Building on today's care initiatives

CAMH Annual Report

In this section:

• Transforming care in a deinstitutionalized setting
• Room for recovery
• Building on today's care initiatives

This year, we moved forward on initiatives that are central to CAMH’s strategic priorities and functional program—the blueprint of programs and services that CAMH will offer at the new Queen Street site. These initiatives include building capacity to treat concurrent disorders, redefining health care for seniors and expanding access to early intervention programs.

Building capacity to treat concurrent disorders

Research shows that 40 to 60 per cent of people with a mental illness will also have a substance use problem at some point in their lives. Similarly, 37 per cent of people with an alcohol disorder will have a mental health disorder. Given these statistics, it is a priority for CAMH to better integrate our mental health and addiction services and help expand the capacity of other health care providers to help people with concurrent disorders.

Our Concurrent Disorders Service offers specialized outpatient treatment to clients with both substance use and psychiatric problems. Understanding how these two problems interact improves client outcomes. Our specialized clinics help clients with complex problems such as concurrent anger and substance use or gambling problems, eating disorders and addiction, and concurrent substance use and trauma-related disorders.

Our Alternate Milieu facilities will support care for people with concurrent disorders on our Queen Street site. In the meantime, CAMH has reserved four beds in the Women’s Program for clients with severe concurrent disorders. We also launched a new Concurrent Disorders Capacity-Building Team, which has held over 100 consultations with front-line staff across CAMH to help them better assess and plan treatment for clients.

CAMH clinical staff work closely with our policy, education and health promotion staff to develop resources and train health care and social service providers. CAMH’s nine addiction and mental health system planning consultants across the province disseminate CAMH resources such as Concurrent Disorders Treatment:Models for Varied Populations, an evidence-based best practice resource for service providers.

Working with the Concurrent Disorders Ontario Network, CAMH led the development of a Concurrent Disorders Policy Framework that has been endorsed by sector partners and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. CAMH is working with partners to set up a concurrent disorders network in Toronto.

Redefining geriatric medicine

Ontario’s largest geriatric mental health program will get a new home in Phase 1B of the redevelopment. Expanding our work in this area is a priority, given the growing needs of our aging population.

l-r: Dr. Benoit Mulsant, Program Director, Geriatric Mental Health Program; Shirley Campbell, a client in the program.

CAMH recently hired two top geriatric experts to reshape the program: Director Dr. Benoit Mulsant and Senior Scientist Dr. Bruce Pollock. Over the next year, close to 100 older inpatients and outpatients in other CAMH programs will be transferred to the Geriatric Mental Health Program, which currently has 48 inpatient beds and five different outpatient programs, including the Multilingual Multicultural Memory Clinic. Once its new, welcoming, non-institutional facilities are built, the Geriatric Mental Health Program will expand its services and help clients make the transition from the community into specialized treatment.

By 2026, 21 per cent of Canadians will be over 65. Studies have shown that more than one-third of seniors living in the community have depression, anxiety, psychotic disorders or other neuropsychiatric syndromes. “Yet geriatric mental health is one of the most under-researched and misunderstood areas of all health care. It’s where children’s mental health was 20 years ago. We plan to change that at CAMH,” says Dr. Mulsant, who recently returned from a term as Medical Director at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Mulsant plans to work closely with CAMH’s Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Centre to research mental health disorders in older populations.

Expanding early intervention

Research shows that when people with mental health and substance use issues have access to early intervention programs, they have better outcomes, have increased rates of remission and are less likely to be hospitalized.

Our PRIME (Prevention through Risk Identification, Management and Education) Clinic helps young adults who are distressed by changes in their thoughts and feelings and are at risk of developing psychosis.

In addition to early intervention initiatives in our clinical programs and other community clinics, CAMH has developed new partnerships to build early intervention capacity province-wide. We:

• Staff of CAMH's PRIME Clinic.

  took a lead role, as a member of the Ontario Working Group on Early Intervention in Psychosis, in successfully advocating for early intervention as a provincial government priority
• secured funding for our LEARN (Learning Employment Advocacy Recreation Network) Centre, FACT (First Assessment Clinical Team) Clinic, and Mood and Anxiety Program from the province’s $13 million allocation for early intervention projects across Ontario
• contributed to the province’s Program Policy Framework for Early Intervention in Psychosis
• hosted a provincial workshop for all early intervention programs partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) to establish a broad Toronto Early Psychosis Network.
• contributed to the province’s Program Policy Framework for Early Intervention in Psychosis
• hosted a provincial workshop for all early intervention programs
• partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) to establish a broad Toronto Early Psychosis Network.

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