What is Canadian Mental Health Innovation?

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In this post, I seek to explore what ‘Canadian mental health innovation’ means to me. As I reflect on this term, I had to think about what it really means because of the many concepts that are attributed to this term. I would like to state that my view on this is not deemed the ‘right’ one but only an interpretation.

To conceptualize what this means to me, as there is no agreed upon definition of Canadian mental health innovation, I would like to start off by breaking the term according to its components. The first being ‘Canadian’, the second and third is ‘mental’ and ‘health’ often used in conjunction with one another, and ‘innovation’ as fourth and final word in the term. Below in Figure 1 is what I see and respond to when I visually and mentally see the term.

Figure 1: Linguistic Orientation of “Canadian Mental-Health Innovation”

As the figure presents and is linguistically ordered, the words ‘Canadian’ and ‘innovation’ are on the outside of the two individual words ‘mental’ and ‘health.’ I see the relationship between ‘mental’ and ‘health’ as two humanistic realities that affect one another, therefore I’d like to stress a hyphen to create ‘mental-health.’ I also see the two words ‘Canadian’ and ‘innovation’ as two individual realities that work together in striving to target mental health as part of a national priority using innovative tools/techniques. Our mental-health also influences how we approach mental-health as Canadians, therefore also affecting the way we approach innovation.

Conceptually, I see this reflection through three lenses (figure 2). For me, the first lens means unpacking the concept of mental-health, and the second lens either looking through the lens of understanding the reality of mental-health amongst Canadians or through the lens of understanding your own mental health. The third lens would then be the opposite of the second lens chosen, for example, if you looked at your personal mental health, you might then reflect on the mental health of Canadians, and vice versa. I don’t believe there is an order to viewing these lenses as everyone will approach the topic of mental-health differently, but I see these lenses revisited and understood in parallel to one another.

Figure 2: Lenses of “Canadian Mental-Health Innovation”

I do believe that this reflection is an ‘engine’ for doing Canadian innovation in the field of mental-health. I think it can happen naturally through the facilitation of open discussions on mental-health, either in healthy and unhealthy ways. Innovation can be approached on various scales, and I believe the collectivity of discussions on mental health in Canada are the ‘gears’ to igniting innovation. Innovation through social means, precisely “social innovation”, aims to respond to a social need (Milley et al., 2020; Mulgan, 2006). In the context of mental-health, a social need varies, therefore, the scale of innovation can also range drastically according to a social need. It can be anywhere from a person feeling like they need a supportive friend to check up on them, thereby creating a domino effect on the socialized importance of this action in mental-health care spaces. To me that is innovation on an individual level as it influences the way that society thinks and acts, but on another level it can be individuals coming together to create new novel interventions or advancing current practices to increase access to mental health services, as an example.

Overall, the topic of Canadian mental health innovation is a growing discussion and I encourage others to offer ideas to improve my conceptualization of this term as well as other ways to build on this conceptualization. Thank you for reading my reflection, and I hope that you, and I can innovate together as we discuss Canadian mental-health innovation.

References

Milley, P., Szijarto, B., & Bennett, K. (2020). The landscape of social innovation in Canadian universities: an empirical analysis. Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research, 11(1), 21-41.
Mulgan, G. (2006). The process of social innovation. innovations, 1(2), 145-162.

Contact

Daphne Varghese
Email: daphne.varghese@sjhc.london.on.ca