Accessing mental health services in Canada requires the possession of at least one of three things: decent employer benefits, the ability to pay, or the ability to wait for support that is covered by public insurance. Acute psychiatric care is available in most emergency departments, and, if things are serious enough, inpatient hospital settings. But outside of emergency situations, one’s options are more or less the same: without private insurance, people in need of care must pony up or be willing to wait months — or sometimes years — for treatment.

The cold reality is that the Canadian public mental health system — which relies heavily on hospital based, physician referred, and physician provided services — can be so difficult to navigate that many people give up even trying. What’s worse, some public and not-for-profit services periodically close their waitlists altogether due to the overwhelming volume of applicants.

The failings of mental health coverage are not helped by antipsychiatry advocacy that decries medicalization, institutionalization, and even question the reality of mental illness itself. This kind of pushback stifles the intellectual contributions that leftists can make to mental health research and care. It also undermines any hope of coordinating our efforts to fight for the strong, centralized, federal support needed to create a robust mental health policy framework.