Commentary: Time to Improve Access to Psychotherapies - A Family Medicine Perspective

The COVID pandemic - despite the dire economic and personal toll on all Canadians - is helping us move forward. It bears light on the most vulnerable. Indeed, it has aggravated the mental health of those with such disorders as anxiety or depression and revealed the precarity of our mental well-being. The health system, and most particularly our primary care system, is overwhelmed and its capacity to answer to the mental healthcare of Canadians is put to the test. It is, therefore, time for family physicians to be able to find support in various ways and means to answer the needs of their patients. This support may be through public coverage to psychotherapies, which has been proven effective in Australia and the UK since the last decade, or open access to various validated web-based tools offering cognitive behavioural therapies for the most common mental health disorders in both official languages.