Background

Women’s College Hospital has been dedicated to groundbreaking advances in women’s health for the past 100 years. Today, Women’s College Hospital – an ambulatory care centre and teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto – is focusing on sex and gender-based medicine, one of the most important and unrecognized areas of women’s health.

X Effects creates a new focus and sends a clear message based on new science: when it comes to health and healthcare, women and men are different.

Mental health on the job is a leading social, medical and business concern in Canada and around the globe. And it’s growing.

By 2020, the World Health Organization estimates depression will be the second leading cause of “lost years of healthy life worldwide.”

The cost to the Canadian economy is $51 billion every year in direct costs, lost productivity and diminished health-related quality of life.

In 2008, 40 percent of disability claims and sick leaves in Canada were due to psychiatric problems.

And, women account for two million of the three million Canadians who suffer depressive episodes in any twelve-month period.

It’s a women’s issue:

• Women experience depression twice as often as men.
• One in four women can expect to develop clinical depression during her lifetime.
• 15 to 20 percent of women develop postpartum depression.
• Two-thirds of those who experience depression do not seek treatment.
• Depression occurs most frequently in women in their working years, between the ages of 25 and 44.
• Depression and anxiety are the leading cause of disability in women.

The workplace is key:

• Depression is seldom dealt with at home.
• The workplace is critical for early detection and treatment referral.
• Early detection is essential as there is an 80 percent success rate in treating depression.

At Women’s College Hospital we believe acknowledging the factors and forces that contribute to this growing epidemic and understanding conditions like addiction, trauma and reproductive mental health and how they manifest in the workplace are critical first steps.

The X Effects Conference will bring together clinicians, professionals and corporate executives and generate dialogue around an issue that is having a major impact on women, their families, the workplace and the healthcare system.