Some good news on mental health, via BDC. 

The Crown lender’s annual survey of how entrepreneurs are coping with stress found that three-quarters of respondents said they were satisfied with their mental health, somewhat better than last year. Fewer reported that they lacked energy at least once a week, and a greater number of respondents said they would seek help if they needed it. 

“There’s a little bit less [of] people feeling anxious,” Isabelle Hudon, BDC’s chief executive officer, said in an interview at her office in Montreal. 

Good news is a relative thing when it comes to mental health, a sleeper issue among the various forces that have aligned to make this such a challenging moment for the economy. 

It is a variable in Canada’s productivity problem. Almost half of all respondents to the BDC survey reported feeling depressed at least once per week—slightly less than last year, but still alarmingly high. Imagine the missed orders and bottlenecks if half the labour pool suffered from a weekly migraine, or if the same percentage of CEOs were forced to take temporary leave to treat some physical ailment.

The marginal improvement in overall mental health probably relates to inflation, which 48 per cent of respondents identified as a source of stress, down six percentage points from the previous survey. The consumer price index was still increasing at annual rates of around four per cent last spring, too fast for the Bank of Canada to consider cutting interest rates. But inflation gradually slowed, and by the end of the year governor Tiff Macklem was signalling that rate cuts this year were likely. Data this spring has made that even more probable, as inflation is now below three per cent. 

“Either as good humans we got used to [inflation], or because compared to last year there’s a light at the end of the tunnel that interest rates might move in favour of entrepreneurs,” Hudon said. “People are not seeing the world as dark as they saw the situation last year.” 

The Mental Health Commission of Canada estimated a decade ago that one in five Canadians suffered a mental illness, and that the cost amounted to about $50 billion a year. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which almost certainly accelerated that trend. 

Histories of the Great Influenza of 1918-19 talk of depression and other mental illnesses as common among survivors. COVID likely had the same effect. Canadian insurers paid $650 million in mental health claims in 2022, an increase of 10 per cent from the previous year and nearly double what they dispersed in 2019, according to the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. You read that right: nearly double pre-pandemic levels. 

“They’re really into mental health, because of the number of claims they need to absorb and pay for all of this,” said Hudon, herself a former executive at Sun Life Financial. 

BDC is also really into mental health. Hudon sees it as an extension of the institution’s role as a development bank. “You want a healthy entrepreneur ecosystem,” she said. 

Hudon won’t be setting up a health unit under the BDC umbrella. But she’s experimenting with things that don’t stray too far from the institution’s competencies. The survey collects data and subtly allows respondents to assess their own mental health in private. In January, BDC offered to cover three hours of virtual talk therapy for 550 clients on a first-come-first-served basis, an experiment meant to test whether a bank could do more than simply promote good mental health. It helps amplify the stories of entrepreneurs such as Peter Neal and Dominic Gagnon, and to normalize mental illness for a demographic—many of the entrepreneurs surveyed are older white men—that Hudon senses still tends to associate depression and burnout with weakness. 

The quarter of respondents who said they were dissatisfied with their mental health tended to be younger than 45, operators of businesses that had been running for less than three years, women and members of diverse groups. That’s useful information. BDC already knows that those types of entrepreneurs are the ones that find it hardest to raise capital, so the institution could make a difference by simply doing its job. Hudon said she’s creating a “community banking” team that will have a “laser focus” on increasing lending to underrepresented groups in BDC’s portfolio, including women, Indigenous, Black, newcomers and rural businesses.  

But Hudon also knows that the BDC clients who say they are struggling with mental health are also the ones that have been socialized to talk about it. Topics such as depression and suicide are still taboo for many older men, who grew up believing that stress was something you endured, not something you tried to manage by talking to strangers.  

When BDC announced in January that it would cover a few hours of talk therapy for its clients, I had bet the slots would fill up within days. I might have been influenced by my own experience with burnout. Four months later, only half of the 550 sessions on offer have been claimed. That suggests to me that a lot of entrepreneurs are letting their work ethics and outdated notions of mental health get in the way of taking care of themselves. Hudon agreed. 

“We need to keep the conversation going,” she said.