help clin­i­cians improve client care,” said Cara Vac­carino, CAMH Direc­tor of Med­ical Affairs. “The test will also help researchers track use rates and inform pub­lic health strate­gies in the com­mu­nity. As the only lab in Canada capa­ble of car­ry­ing out this test, CAMH will be a resource to other hos­pi­tals across the coun­try requir­ing the test.”

This test will help physi­cians, nurses and clin­i­cians link lab­o­ra­tory results to unex­plained clin­i­cal symp­toms. Even in the absence of symp­toms, pos­i­tive lab results can pro­vide evi­dence of con­sump­tion and allow health care providers to advise clients of the poten­tial dan­gers of these products.

“The abil­ity to carry out this new test at CAMH gives us the unique poten­tial of iden­ti­fy­ing an unlim­ited num­ber of syn­thetic com­pounds from the JWH fam­ily of chem­i­cals found in these herbal prod­ucts, which can help us stay ahead of the man­u­fac­tur­ers,” said Cara Vac­carino.  “This will also enable us to expe­dite test results. We no longer have to send sam­ples to the United States  and wait sev­eral weeks for results.”

Syn­thetic mar­i­juana is often mar­keted as “smoke­able herbal incense” or “exotic herbal incense,” but these seem­ingly benign herbal prod­ucts can have seri­ous con­se­quences for those who use them.

Med­ica­tion Abuse Strat­egy Calls For More Mon­i­tor­ing Of Prescriptions

CTV News – March 27, 2013

With Canada bat­tling a grow­ing cri­sis of pre­scrip­tion drug abuse, the Cana­dian Cen­tre on Sub­stance Abuse has released a 10-year plan aimed at curb­ing the mis­use while also ensur­ing that those who legit­i­mately need the med­ica­tions can still access them.

The plan is enti­tled First Do No Harm: Respond­ing to Canada’s Pre­scrip­tion Drug Cri­sis, and is aimed at high­light­ing what’s needed to address the prob­lem of pre­scrip­tion drug abuse.

The plan calls for the cre­ation of a coun­try­wide sur­veil­lance sys­tem that would track how pow­er­ful med­ica­tions are being prescribed.

More at:

Link to Article

CAMH Study Shows Men­tal Ill­ness Asso­ci­ated With Heavy Cannabis Use

CAMH — April 2, 2013

Peo­ple with men­tal ill­nesses are more than seven times more likely to use cannabis weekly com­pared to peo­ple with­out a men­tal ill­ness, accord­ing to researchers from the Cen­tre for Addic­tion and Men­tal Health (CAMH) who stud­ied U.S. data.

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit sub­stance glob­ally, with an esti­mated 203 mil­lion peo­ple report­ing use. Although research has found links between cannabis use and men­tal ill­ness, exact num­bers and preva­lence of prob­lem cannabis use had not been investigated.

More at:

Link to Article

Doc­tors Say Ontario Needs to Address its ‘Drink­ing Problem’

Times Colonist — April 2, 2013

TORONTO — Ontario has a drink­ing prob­lem and the gov­ern­ment must do some­thing about it, the orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing the province’s doc­tors said Tuesday.

The Ontario Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion said heavy drink­ing is very com­mon and gets far less atten­tion than alco­holism, even though it also has poten­tially seri­ous consequences.

“Peo­ple don’t always real­ize that heavy drink­ing, as opposed to devel­op­ing a clin­i­cal dis­or­der, has other kinds of health con­se­quences, whether it’s devel­op­ing liver dis­ease or other things that peo­ple for­get about,” OMA Pres­i­dent Dr. Doug Weir said Tuesday.

“The prob­lems are there now, we see them every day,” he said, point­ing to chronic con­di­tions such as insom­nia and depres­sion as well as dan­ger­ous behav­iours that can cause injury or death.

The asso­ci­a­tion cites stud­ies that show about 80 per cent of Ontario’s pop­u­la­tion reports con­sum­ing alco­hol and more than 15 per cent reports drink­ing heavily.

Exces­sive drink­ing among Cana­di­ans tends to peak in the early to mid-20s and grad­u­ally decrease start­ing in the 30s, though it’s more wide­spread in under­age cir­cles than some may believe, the group says.

Heavy drink­ing is defined as con­sum­ing more than the rec­om­mended weekly max­i­mum, which is 10 stan­dard drinks for women and 15 for men.

The issue is the focus of a pol­icy paper to be released April 17th.

More at:

Link to Article

Fight­ing Addiction

Cum­ber­land News Now — April 2, 2013

AMHERST – Some­times addic­tions are hard to recognize.

That’s the tagline for a new gam­bling and sub­stance abuse aware­ness cam­paign. The cam­paign, enti­tled Remove the Mask, is being launched by the com­mu­nity health boards of Colch­ester East Hants and Cum­ber­land Health Author­ity, with fund­ing from Gam­bling Aware­ness Nova Scotia.

News­pa­per adver­tis­ing is part of the ini­tia­tive, as well as Face­book adver­tis­ing, print posters and a web­site, removethemask.ca.

The main focus of the effort is prob­lem gam­bling. A 2007 study found that about 6.1 per cent of adults in the province were at risk for prob­lem gambling.

The con­cept was first devel­oped in Saskatchewan.

————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

Canadians’ use of alcohol, cannabis, and other drugs (Survey)

March 28, 2013 By

The CAS is one of the most detailed and exten­sive addic­tion sur­veys ever con­ducted in Canada, with over 400 unique ques­tion­naire items.

Method­ol­ogy

The CAS sam­ple included 13,909 Cana­di­ans aged 15 and older who were inter­viewed by tele­phone between Decem­ber 16, 2003, and April 19, 2004. The sur­vey, based on a two-stage (tele­phone house­hold, respon­dent) ran­dom sam­ple, used random-digit-dialing meth­ods. In each province, a min­i­mum of 1,000 peo­ple were interviewed.

Alco­hol use and problems

Preva­lence

Most Cana­di­ans drink in mod­er­a­tion. In the 12 months before the survey:

  • 79.3% of Cana­di­ans aged 15 or older report con­sum­ing alcohol.
  • 14% are for­mer drinkers and 7% life­time abstainers.
  • Of the past-year drinkers, 44% report drink­ing weekly.
  • The rate of past-year drink­ing is sig­nif­i­cantly higher among males than females (82.0% vs. 76.8%, respec­tively). Past-year drink­ing rates peak among youth 18 to 24 years of age, with about 90% of peo­ple in that age range con­sum­ing alco­hol dur­ing the course of the year.

Peo­ple who drank alco­hol in the past 12 months can be divided into four cat­e­gories depend­ing on the fre­quency with which they drank and the quan­tity of alco­hol consumed:

  1. Light infre­quent drinkers (once a week or more, fewer than five drinks when alco­hol is used): 38.7%.
  2. Light fre­quent drinkers (once a week or more, fewer than five drinks when alco­hol is used): 27.7%.
  3. Heavy infre­quent drinkers (once a week or more, fewer than five drinks when alco­hol is used): 5.6%.
  4. Heavy fre­quent drinkers (more than once a week, five drinks or more): 71%.

Heavy drink­ing

Of past-year drinkers:

  • 6.2% report heavy drink­ing (five or more drinks on a sin­gle occa­sion for men and four or more drinks on a sin­gle occa­sion for women) at least once a week.
  • 25.5% report this pat­tern of drink­ing at least once a month. Males, per­sons 18 to 24 years of age, and sin­gle per­sons are more likely to report heavy drink­ing than their counterparts.
  • Most drink­ing occa­sions occur with­out harm, and most peo­ple do not have prob­lems with alco­hol. The pro­por­tion of those report­ing harm increases sub­stan­tially and sig­nif­i­cantly with increases in the fre­quency of heavy drinking.
  • Among past-year drinkers, an esti­mated 17% (13.6% of all Cana­di­ans) are con­sid­ered high-risk drinkers.
  • The pro­por­tion of women drinkers iden­ti­fied as high-risk drinkers is 8.9% and of men, 25.1%.
  • More than 30% of those under 25 scored 8 or more on the AUDIT, com­pared with less than 5% for peo­ple aged 65 or older.

Harm from one’s own use of alcohol

Nearly a quar­ter of for­mer and cur­rent drinkers report that their drink­ing has caused harm to them­selves and to oth­ers some­time in their lives.

  • Almost 1 in 10 cur­rent drinkers report that they expe­ri­enced harm from their drink­ing dur­ing the past year.
  • Among these drinkers, 3% report adverse effects of drink­ing on friend­ships and social life, and 5.4% report that their drink­ing had harmed their phys­i­cal health.

Harm because of oth­ers’ use of alcohol

Almost a third of respon­dents (32.7%) report hav­ing been harmed at least once in the past year because of someone’s drinking.

  1. One in 10 respon­dents, 18 years and older, reports that someone’s drink­ing was respon­si­ble for fam­ily and mar­riage problems.
  2. About one-fifth (22.1 %) of respon­dents indi­cate that they were insulted and humiliated.
  3. 15.5% report they had seri­ous argu­ments or quar­rels because of someone’s drinking.
  4. 15.8% report ver­bal abuse.
  5. Phys­i­cal alter­ca­tions were less fre­quent, but rates were sub­stan­tial: 10.8% were pushed or shoved, and 3.2% were phys­i­cally assaulted.

Rates of all three mea­sures of alco­hol prob­lems for mar­ried peo­ple are lower than for sin­gle peo­ple and for those for­merly mar­ried (wid­owed or divorced). When peo­ple are mar­ried, they are less likely to drink heav­ily and/or to drink heav­ily often. When mar­ried peo­ple do drink heav­ily, they are as likely to expe­ri­ence harm as unmar­ried people.

Cannabis use and problems

  • Over­all, 44.5% of Cana­di­ans report using cannabis at least once in their life­time, and 14.1% report use dur­ing the 12 months before the survey.
  • Males are more likely than females to have used cannabis in their life­time (50.1% vs 39.2%) and dur­ing the past year (18.2% vs. 10.2%).
  • Younger peo­ple are more likely to have ever used cannabis in their life­time, with almost 70% of those between 18 and 24 hav­ing used it at least once.
  • Younger peo­ple are also more likely to be past-year users.Almost 30% of 15–17 year olds and just over 47% of 18 and 19 year olds have used cannabis in the past year.
  • Beyond age 45, less than 10% of the pop­u­la­tion has used cannabis in the past year. Those who were never mar­ried are more likely to haveused cannabis. More than half (57.5%) of the never-married had used cannabis in their life­time, com­pared with 35.2% of those who had been pre­vi­ously married.
  • 40.9% of those who are cur­rently mar­ried or liv­ing with a part­ner. After adjust­ing for age dif­fer­ences between mar­i­tal sta­tus groups, both life­time and past-year cannabis use was sig­nif­i­cantly lower among mar­ried respon­dents com­pared with never-married and pre­vi­ously mar­ried respon­dents. Life­time cannabis use increases with edu­ca­tion, ris­ing from 34.9% among those with­out high school com­ple­tion to a peak of 52.4% among those with some post-secondary edu­ca­tion and 44.2% among those with a uni­ver­sity degree.
  • Life­time expe­ri­ences with cannabis use increases with income ade­quacy (income rel­a­tive to the num­ber of peo­ple in a house­hold), from 42.9% of those with a low income ade­quacy to 44.6% of those with a mod­er­ate income and 54.8% of those with a high income ade­quacy. The asso­ci­a­tion between income ade­quacy and past year use is not significant.
  • The fre­quency of cannabis use among past-year users shows wide vari­a­tion: about 21% of users do not report use dur­ing the past three months, while 24.9% report use just once or twice, 16% report use monthly, 20.3% weekly, and 18.1% daily.

Haz­ardous or harm­ful cannabis use

About 1 in 20 Cana­di­ans report a cannabis-related concern.

  • The most com­mon con­cern is fail­ing to con­trol use (4.8%), fol­lowed by a strong desire to use (4.5%), and friends’ con­cerns about the respondent’s cannabis use (2.2%).
  • Prob­lems such as unful­filled oblig­a­tions and expe­ri­enc­ing health, social and legal prob­lems are reported by 1% or lower.
  • Among past-year cannabis users, about one-third report fail­ing to con­trol their use (34.1%) and a strong desire to use (32%).
  • Approx­i­mately 16% report that friends or rel­a­tives expressed con­cern about the respondent’s cannabis use, 6.9% report failed expec­ta­tions, and 4.9% report expe­ri­enc­ing health, social or legal prob­lems due to their use.

Other illicit drug use and problems

The use of illicit drugs is gen­er­ally lim­ited to cannabis only. About 28.7% of Cana­di­ans (63.4% of life­time users) report using only cannabis dur­ing their life­time, and 11.5% (79.1% of past-year users) used only cannabis dur­ing the past year.

Exclud­ing cannabis, the illicit drug most com­monly used dur­ing one’s life­time is reported to be hal­lu­cino­gens, used by 11.4% of respon­dents, fol­lowed closely by cocaine (10.6%), speed (6.4%) and ecstasy (4.1%). The life­time use of drugs such as inhalants, heroin, steroids and drugs taken intra­venously is about 1% or less of the population.

  • The per­cent­age report­ing the use of any five drugs other than cannabis (cocaine or crack; hal­lu­cino­gens, PCP or LSD; speed or amphet­a­mines; heroin; ecstasy [MDMA]), is 16.5%.
  • The per­cent­age report­ing the use of any of the eight drugs, includ­ing cannabis, is 45.2%.
  • Although about one in six Cana­di­ans has used an illicit drug other than cannabis in their life­time, few have used these drugs dur­ing the past year.
  • Rates of drug use in the past 12 months are gen­er­ally 1% or less, with the excep­tion of cocaine use (1.9%). About 3% of Cana­di­ans (4.3% of males and 1.8% of females) report using at least one of the five drugs other than cannabis, and 14.5% (18.7% of males and 10.6% of females) report using any of the eight drugs, includ­ing steroids and inhalants.
  • The rate of life­time and past-year illicit drug use other than cannabis (16.5% and 3%) is high­est among men (21.1% and 4.3%, respec­tively), 18 to 19 year olds (30.6% and 17.8%) and 20 to 24 year olds (28.1% and 11.5%), res­i­dents of Que­bec (18.1% and 4%), and British Colum­bia (23% and 4%) and Alberta (18.7% life­time use only), and sin­gle (24% and 8.9%) and pre­vi­ously mar­ried respon­dents (13.5% life­time only).

Harms related to illicit drug use

The most com­monly reported drug-related harm involve phys­i­cal health, reported by 30.3% of life­time and 23.9% of past-year users of drugs other than cannabis, and 15.1% of life­time and 10.1% of past-year users of any drug.

Fol­low­ing phys­i­cal health, a clus­ter of harms, rep­re­sented some­what equally, includes harms to one’s friend­ship and social life (22.3% and 16.4% of users exclud­ing cannabis, 10.7% and 6% of any drug users), home and mar­riage (18.9% and 14.1% exclud­ing cannabis, 8.7% and 5.1% of any drug users), work (18.9% and 14.2% exclud­ing cannabis, 9.2% and 5.1% of any drug users), and finan­cial (19.6% and 18.9% exclud­ing cannabis, 8.4% and 6.5% of any drug users).

About 17.5% of past-year users of illicit drugs, includ­ing cannabis, and 36.7% of past-year users, exclud­ing cannabis, report expe­ri­enc­ing one or more of the eight harms.

Trends

Alco­hol use

Accord­ing to this exam­i­na­tion, the over­all per­cent­age of drinkers in Canada declined from 77.7% in 1989 to 72.3% in 1994 and has no w risen again to 79.3% in 2004.

Other drug use

Self-reported rates of illicit drug use are increas­ing in Canada. The pro­por­tion of Cana­di­ans report­ing any illicit drug use in their life­time rose from 28.5% in 1994 to 45.0% in 2004, and in the past 12 months from 7.6% to 14.4%.

Harms related to other drug use

This over­all trend of increas­ing rates of illicit drug use does not trans­late into changes in reported harms among most of the vari­ables that can be com­pared across sur­veys.
————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!

We’re on Google Plus!


Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

Sharing some great mental health and addictions infographics

March 19, 2013 By
  1. We’ve found some great info­graph­ics, posted on our Pin­ter­est site (pinterest.com/homewoodhs).

Check these out!

  1. 11 ways men and women deal with depres­sion differently
  2. 12 men­tal health ben­e­fits of exercise
  3. Men­tal ill­ness by the numbers
  4. Rethink­ing schizophrenia
  5. Alco­hol and the workplace
  6. The truth about alcoholism

Have any inter­est­ing info­graph­ics to share? Let us know and we may post them here!

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!



————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

What is dual diagnosis: An Infographic

March 15, 2013 By

If you are as sur­prised as we are who is on this list, con­sider who you might know that may have an addiction…and you don’t even know it. When you know more, you can do more. We encour­age every­one to edu­cate them­selves about the signs of addic­tion and the steps that can be taken to sup­port oth­ers towards help (or oneself).

 

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!



————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

Celebrities Now Clean and Sober: Infographic

March 15, 2013 By

If you are as sur­prised as we are who is on this list, con­sider who you might know that may have an addiction…and you don’t even know it. When you know more, you can do more. We encour­age every­one to edu­cate them­selves about the signs of addic­tion and the steps that can be taken to sup­port oth­ers towards help (or oneself).

 

Have you vis­ited our Pin­ter­est site? We have many, many more info­graph­ics to peruse. Have a look here!



————————————————————————————

How can we help?

About Home­wood

For more than 129 years, Home­wood has been a cor­ner­stone of Cana­dian addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment. We save lives. We have helped thou­sands of Cana­di­ans for decades to cope with the dev­as­tat­ing effects of men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Founded in 1883, we are renowned for the qual­ity of our treat­ment, our med­ical integrity, and the breadth and depth of our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team.

Home­wood is part of Schlegel Health Care, a family-owned health care orga­ni­za­tion based in Kitch­ener, Ontario, that incor­po­rates three other entities:

Home­wood Human Solu­tions (www.homewoodhumansolutions.com)

Home­wood Human Solu­tions™ offers a one-of-a-kind approach to the mar­ket: the high­est qual­ity of clin­i­cal sup­port and inter­ven­tion avail­able within the EFAP indus­try, and an unmatched con­tin­uum of ser­vices — span­ning health pro­mo­tion, men­tal health and addic­tions treat­ment, and prevention-focused work-life coun­selling services.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre (www.homewood.org)

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is Canada’s unsur­passed med­ical leader in addic­tion and men­tal health treat­ment, pro­vid­ing highly spe­cial­ized psy­chi­atric ser­vices to all Cana­di­ans. We are a 312-bed, Sched­ule 1 facil­ity under the Ontario Men­tal Health Act. We oper­ate nine pro­grams treat­ing a range of men­tal health and addic­tion issues.

Home­wood Health Cen­tre is located in Guelph, Ontario.

Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (www.homewood.org/disability-treatment-program)

Effec­tive dis­abil­ity man­age­ment for men­tal ill­ness must go beyond “man­ag­ing” dis­abil­ity to include both inpa­tient and out­pa­tient treat­ment. Treat­ment goals must incor­po­rate strate­gies for suc­cess­ful work rein­te­gra­tion to min­i­mize recur­rence and relapse.

The Home­wood Dis­abil­ity Treat­ment Pro­gram (HDTP) com­bines the ser­vices avail­able through the Home­wood Health Cen­tre – a nation­ally rec­og­nized men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment cen­tre with the best national net­work of skilled men­tal health and addic­tion treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als through Home­wood Human Solu­tionsTM.

Schlegel Vil­lages (www.schlegelvillages.com)

Schlegel Vil­lages are designed, built and man­aged by the Schlegel fam­ily of Kitch­ener, Ontario. Our motto: “It Takes a Vil­lage to Care” lives on.

Cana­dian owned and oper­ated, our Vil­lages ben­e­fit from the Schlegel fam­ily hav­ing over 40 years of direct expe­ri­ence co-owning, man­ag­ing and oper­at­ing Long Term Care and Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties in Ontario. There are eleven Schlegel Vil­lages hous­ing approx­i­mately 2500 seniors. Each Vil­lage has a Long Term Care com­po­nent, with Full Ser­vice Retire­ment Liv­ing, Assisted Care, Mem­ory Care and Inde­pen­dent Liv­ing options being added in stages. The first Schlegel Vil­lage opened in 1998 in Guelph.

Com­ments? Thoughts or resources to share?

.

NOTE: The con­tent and opin­ions offered in Healthy Work­places blog posts do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the for­mal stance of Home­wood Human Solu­tions, unless oth­er­wise iden­ti­fied. We bring this infor­ma­tion for­ward in the inter­ests of openly shar­ing val­ued infor­ma­tion in this time of fast-growing online con­ver­sa­tions and knowledge.

 

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