From today’s Globe and Mail:

The working wounded

Mental illness is costing the Canadian economy a staggering $51-billion a year, and each day 500,000 people miss work because of psychiatric problems. What are employers doing about it? Not much.

Mental illness accounts for a stunning 40 per cent of disability claims and sick leaves in Canada. While employees jest about “mental-health days,” they are no joke. Every day, 500,000 Canadians are absent from work due to psychiatric problems; the most recent estimate pegged the annual economic burden of mental illness at a staggering $51-billion. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2020, depression will be the leading cause of disability on the planet.

“Depression is a colossus,” said Bill Wilkerson, CEO of the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health. “It’s one of the biggest killers and one of the biggest disablers.”

And it carries a cruel stigma. “There’s this attitude out there that if you come back from cancer, you’re a hero, but if you come back from depression, you’re damaged goods,” Mr. Wilkerson said.

Most people do return to work after bouts of mental illness. Yet few employers are accommodating, and fewer still reach out to help staffers before they descend into crisis.

“We can’t afford to be tossing any workers overboard,” Mr. Wilkerson said. “We have a brain economy and we can’t let all these brains go to waste.” The situation, he added, is a “national calamity.”

Yesterday, the PEI Advisory Council on the Status of Women released its first Equality Report Card on the provincial government’s progress towards selected women’s equality goals. The PEI Status of Women assessed government on more than twenty initiatives in seven categories and awarded PEI’s provincial government a C+ overall.

The category grades assessed by the PEI Status of Women look like this:

• C+ for Making Equality a Priority. Positive government steps push equality forward (such as a strong role for the Minister Responsible for the Status of Women), and old attitudes hold equality back (such as continued lack of mention of women in budgets and key public statements).

• C+ for Women in Decision-Making. Some government initiatives signal positive change (better gender balance on agencies, boards, and commissions), but little change at the highest levels or in the biggest systems (still very few women in cabinet, and still little improvement to the electoral system).

• C for Family Violence Prevention. Government has taken small steps across the board this year on violence prevention. More is needed to support community groups active in preventing violence, to get the Premier’s Action Committee on Family Violence Prevention back up and going soon, and to implement woman abuse protocols.

• B for Access to Justice. Government has begun to take concrete action on long-standing issues of access to family law legal aid.

• D for Women’s Economic Status. Government’s supports for economically vulnerable women are mostly stagnant, even while stressful food and fuel costs grow.

• C for Supports for Caregiving. Government is headed for the right destination to support early childhood care and education, but has taken some wrong routes, bypassing consultation with early childhood educators. There’s been little action to improve access to maternity and parental benefits for new parents.

• C for Women’s Health. Government invests lots in fixing the worst that happens to bodies through support for acute care, but we need more that links body, mind, and spirit — looking at social determinants of health and whole-body health, and especially supporting people’s mental health.

• B+ as a Bonus. Government collaborated on the pilot Report Card extremely well and is taking steps towards more inclusive decision-making.

Here is a link to the article that ran in the Guardian on the Report Card.