What to know
- The Treliving family has donated $5 million to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support its womenmind initiative.
- Experts say women’s mental health is significantly underfunded, despite higher rates of conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
- The funding will support research, treatment advancements, and efforts to better understand gender-specific mental health needs.
- Researchers hope increased awareness—similar to viral fundraising campaigns—can help drive more investment into the field.
The Treliving family has donated $5 million to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) to invest in advancing groundbreaking women’s mental health research.
CAMH announced the donation on Monday, revealing the money will be dedicated to womenmind, an initiative that supports women’s mental health advancements and women in sciences.
Dr. Liisa Galea, a senior scientist at CAMH, tells Now Toronto the donation is of extreme importance, since women’s health, especially mental health, has been historically overlooked when it comes to investments, often relying on philanthropic funding to advance research.
“You can imagine that having $5 million is a huge, huge bonus and impactful for anyone that’s studying women’s mental health, because we just see so little investment in this area,” she said.
Galea explains that mental health issues often differ for different genders. For instance, she says women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders. In addition, these conditions often come with different symptoms and at different periods in patients’ lives.
Without proper research and investments, she says it is difficult for mental health providers to understand these differences and provide appropriate care for women.
“If we think of the healthcare system as being our boat… [and] healthcare practitioners — your doctors, nurses, midwives and social workers — as being the crew on that boat. You can have… the best trained crew, but without research, which is our compass and map, we can’t tell where to go,” she said.
In addition to advancing treatments, Galea says womenmind also hopes to increase awareness about the gap in women’s mental health and what is needed to bridge it.
Over the last few years, the scientist says she has seen more awareness about this gap, but actual progress is still lacking.
According to her, raising more awareness is also a first step towards more funding and research, pointing as an example, the “ASL Ice Bucket Challenge,” which were a series of online videos where people poured a bucket of ice over a another person’s head to promote awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which led to millions of dollars in investments in 2014.
“I want our own ice bucket challenge…so that we can create a huge bolus of money, because that’s going to draw in our clinicians, that’s going to draw on our researchers, and we’re going to have really good, high quality research to answer the questions on what are more effective medications and treatments,” she said.
