MENTAL HEALTH

Canadian Mental Health Facts and Statistics:

More than 80% of Canadian adults experience levels of excessive stress in their daily lives
Approximately $51 billion each year are lost to the Canadian economy because of mental illness.
Mental health issues and illness are the number one cause of disability in Canada
500,000 Canadians, in any given week, are unable to work due to mental illness
One in three Canadians will experience mental health issues or mental illness in any given year
People with a mental illness are twice as likely to have a substance use issue compared to the general population.
People with mental illness and addictions are more likely to die prematurely than the general population. Mental illness can cut 10 to 20 years from a person’s life expectancy

Unhelpful Thinking Styles:

Black and White Thinking
Evaluating our environment and experiences in extremes. Things are either good or bad, a success or a failure. Most events call for explanation somewhere in between.

Overgeneralization
Using words like “always” or “never” to describe situations or events. We overgeneralize when we are not taking all aspects of a situation or event into consideration.

Mental Filter
Paying attention to only the unpleasant things that happen and ignoring the good ones. Filtering prevents us from looking at all aspects of a situation and drawing on more balanced conclusions.

Disqualifying the Positive
Transforming our neutral or positive experiences into negative ones. This is not about ignoring positive events and focusing on the negative ones. Rather, it is about our ability to cleverly switch anything good into bad.

Mind Reading
Believing we know what others are thinking – we will assume they are thinking the worst of us.

Fortune Telling
Predicting that things will turn out badly when in reality we cannot predict the future.

Catastrophizing
Imagining the worst possible thing is about to happen and predicting we will not be able to cope with the outcome.

Labelling
Talking to ourselves in mean ways and using a single negative word to describe ourselves.

Unhelpful thinking styles has been adapted from this source.