Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Canada is undergoing a crisis in mental health, and the federal government has established a strategy that is attentive to mental health among Black people. Our objective is to inform this work by understanding the relationships between race, discrimination, and mental health outcomes. METHODS: We obtained a sample of 17,526 respondents from the Canadian Community Health Survey Rapid Response Module on Experiences of Discrimination, which asked about respondent race and other sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics, the validated Williams Everyday Discrimination Scale, and mental health outcomes (mood and anxiety disorders, substance use, and self-rated mental health). We ran descriptive statistics as well as crude, sociodemographic- and socioeconomic-adjusted logistic regressions to assess relationships in the overall sample between race and the Williams Discrimination Scale and between the Williams Discrimination Scale and mental health outcomes. RESULTS: Compared to white people, Black people had two to three times the odds of experiencing frequent discrimination, while Asian people were not statistically different from white people. Frequent experiences of everyday discrimination in the sample were associated with between 40% and two times the odds of experiencing adverse mental health outcomes, though white people had the highest prevalences of adverse mental health outcomes in the sample. CONCLUSION: In Canada, experiences of discrimination can produce adverse mental health outcomes, and Black people in particular experience high degrees of discrimination compared to all other racial groups. National health surveys should contain larger and more representative samples of non-white individuals, which allow for more complex analyses.