Mental health not enrolled Researchers unsurprised by enrolment gap found in study

 By MAX LECKIE

Anew study suggests less than half of Canadians diagnosed with mental health conditions will enroll in post-secondary education by the age of 22.

Michele Bowers, head of counselling services at Langara College, isn’t surprised by the results, as postsecondary is already a difficult time for many people.

“It’s like the perfect storm in postsecondary for mental health and if you want to add in a neurodevelopmental issue. It just makes things more complicated in terms of navigating stress and being able to keep up with the demands of school.”

The Statistics Canada study released in February found 77 per cent of people with no mental health conditions enrolled in post-secondary by age 21 or 22. Enrolment rates drop to 60 per cent for those with neurodevelopmental conditions, 48 per cent for those with mental health conditions, and 36 per cent for those with a combination of both.

There are a lot of factors that determine if someone will be able to their ethnicity or travel history.”

BCCDC currently suggests that travelers returning from the Hubei province of China or from Iran should self-isolate for 14 days.

Federal health officials provided an update on COVID-19 on March 4. Deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, said that Canada has seen an increase of cases over the last several days.

“We are very aware that this situation is evolving rapidly,” said Freeland.

Chief public health officer Theresa Tam said that as of [March 4], there are 33 confirmed cases of COVID19 reported on a national level.

“Twenty in Ontario, 12 in British Columbia and one in Quebec. All cases are related to or close contacts of travellers that visited China, Iran and Egypt,” said Tam.

Meanwhile, global responses differ as COVID-19 cases continue to climb. Reports say that Italy has shut down all of its universities and schools in response to its rising amount of cases and deaths.

Correction

In the Feb. 13 edition, The Voice misstated that the COVID-19 death toll was 2016 when in fact that was the number of cases worldwide. As of publication March 5, the current death toll is 3,198, according to the World Health Organization.

attend post-secondary, be it income or their parents’ aspirations, but research on the subject has a gap in mental health’s effects said Rubab Arim, senior research analyst at Stats Canada and author of the study.

“The findings really show that youth with diagnosed neurodevelopmental or mental health conditions may face additional barriers to attending post secondary education that are really distinct from those challenging the general population of youth,” Arim said.

More research needs to be done to understand the large gap in enrollment between those with no mental health conditions and those struggling with them, said Arim.

Stuart Morris, a senior analyst at Stats Canada who worked on the Canadian Survey on Disability, 2017, said a lot of mental health disabilities coincide with other disabilities.

Among those aged 15 to 24, the top three coinciding disability types were learning at 41 per cent, painrelated at 31 per cent, and memory at 22 per cent.