“Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”

– World Health Organization, 2018

The mental health of an individual is directly related to their physical, social, and mental wellbeing, as such it can affect the way one thinks, interacts with others, carries out their emotions, earns an income, and enjoys life (WHO, 2018). With such a broad scope of impacts, maintaining good mental health is essential to a person’s over all wellbeing. In 2009/2010 alone, 14.4% of Canadians over one year of age acquired health care services for a mental illness (Government of Canada, 2015). Poor mental health affects people of all ages around the world, and can be linked to a broad and infinite range of influencing factors including: income, relationships, the weather, access to green space, work environment, hormones, addiction, disease, etc. Due to the wide range of factors that can effect ones mental health it is becoming increasingly important to begin to understand the potential broad drivers of poor mental health in specific regions.

This research investigates mental health emergencies in Toronto, Ontario with the goals of determining: variables that have a relationship with mental health and addiction related emergency department visits and hospitalizations, what neighbourhoods in Toronto may be at higher risk of mental health and addiction related emergency department visits and hospitalizations, and if there is fragmentation of mental health resource facilities within Toronto. To address these research goals a series of spatial analyses were conducted, including correlation analysis, exploratory regressions, Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis, Spatial Autocorrelation (Moran’s I), Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) analysis and a brief network analysis.

These methods proved to yield results establishing the significant spatial relationships between mental health and addiction related emergency department visits and hospitalizations and five explanatory variables.

GEOB479 – Final Project (Spring 2020) – Marie Claire Anderson