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The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health says psychological distress among Ontario youth appears to have decreased since the pandemic, but still remains high.
The centre’s latest Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey found 46 per cent of youth in Grades 7 to 12 reported a “moderate to serious level” of psychological distress in 2025.
That’s down from 51 per cent of students when the last survey was conducted in 2023.
Lead investigator Hayley Hamilton says the decrease is “encouraging” but the percentage of students struggling with their mental health is still significantly higher than it was more than a decade ago.
Hamilton says the rise in reported mental health issues over the years could be due to factors such as social media but could also reflect a decrease in stigma and more willingness to talk about psychological distress.
As for what’s happened in the last two years, Hamilton pointed to the resources devoted to youth mental health.
“There’s been so much effort to try to help youth recognizing the challenges that they have experienced,” Hamilton told CBC News.
Hamilton also says CAMH saw an encouraging increase in students accessing mental health services at schools.
WATCH | Teens across Canada rely on Kids Help Phone at night:
Record number of young people calling Kids Help Phone crisis line in the North
A record number of young people are staying up at night and calling the Kids Help Phone over mental health issues. It’s a phenomenon that’s especially prevalent in some parts of the North. As CBC’s Saloni Bhugra reports, it’s the most dramatic spike the non-profit has ever seen.
Hanna Grover of Surrey, B.C., began feeling anxious when she was in Grade 8. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she began to feel the consequences of the isolation and turned to the support of her family and various creative outlets to cope.
“That feeling of anxiety and helplessness, it’s very difficult to transition out of it if you don’t have accessible support or a loved one to speak to,” Grover said.
Grover started Poet2Poet, a site which says it has connected youth through creative expression in over 70 countries.
Hanna Grover started Poet2Poet to connect youth worldwide through creative expression to share the emotions and reflections behind their work. (Adnan Hussain/Submitted by Hanna Grover)
Journalling and writing poetry was, she said, her way “of acknowledgement and recognizing that these feelings are real and matter.”
The 2025 survey, released Monday, shows that fewer students are using alcohol and drugs than in the past and that they’re waiting longer before trying them for the first time.
1 in 10 students laying sports bets in 2025
But it also revealed a dramatic rise in online gambling, with one in 10 students laying sports bets in 2025 compared to one in 100 in 2017.
Almost one-quarter of students reported seeing or hearing advertising for online gambling sites every day.
Hamilton, who is co-director of CAMH’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research, said the increase in online gambling came as Ontario regulations changed to allow non-government, private betting sites.
Despite age restrictions on those sites, “the students are finding a way to gamble,” she said.
The Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey has been conducted every two years since 1977 in school boards across the province.
The 2025 survey included 11,108 students in Grades 7 to 12 in 1,147 classes in 246 schools in 42 school boards. The students completed anonymous online questionnaires between December 2024 and June 2025.
The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.