Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

In 2004, neuropsychiatric conditions accounted for 31.6% of the total burden of disease in Canada (as measured by disability adjusted years of life lost). Despite being responsible for a large proportion of the burden of disease, currently no provincial or national framework exists in Canada to measure the burden of substance abuse and/or mental health problems, and international quantification of this burden is also limited. As such, there exists the need for a system to characterize the population with substance abuse and/or mental health problems, and to evaluate sensitivity to change in that population after interventions. We propose to focus on three dimensions, namely disability, functioning in daily life, and distress in the affected individuals. To determine the viability of developing such a system, we will undertake a longitudinal cohort study to characterize individuals with substance abuse and/or mental health problems who present at either the Emergency or Ambulatory departments or the Crisis Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in terms of these aforementioned dimensions. We will then correlate changes over time in these variables with health services and support utilization by using CAMH records and databases from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. For this study we will recruit approximately 1,400 people aged 17 years or older with substance abuse and/or mental health problems who present as indicated above at CAMH. This is the first project of this kind and will help establish the feasibility of evaluating outcomes of health services and support within the studied population. If successful, the results of this study will be disseminated both nationally and, with help of the World Health Organization (a formal partner in this project), globally.