Latest StatCan research reveals depth of pandemic impact on the prevalence of mental health disabilities
In 2021 and during the second year of the pandemic, mental health-related disability significantly rose among employed Canadians.
Using combined data from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) and the Canadian Income Survey, Statistics Canada has reported new findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence of disability in the workplace.
The data revealed that more than one-fifth (21.5%) of individuals employed during the first four months of 2021 had a physical, mental health, cognitive, or other disability. The figure was a 2.7%-point increase over the previous year (18.8%), which continued a long-term rising trend linked to population aging and other reasons. From 2019 (6.4%) to 2021 (7.3%), the proportion of employed people with a mental health-related disability climbed by 2.3 percentage points (8.7%).
“Given the change in labour market conditions from 2019 to 2021, particularly large scale employment losses related to the pandemic, this increase was likely due mostly to an increase in the prevalence of mental health-related disability among those who were already employed, rather than an increase in employment among those with a disability,” StatCan said.
The most recent report’s findings are in line with the 2020 Canadian Community Health Survey, which found the proportion of Canadians self-reporting positive mental health declined slightly through the pandemic, as well as 2021’s Canadian Social Survey: COVID-19 and well-being, where many Canadians reported higher stress levels compared to before the pandemic.
Young women had the highest frequency of mental health-related disability among those employed in 2021, with 17.2% of working women between the ages of 16 and 24 saying they were affected. That was a 7.6% increase from the previous year, the biggest growth among the major demographic groupings. A little under one in ten (8.9%) employed young males in the same age group had a mental health-related disability, which has hardly changed from 2019.
During the first four months of 2021, 44.2% of youth worked in retail trade or accommodation and food services, where a large percentage of jobs require working close to others and where job security has been affected by the tightening and loosening of public health restrictions throughout the pandemic.
The most common disability category among younger Canadian adults (aged 15 to 24 years) in 2017 was mental health-related, according to official disability statistics from the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD).
Among those in the core working ages of 25 to 54 years, employed women had a higher prevalence of mental-health related disability (13%) than men in the same age cohort (6.5%). The proportion of people aged 55 years and older reporting such disabilities was virtually unchanged from 2019, but was lower than the prevalence reported among core-aged workers; in that more senior aged group, 4.5% employed women reportedly had a mental-health related disability, compared to 3.3% among men.
