'Crisis level': N.L. faces shortage of psychologists as they leave public system

Access to mental health services is taking a hit in Newfoundland and Labrador as psychologists in the province continue to leave the public system en masse.

The province has the worst wait times in Canada for mental health services, according to the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association. The Newfoundland and Labrador Psychology Board also currently only lists 242 fully registered psychologists, which equates to one psychologist per 2,155 people.

Lisa Moores, a psychologist and professor at Memorial University, says the exodus of psychologists is something that's been happening for the last three years.

"We started to see a trend towards folks moving out of the public system but also different people moving out of the public system. So, more mid-career psychologists who had really made their career there -- those were the folks that we were starting to see move out and make the switch over to private practice and that's quite unusual," she told CTV's Your Morning on Wednesday.

Moores was also a co-author of a report on the state of mental health services in the province that was presented to Health Minister John Haggie last year. Among the issues highlighted in the report was the province's implementation of the "stepped care" system, which involves matching patients with the right level of care in terms of duration and intensity.

"The kind of stepped care that was used was actually a proprietary model called Stepped Care 2.0. And there were a couple of concerns around that. One is a tendency for it to encourage what we think of as something of a 'melting pot' idea of mental health," she said.

Stepped care was first pioneered in the U.K. and launched in N.L. back in 2017. But Moore says the province's implementation of the model lumped mental health treatment and mental wellness support into one area, often resulting in psychiatrists and psychologists dealing with work that could be handled by counsellors or social workers.

"It gives the idea that to some degree, mental health professionals are interchangeable, when of course, the work they do is all equally important but can be quite different and their skill sets are different," Moores said.

A February 2022 survey conducted by the Association of Psychology Newfoundland Labrador also found that 52 per cent of psychologists in the province have considered leaving their professions. These respondents expressed the desire for increased respect, increased autonomy and wanted their employer to have a better understanding of the role of psychologists.

In addition, 74 per cent of these respondents said the structural changes and the blurring of psychologist roles with counsellors had a moderate to great deal of impact.

"Our concerns are really that we're moving into a point of crisis, where the time and the effort that it will take to move out of this period will be really a serious problem for us," Moores said.

"We've seen this before and been able to kind of successfully maneuver out of it. And that's the approach that we'd like to see taken again -- a very collaborative approach with our psychologists who are on the ground practicing in these public systems and government as well."