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I am sick — SICK!– of endless government study. I mean that literally. I live with a disorder that we would know a lot more about if only government took it seriously and did more than study the problem.
On the mental health scale, my disorder is mild. I can function, live a balanced life, and work efficiently most of the time. I’m lucky.
A few years ago, the Government of Canada established a Mental Health Commission. I’m sure they meant well. But it was one more study — a five-year study at that. Its goals were like all the other countless studies before it:
- Understand the impact mental illness has on Canadians
- Be a “catalyst” for the reform of mental health policies
- Facilitate a national approach to mental health issues
- Work to diminish the stigma and discrimination faced by Canadians living with mental illness
Forgive me. But give me a break. We need to spend time and money “understanding the impact mental illness has?!” Is there anyone in this country who doesn’t think there’s an issue?
Besides, we all know we desperately need a “national approach” and we should change policies. Here’s a radical idea — how about let’s do it instead of studying it. Again.
Two months ago, the Commission proudly unveiled its findings [PDF link] — a “framework” called Toward Recovery and Well-Being. Among its earth-shattering findings:
- People with mental health problems should be engaged and supported
- Mental health should be prevented wherever possible
- The mental health system should respond to the all people living in Canada
- (And, my favourite…) “Actions are informed by the best evidence based on multiple sources of knowledge, outcomes are measured, and research is advanced.”
Uh… Are you f%#king kidding me?! That’s all you’ve figured out after three years?! I’d like to know how this, in any way, differs from the findings of any other study on mental health in this country.
We know all this, folks. A fifth-grader could have come up with more helpful actions.
It would be funny, if inaction like this weren’t killing people.
Worse than their catatonic findings, the Commission has no teeth. None. All it will do is present recommendations to our leaders. They will pick and choose which to implement. Or, my guess, they will thank for Commission for its work, won’t implement any recommendations, and take its findings “under consideration.” After all, there are far more important things Parliament is doing. Like, um, proroguing.
Worse, last week the Commission’s CEO and President, Michael Kirby, abruptly quit. [PDF link]. Does he know something about how receptive the government will be to implementing the Commission’s recommendations? If so, he’s not telling. The news release only makes vague reference to him continuing his work with mental health partnerships.
Why is the Commission operating behind closed doors?
- Where’s the blog updating Canadians on what they’re learning as they’re learning it?
- Where’s the Facebook group dedicated to letting Canadians have an actual voice — being specially “invited” to speak before the Commission is elitist and out-of-date.
- Why is it nearly impossible to find out how to sign up to a simple email list to get the latest news about what the Commission is doing? (Not that I’d get much information; the Commission’s idea of news is sending out a press release whenever a board member writes an article or is interviewed in the media. That’s not action, that’s promotion. )
We Have to Make Our Representatives Uncomfortable
We all say “We have to make our representatives accountable” and then we pat ourselves on the back for saying it, believing that’s how one holds politicians’ feet to the fire. We go to rallies and hold signs. We shout, we march, and then we all file back to the nearest Starbucks to congratulate ourselves for doing our part.
It’s silly. Worse than that, it’s a waste of time. It doesn’t change a thing.
No, we don’t to make our representatives accountable. That can come later. First, we have to make them uncomfortable.
We have to jolt them out of the studies and charts and data and research and paperwork that these people drown in, and frankly we have to confront them, directly. In person.
Stand up at the next town hall meeting of your MP or MLA and ask for a commitment – a real actual commitment. “Sir, when the Mental Health Commission tables its reports, will you or won’t you be voting to adopt its recommendations?” And they’ll bob, and they’ll weave, and they’ll get onto the message track speaking points that have been written for them in the binders they carry.
Don’t blame them. The vast majority of our representatives are good people with good intentions doing far more work than most Canadians realize, and for far less pay. It’s not their fault. It’s the culture of politics that surrounds and engulfs them from the first day they got sworn in. They are taught the language of appearing to be accountable without the inconvenience of actually being accountable.
We have to assert a new culture and force them into it. So when they stop talking and before the next person gets to the microphone, ask again, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but what I’m asking for is a personal commitment from you that you will vote to back the recommendations of the Mental Health Commission.”
Then smile and wait. Force the answer. If nothing else, force the question’s consideration. Push it into the minds of the people in that room.
We Have To Stop Being So Damned Canadian
We don’t force an answer it because it’s not very friendly. It’s not Canadian being in people’s faces.
Tough.
People are dying in this country, not because of mental health or addiction, but because of political apathy. And we, yes we the public, have let it happen. We aren’t bold enough.
Canada is the only G8 country without a mental health strategy.
If we are going to advocate then let’s advocate. Loudly. Relentlessly. Because email petitions do nothing. Letter writing campaigns do nothing. We have to be in their faces. You have to be in their face.
We Have To Take Back ‘Crazy’
We all need to be a little bit crazy. Yes, crazy. I don’t think craziness is a bad thing. In fact I think we need to take crazy back and own it for the power the word has.
By my definition, crazy isn’t insanity, crazy isn’t reckless.
- Crazy is unique.
- Crazy is loud.
- Crazy is brave.
- Crazy gets shit done.
As well-meaning as task forces are, endless government study does not get shit done. What we probably need, but could never really have, is an independent minister of health who is not tied to the whim of a party’s priorities. They’d have to be a maverick, a rebel, a risk-taker. Sadly, they’d never survive in our existing system.
In fact when you think about it, paradoxically, the only people who can help us fix the problems in mental health in this country will have to be a little crazy. Because it doesn’t get any more urgent than this.
- Three million Canadians will experience a major bout of depression at some point in their lives.
- Four out of every five depressed workers say the symptoms interfere with their ability to work.
- You will live longer in Canada with heart disease, diabetes or asthma, than you will with a mental illness.
- Depressed workers reported an average of 32 days in the previous year when their symptoms left them either unable to carry out normal activities or totally unable to work.
- There are 10 suicides each day in Canada.
- Depression is now the leading cause of short-term disability claims around the world.
- Mental health claims, especially depression, have overtaken cardiovascular disease as the fastest category of disability costs.
When you break it down by provinces, it’s even more disturbing. In Manitoba alone, 228 people will kill themselves this year. That’s six times the number of people who will die in motor vehicle collisions.
This isn’t getting any better.
We can’t just ask our leaders to be accountable anymore. We need to force their hand.
Canada’s Mental Health Commission is aiming its sights on a national strategy and anti-stigma campaign (and more), but it’s not enough.
The federal government put $110 million on the table for the commission, but that money has to last five years. $110 million over five years helps, but it’s nothing when you put it into perspective.
- In 2006, there were fewer than 2,000 cases of polio around the world. Today, there are no cases of polio anywhere in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and 36 Western Pacific countries including China – not a single case – and yet, since 1998 Canada has given $110 million to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, to solve a problem that barely exists.
- The Vancouver Olympics, an event that runs 16 days, is currently over budget by $110 million, and mental health that affects so many of us, millions of us, gets $110 million for five years. That’s $22 million a year. Something is not right.
Where is ‘crazy’ when we need it? Crazy works. It’s effective. How much more study do we need to recognize we urgently must have more beds, more psychiatric nurses, more addictions doctors. Hell, more doctors trained in mental health at all. Being willing to take crazy back produces dramatic changes.
- The BBC was crazy. In the late 90s the corporation was under massive rigid budget controls. Morale suffered. Innovation plunged. So the new CEO created a special programming pilot they funded called The Gambling Fund Then they did something crazy. They said only ideas that were expected to fail could qualify for this fund. Out of that ridiculous idea came the BBC’s most successful program in its history – The Office.
- Steve Wozniak was crazy. In 1976 he and his buddy Steve Jobs were showing off their new homemade computer to their local homebrew computer club in California. They called it the Apple. What Wozniak did was to take the functionality of 38 different micro-components and squash them down into five, creating one of the world’s first advanced multiprocessing chipsets. At the time, that wasn’t even possible. It was crazy talk, until they did it.
- James Watson and Francis Crick were crazy. They were biochemists. Crick, working on hemoglobin and Watson working on the tobacco mosaic virus. Together, they came out with a triple helix of DNA, which it turned out was totally wrong. Their supervisor, a guy named Lawrence Bragg, was so embarrassed that he forbade Watson and Crick from working on their crazy ideas ever again. But they ignored him. They studied on the side and discovered DNA, the very source of life.
Crazy get things done.
Next time you talk to your MP or MLA, ask them if they’ll back the Commission’s report. They’ll say yes because they’ll want to be nice. Then blog, Facebook, tweet that they agreed to it. And follow their vote. If they don’t do what they said, call them up and ask them why they didn’t. If their answer doesn’t make sense, shame them publicly.
Lives are at stake here. It’s time we create a new urgency. Starting today.
Who’s with me?
Keynote Speech
Taking Crazy Back: A Bold New Blueprint for Mental Health in the Workplace.
With depression rates soaring in the workplace, do we need a radical new way of providing mental health services to our employees? Tod Maffin thinks so.
Once the founder and CEO of a multi-million dollar technology firm, Tod’s workload and always-on personality finally caught up with him and over the following years, he was crippled by a devastating depression — all the while struggling to appear to be productive to employers and colleagues, and happy and healthy to his friends and family.
In this provocative keynote speech, adaptable to any country, Tod will reveal to your delegates how this always-connected landscape has seduced all of us into endless multitasking and infinite email — all the while pretending that this increasing workload is the best thing for “productivity.”
In fact, this hyper-connected economy may be both destroying the productivity of workplaces and eroding the mental health of companies’ most valuable asset — their people.
Tod will outline his own bold strategy for bringing mental health discussion out of the shadows in a way that will challenge your attendees for years to come.
Check Tod’s availability for your event
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Book
Tod’s book — Taking Crazy Back: A Bi-Polar Adventure through Addiction, Recovery, and Hope — will be out in April 2010. If you’d like to receive a one-time email alerting you to its availability, fill in the form below.
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February 03rd, 2010 
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I don’t know why, but I’ve never liked picking up my voicemails. My entire communications system revolves around my email, so I’ve never understood why voicemails don’t show up in my email box.
A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where people leave a voicemail and the audio is emailed to you.
I use a great service called PhoneTag that goes one stage beyond that — it actually transcribes the message for you. You forward any calls you miss from your office or cell phone to the special number PhoneTag gives you. To the caller, it sounds like any normal voicemail, complete with your voice prompting callers to leave a message. When they do so, a human being somewhere transcribes their message and that text is sent, along with an MP3 of the actual voicemail, to your regular email box.
Google Voice and others offer something similar, but their systems rely on a computer program to try to decrypt what someone is saying. As such, it doesn’t know when a comma or period goes, can’t figure out when someone is spelling out a name, and so on. The people at PhoneTag are usually very good at trying to accurately transcribe the message. They’ll even put [?] after guesses if it’s not clear. If you’d like someone else to take a whack at transcribing the voicemail, just hit Reply and Send.
I’ve found voicemails come to me transcribed less than five minutes after they were left. I never, ever actually “dial in” to pick up my messages.
The other advantage to this is that because it arrives in your email box, you can store the message and audio forever. Search your email for someone’s name and you’ll get their emails and voicemails sent to you. It will even put their actual name in the From line of the email if you upload your address book to the system.
PhoneTag comes with unlimited voicemail box storage, you can still dial-in and pick up messages if you like, and 24/7 customer support. You can pay in any of three ways:
- $0.35 per message
- $9.95 per month for up to 40 messages a month ($0.25 for each message over 40)
- $29.95 for unlimited messages
Whether you are in a meeting, showing off a home with a client, or on the golf course, you can instantly see who called, what they said, and you won’t have to listen to all of your messages to find out about an important missed call. I often hit Forward and reply via email to the person who left the voicemail. They’re often pretty amused to see their words in text form.
February 01st, 2010 (1)
Sometimes I really don’t understand airp0rt security. I’ve been having boarding passes sent to my iPhone for a few months now and generally love it. I tend to lose anything in my pockets.
It struck me recently, that the screen you show to the security people when getting your carry-0n bags screened is pretty easily faked. You just need any barcode and you can type in the info you need below it. This would be about a 30-second job in Photoshop.
Save it to your cellphone and bingo — you’re into the “security” area.
Why would this work? Because the person checking boarding passes to get you to the x-ray lineup doesn’t actually scan anything. They just eyeball it — they’re looking to make sure you’re flying on that date, and they wave you in.
Of course, once you’re about to b0ard, they scan it and will figure out pretty quick that you’re using a fake screen.
But that could still get someone dangerous into what’s supposed to be a very secure area.
Is this something that hasn’t crossed their minds?
January 29th, 2010 (1)
