On Tuesday August 27 I participated in the Mental Health and Addictions Political Forum along with the Hon. Cameron Friesen for the Progressive Conservative Party, Uzoma Asagwara with the NDP Party and Andrea Shalay with the Green Party. My opening comments are below:
Welcome all of you who are here,
and thank you for coming.
For many years, brain, mental
health and addictions have been poor cousins to physical health in Manitoba. It does not have to be this way.
A Liberal government will make
dramatic improvements to our situation.
In addition to effectively addressing
poverty and homelessness, we will create
a province-wide multidisciplinary specialist network for Brain, Mental Health
and Addictions based on the successful Cancercare Manitoba model. It will report directly to the Minister of
Health, as Cancercare Manitoba does, but will be different from Cancercare in
that the role and the importance of numerous and varied community based
partners will be much larger. It will
work with all organizations to implement recommendations from our 2016 Liberal report “Optimum Brain Health
for All Manitobans” and the Virgo Report.
A major part of our platform, is to
bring psychological therapies under medicare.
This is essential to give Manitobans access to needed psychological
therapies. We will model our approach on the highly successful IAPT, increased
Access to Psychological Therapy program which has gone from no program before
2008 to a program with centres all over England, centres run by organizations
like the partners supporting tonight’s
debate. It now sees a million
people a year. They have outcome
measures on better than 98% of those treated.
And they have had phenomenal success. The prestigious journal Nature says
it is “world beating”. We will bring
it to Manitoba. [This will mean training
250 additional psychological therapists in the next four years and establishing
about 50 locations around Manitoba which will deliver the program].
And we will not stop here.
We will embrace peer support
workers – because they are very effective in helping those with brain, mental
health and addictions issues and are cost effective in saving money.
Our efforts will start young. We will support children and families with a major
improvement in support for early childhood education and child care.
We will cover the cost of
psychological assessments and the treatment of children with learning and
behavioural conditions under medicare.
It is essential that we identify children with learning and behavoural
difficulties early on and help them quickly.
This is a very personal issue for me as one of our sons had a reading
difficulty a form of dyslexia. This can help many children do well and also prevent
a significant amount of mental illness. Manitoba Liberals will also support brain and
mental health education in schools. Every
child should be taught Mental Health First Aid.
We will also address addictions:
Help for those with addictions
needs to be there when a person needs help and it needs to be seemless so there
are no gaps, between stabilization and detoxification and between detoxification
and treatment, and there needs to be follow up beyond treatment – sometimes
with longer treatment to achieve the best results and always with a period of
support away from the triggers which lead the person to take alcohol or opiods
or meth. We will work with all involved
throughout the province to make the needed changes to achieve success.
To achieve a coherent,
coordinated and comprehensive system.
Manitoba Liberals will set up a 24/7 virtual addictions line and
coordination centre as an entry point and as a step toward improved function
and results. We will also have an
effective approach to prevention. We can
benefit from existing preventive programs
- like that offered by Drug Free World.
And we need to be able to respond
to public health emergencies in brain, mental health and addictions. In 2009, there was a major response to the H1N1
flu which was rapid and effective. Yet
in 2017, when the meth crisis emerged and the police and many others raised the
alarm about how serious it was, and when I raised this in the Manitoba
Legislature as a major problem, our calls for action were met by attacks on us
and by the response “it’s too complicated.”
We need in such circumstances to be ready for the crisis and to be able
to respond quickly.
Manitoba Liberals believe that
mental health and addictions emergencies should be treated as effectively and
with an adequate response just like physical health emergencies should be
treated. Thank you for this
opportunity to speak tonight and to present our Manitoba Liberal perspective.
For a full video of the Forum, you can go to the links below.
For a full video of the Forum, you can go to the links below.
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