GUELPH/WELLINGTON – Prior to COVID, the head of a mental health services agency serving Guelph and Wellington County would have said calls to its support lines go up during the holiday season.
That hasn’t been the case recently, said Compass Community Services (CCS) executive director Joanne Young Evans, but calls in general have been consistently higher than usual all year.
“It’s not because of Christmas or lousy weather or anything else, it just continues to increase. People are feeling the pressure, people are feeling the anxiety,” Young Evans said.
When CCS took over support lines from another agency in January 2020, Young Evans said a group of volunteers would get a few hundred calls a month. In the last 12 months, CCS has had over 30,000 contacts.
This would include calls to and from the four telephone service lines: a distress line, a teleconnect line focused on general social support, an LGBTQ+ support line and a seniors’ support line.
Young Evans said it’s not any particular service but all of them have seen increases this year.
It’s been much of the same for Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington’s (CMHAWW) Here 24/7 mental health support line.
“Since the end of September we’ve seen a significant spike in our call volumes,” said Helen Fishburn, CMHAWW CEO.
Pre-pandemic volumes would range from 3,500 to 4,000 calls per month, the pandemic shot that up from 5,500 to 6,500. This fall has seen the service’s highest call volumes at over 7,000 per month.
Years ago Fishburn said years ago the holiday season would sometimes be quieter than usual but that doesn’t happen anymore and she expects this to remain consistent for the near future.
“It really honestly speaks to the cumulative impact of the past two and a half years, you know I think we all had hoped by now we’d be in a better spot,” Fishburn said.
Both Fishburn and Young Evans noted a multitude of societal stressors piling on top of each other that could be pushing people to their breaking points leading them to seek mental health support including continued illness and outbreaks like the flu, COVID and RSV, inflation leading to financial troubles, housing costs, isolation, climate change anxiety and a war in Ukraine.
“It all seems if you isolate incident by incident you think ‘okay, people should be able to handle this’ but everyone’s trigger point is different and there’s so many things happening all at once,” Young Evans said.
“It doesn’t take much now for people to be triggered either with anxiety or depression, it could just be a story in the newspaper something as simple as that because they’ve had enough and they’ve got no resilience left.”
While the holiday season doesn’t seem to be driving calls to mental health services, Fishburn noted it can be a stressful time for people.
She encouraged people to find time for rest and to disconnect from work when possible.
“Practice gratitude, practice just being present and focusing on what we have versus what we don’t have, those are always important reminders for us over the holidays,” Fishburn said.
More information on CCS and CMHAWW’s services can be found here and here.
