Join Us: Children’s Mental Health Ontario, Twitter Chat
Alongside Children’s Mental Health Ontario and its Digital Ambassadors, Responsible Communications will be spearheading an upcoming Twitter Chat on Oct. 1, 2018 as part of Mental Illness Awareness Week in Canada.
It will be the sixth chat hosted by the organization to raise awareness and create opportunities for parents, youth, healthcare workers and all others in our communities who are affected by children and youth mental health. Over the previous five chats, more than 28 million impressions were generated using the hashtag #kidscantwait (Impression is the total number of times tweets were delivered to Twitter streams, or the number of overall potential impressions generated).
The chats are a success for a myriad of reasons:
- They provide an outlet for families and youth, as well as healthcare workers and teachers, affected by mental healthcare to have their voice heard and share experiences with like-minded people.
- The chats are supported by the Children’s Mental Health Ontario Digital Ambassadors – a crew of specially-selected social media influencers who range from police officers to parenting authors to parents who are catalysts for change in their communities.
- While social media trends are moving toward other tools like Instagram, many government and mental health industry stakeholders who are decision-makers and policy-makers in children’s mental health are using Twitter and paying attention to these chats.
For these chats, we created the hashtag #kidscantwait.
This hashtag was inspired by a youth speaker at a Children’s Mental Health Ontario conference who captivated audiences with stories about youth across our province who are affected by mental illness and languishing on long wait times. They simply cannot wait any longer.
In the upcoming chat, people will be given an opportunity to share ideas on what they would like to see from the new provincial government in the way of improvements to children and youth mental healthcare.
Here’s a brief summary of what politics and governments have done for the children’s mental health sector.
- In 15 years of Liberal government, there was such little investment in the sector which contributed to waitlists of up to 18 months in some communities and further clogged hospital emergency departments. Many other communities continue to lack the right services to provide the right treatments when and where people need it.
- During the 2018 Ontario election, Children’s Mental Health Ontario, with support from Responsible Communications ensured that mental healthcare for children and youth was an election issue. All three parties committed to investing in children’s mental healthcare.
- The former Wynne government made a promise to inject more than a billion dollars into the healthcare sector, promising funding for children and youth services, and rolled out a preliminary five per cent of the funding prior to losing the election.
- Premier Ford’s government is still new, and the sector and parents are waiting to hear what services it will fund and how services will change in Ontario.
The upcoming chat won’t be all politics.
We want to encourage participants to share tips and experiences on back-to-school anxiety and classroom bullying and share ideas on how they will be marking Mental Illness Awareness Week. The chat will be hosted by Kim Moran, CEO, Children’s Mental Health Ontario; Ann Douglas, parenting author; and Laurie McCann, Toronto police officer and community activist.
These chats are honest and real. We do not offer freebies or pay people to participate. All our welcome to participate.
Join us.
