Requests for mental health services in Toronto reached a pandemic peak at the end of September

Requests for mental health services in Toronto have increased over the course of the pandemic, reaching their highest peak to date in the last week of September. But some seeking mental health support aren’t being connected to the services they need, new data shows.

Calls for mental health services through 2-1-1, a national public line that connects people with social services in their area like food agencies, housing assistance and health supports, have spiked in Toronto as cases increased in the city and surrounding areas, with callers requesting services for anxiety, loneliness and addiction supports.

Now, with the Canada Emergency Response Benefit ending as of Oct. 3 and children returning to school, 2-1-1 is experiencing its highest volume of mental health-related phone calls yet since April.

When COVID-19 cases began to slightly decline at the end of April, 2-1-1 received 157 mental health-related calls for services. Between Sept. 20 and Sept. 26 — when reports of a second wave of cases were beginning to emerge in Ontario — the number of calls was 249.

Carrie Moody, director of strategic solutions at 211 Ontario, said it’s difficult to determine concrete trends in the data as the pandemic is still ongoing, but she said many of the recent mental health calls have been related to anxieties about children returning to school, as well as CERB ending. The benefit has financially helped 8.5 million Canadians who lost their income as a result of the pandemic.

“There’s also just fear about going inside and the summer being over,” Moody added, compounded with the number of COVID-19 cases going up significantly as the city inches closer to the winter months.

A worrying trend, however, is that mental health-related calls in Toronto have accounted for the highest percentage of unmet needs through 2-1-1, meaning many who are calling for services aren’t receiving them.

Moody said requests for mental health services account for 74 per cent of the total unmet needs of callers. An overwhelming majority of those callers — 93 per cent — are looking for addictions and substance use services, but weren’t connected to the help they needed.

“There’s not enough detox centres in the city,” Moody said. Operators try to offer them other types of supports and continue to call back until the detox services they’re seeking become available.

Throughout the pandemic, around 55 per cent of people who called for mental health-related concerns were seeking assessment or treatment, and half of those callers were seeking some type of crisis intervention. The second-most requested service, however, is help for substance use disorders, which make up about 25 per cent of total mental health-related calls since the pandemic began in Toronto.

The data provided to the Star by 2-1-1 also shows that 9.6 per cent of calls province-wide were related to mental health. But in Toronto, the percentage of calls for mental health services jumps to 25 per cent.

Over the course of the pandemic, Moody said the majority of mental health-related calls in Toronto were coming from women and seniors. Seniors in particular were suffering with loneliness and feelings of depression when lockdown began earlier in the spring. Some were struggling without their personal support workers and the transition to online services.

Around May and June, 2-1-1 began fielding calls from people talking about their own experiences of racism, past trauma and violence. Moody said this coincided with the rise in anti-racism protests that coincided with the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis earlier this summer.

“We were getting some calls from people who were triggered and were thinking about issues that had happened to them in the past, and just were looking for someone who would listen to them talk about their experiences,” Moody said.

People who are calling about discrimination or racism-based trauma would often get referred to agencies like Across Boundaries, a local mental health and addictions service centre that provides anti-racism support and serves Toronto’s racialized communities.

Other callers were referred to agencies like the Gerstein Centre, Progress Place and the Distress Centres of Greater Toronto.

The City of Toronto announced a partnership with the city’s mental health supports through 2-1-1 at the beginning of April to streamline connections between people and the help they seek, due to an anticipated increase in demand for services as pandemic-related struggles continue. The service is also funded with the help of United Way Greater Toronto, Moody said.

While the demand for help is at a peak, Moody said 2-1-1 is well equipped to field calls from the community should the number of calls become even higher. But her worry, she said, lies with the communities who are experiencing significant struggles that are compounded by the pandemic — many of whom from lower-income and racialized backgrounds.

“I do think that over the next little while, we’re going to see significant increases in mental health calls,” Moody said. “I worry about those people who aren’t connected to services.”

Nadine Yousif is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering mental health. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Follow her on Twitter: