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In Canada, 1 in 5 adults experience mental illness every year.
As mental health stigma continues to dissipate, more and more people are reaching out and seeking help.
And treatments – when effective – can help transform lives.
However, our current approaches to treating mental illness don’t always work. In fact, publicly available treatments are only effective about half of the time.
This is because we are right now with mental health care where we were decades ago with physiological health areas such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
“I would do anything to have breast cancer over mental illness. I would do anything because I [would] not have to put up with the stigma” -- Helen Forristall, living with mental illness (taken from the Kirby Report)There is still so much we don’t know about the brain, its connections to the mind, and how and why things can go awry in the brain to cause mental illness – which can inevitably lead to significant trial and error when it comes to treatment.
This is where research comes in.
Through dedicated research focused on incubating innovation, improving treatment interventions, and advancing prevention strategies, The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR) is bringing significant hope to people living with depression and related conditions.
By unlocking the mysteries of the brain and translating discoveries into more personalized and targeted evidence-based treatments, innovative mental health research can help people struggling with mental illness get better, faster.
In some cases, early detection and prevention tools can even stop suffering from occurring altogether.
