By Stan Chung

Op-Ed Commentary

The police arrive at 11:40 on a Friday night.

A person is in distress. Their family is out of ideas. Nobody knows whether this is a mental-health crisis, an addiction problem or both.

By now, it’s turned.

Police officers step in. An ambulance may be coming. Someone may spend the night in an emergency department.

Is this the beginning of the crisis?

Well, it isn’t the beginning.

Months earlier, the person stopped sleeping. They began missing work. Their family tried to find care, but the earliest appointment was months away.

So they waited.

The person lost their job. Their relationships suffered. Their problems increased.

The crisis did not begin at 11:40 on Friday night.

That was simply when the bill arrived.

Every community eventually pays for mental distress. The question is when, how, and who pays.

We usually talk about mental health as a health-care problem. We need more counsellors, psychiatrists and treatment beds.

We do.

But not everything that harms mental health begins as an illness. And not everything that prevents a crisis happens in a hospital.

Sometimes the first problem is much simpler. We do not know where to go.

Imagine a parent sitting at a kitchen table with a phone. Their teenager has stopped going to school. The parent searches online and finds government pages, private counsellors, addiction services, crisis lines and programs with names they have never heard before.

Which one do you call?

Let’s fund mental-health navigators. Give people one place to start. A navigator does not replace a counsellor or doctor. They connect people with the right service, explain what they qualify for and tell them what to do while they wait.

Then let’s put that information where people actually are.

A simple, current local guide should be in schools, workplaces, libraries, clinics and community centres. Who can I call? When are they open? Who qualifies? What happens when I call?

Make it available in the languages people actually use.

And make sure the people we turn to know the same information.

A teacher should know it. So should a police officer, employer, band office, coach, librarian, health worker and settlement worker. Train them on the same local resources.

Here is the test.

It is 4:30 on Friday afternoon. Someone tells you they are struggling.

Do you know what happens next? Boards and councils should be able to answer that question too.

Imagine a board approving a service change because it saves money. Perhaps a bus runs less often. A community program closes. A service moves online.

The spreadsheet shows a saving.

It may not show the senior who can no longer get to an appointment, the person with a disability who cannot use the replacement service, or the worker who now has to choose between a shift and seeing a counsellor.

Those costs did not disappear. They moved. Boards need to understand this before they vote, not after.

That means understanding poverty, racism, violence, isolation, disability and working conditions. In Canada, it also means understanding colonialism and why some Indigenous people have good reason to distrust public systems.

A newcomer may face another problem.

Imagine arriving in Canada six months ago. Your English is improving. You are looking for work. Your child is struggling. Someone gives you the name of a mental-health program, but you do not understand how referrals work or whether you have to pay.

A service can exist and still be almost impossible to reach.

Put information in the languages people use. Make sure settlement and cultural organizations know the same local services. Do not make someone understand the Canadian system before the Canadian system will serve them.

Disability and dementia show us something else about prevention.

Imagine a daughter caring for a parent with dementia. She works during the day and checks on her parent before and after work. She is sleeping badly. There is respite available, but she does not know about it or cannot get enough of it.

Eventually she cannot manage. Better policy cannot make her parent’s dementia disappear.

But a usable bus, respite care, enough income, a dementia-friendly public space and one person who can explain the system may keep one difficult condition from becoming a family crisis.

Prevention does not always mean preventing the condition.

Sometimes it means stopping the condition from taking everything else with it.

And then there is work.

Imagine dreading Sunday night because Monday means seeing your supervisor.

That supervisor controls your schedule, workload, evaluation and perhaps your next opportunity. They regularly humiliate people in meetings. Nobody challenges them because everyone has seen what happens to people who do.

An employee assistance program may give you six counselling sessions.

It does not change what happens Monday morning.

Work is not separate from mental health.

Train supervisors to understand the power they hold. Give workers a safe way around a supervisor when that relationship is the problem. Look at workloads and schedules. Pay attention when sick leave, grievances and resignations begin piling up in the same part of an organization.

Sometimes workers are repeatedly asked to do something they believe is wrong. The harm that can follow has a name: moral injury.

Boards should know these numbers too.

If five people become unwell under the same supervisor, we should at least ask whether the problem is five people.

None of this replaces psychiatrists, counsellors, medication, treatment beds or hospitals.

It asks us to notice what happens before people reach them.

Go back to that Friday night.

There is the police call. Perhaps an ambulance. There may be an emergency-room visit. There are missed shifts. Perhaps a lost job. Someone else in the family may miss work too.

We pay for all of it. We just put the costs in different budgets.

I know something about this from the other side.

There was a time when I was struggling with mental distress and did not know it.

My family struggled too.

That may be the part I understand differently now. You can be the person in trouble and still have no idea how much trouble you are in.

I kept working. I answered emails. I went to meetings. I made decisions. I talked to people.

From the outside, much of my life still worked.

Inside, something wasn’t working at all. Not even close.

The people closest to me could see pieces of it before I could. That was not easy for them. Loving someone who does not understand what is happening to them can leave a family frightened, angry, exhausted and unsure what to do next.

It took me years to find my way back to myself.

I did not do that alone.

My family mattered. Work mattered. People who stayed close mattered. Being outside mattered.

And this community mattered.

There were people here who made room for me before I had the words to explain what I needed. There were places where I could walk, ride my bike, think and slowly feel like myself again. There was useful work to do. There were people who expected something from me and people who did not require anything from me at all.

None of those things, by themselves, were a treatment.

Together, they mattered enormously.

That is why I no longer think prevention means simply getting someone into a doctor’s office sooner, important as that can be.

Sometimes the person who needs care does not know they need it yet. That changes what the rest of us need to know.

We need to recognize distress. We need to know where to turn. We need workplaces where asking for help does not put someone’s livelihood at risk. We need families to have somewhere to go when the person they love insists everything is fine.

And sometimes we simply need to stay close.

Every community eventually pays for mental distress.

I was fortunate.

This community invested in me before I understood how much I needed it.

That is the economics of dignity.

– Stan Chung, PhD lives in Cranbrook BC.  Stan is a writer, strategic advisor, and a 2026 Governor General’s laureate. [email protected]

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