Keyword: policies

This past year, the CAMH Health Promotion Resource Centre (CAMH HPRC) launched a new report that outlines the substantial amount of mental health promotion (MHP) work being done across the province of Ontario. CAMH HPRC is part of the Evidence Exchange Network (EENet) in the Provincial System Support Program (PSSP) at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). EENet is a provincial knowledge exchange network that brings together mental health and addiction stakeholders from across Ontario.

This past February, Quebec’s Ministry of Health and Social Services published an evaluation of the implementation of the province’s Mental Health Action Plan (MHAP) 2005-2010¹. The report states that progress has been made in implementing many aspects of the MHAP and that noticeable improvements to service delivery and organization have occurred in regions where implementation efforts have been successful. However, the evaluation also revealed that full implementation of most local, regional and national measures remained incomplete both across and within regions, and that specified service targets have, with few exceptions, failed to be met.

Until the 1960s, the majority of mental health problems were treated in mental hospitals. Operating essentially as a daycare service, they often took in several thousand “patients”, and offered very little in structured treatments. However, things changed very quickly as a result of several factors: the introduction of antipsychotics, the development of medical specialization programs in psychiatry and, above all, patients’ criticisms regarding their living conditions in these hospitals.