Care Trajectories of People With Mood Disorders in Quebec Using a Sequence Analysis Method

The analysis of care trajectories for chronic diseases has gained increasing importance, particularly for mental health conditions that are often neglected despite their alarming prevalence. This study aimed to identify and describe care trajectories of Quebec adults with self-reported mood disorders.

We used data from the TorSaDE cohort, which links data from the Canadian Community Health Surveys (CCHS) with administrative data from Quebec's health insurance board Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) over a 21-year period (1996-2016). Sequence analysis (SA) was used for 4421 Quebec adults who self-reported mood disorders within a 7-year follow-up period.

SA revealed three distinct user groups: Low healthcare users (Type 1, n = 2714), moderate users with diverse services (Type 2, n = 1120), and moderate users with high psychiatric service use (Type 3, n = 587). Average healthcare costs over 7 years varied significantly between trajectory types, ranging from $94,434 for low users to $230,899 for moderate users.

Results show that the burden of mood disorders is unevenly distributed across care trajectories: a small vulnerable group accounts for a disproportionate share of specialized healthcare use, while the majority relies only marginally on the public system. These findings highlight the heterogeneity of patients with mood disorders and underscore the need for differentiated, profile-specific approaches to healthcare planning rather than uniform treatment strategies.