Telehealth demand for mental health care is rising in Canada

Demand for virtual mental health care in Canada has not levelled off since the pandemic pushed clinics online — it has kept climbing, even as diagnosed rates of depression and anxiety have risen. The harder problem is what happens before the video call ever starts: getting through to book it. National data shows about a third of people with a diagnosed mood, anxiety or substance use disorder report their care needs as unmet or only partially met, and half of Canadians referred for community mental health counselling wait at least a month just to be seen.

Virtual mental health visits are no longer the exception

A decade ago, seeing a psychiatrist, psychologist or counsellor by phone or video was the workaround for people who couldn’t get into an office. That has changed. According to Statistics Canada’s Mental Health and Access to Care Survey, among people who talked to a health professional about their mental health, 51.4% of those conversations happened by telephone and 27.7% happened by video call — with video use climbing as high as 37.6% among people seeing a psychotherapist, compared with just 5.1% for family doctors (Statistics Canada). In-person contact, at 57.0%, is still the most common single channel, but it no longer describes most of what’s happening — a large share of Canadians’ actual contact with the mental health system now happens over a phone line or a screen, not in a waiting room.

That shift lines up with a rise in diagnosed prevalence. The same survey found the share of Canadians meeting criteria for a major depressive episode rose from 4.7% in 2012 to 7.6% in 2022, and generalized anxiety disorder roughly doubled, from 2.6% to 5.2%, over the same period — increases the report attributes in part to the pandemic years and in part to greater willingness to report symptoms. More than 5 million people in Canada met the diagnostic criteria for a mood, anxiety or substance use disorder in the 12 months before the survey was conducted (Statistics Canada).

Among adults specifically, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reports that 41% of those with a diagnosed mental health disorder said their needs went partially or completely unmet in 2024 — and that figure climbs to 52% for adults aged 18 to 34, the group most likely to reach for a virtual appointment in the first place (CIHI). About one in three Canadians with a diagnosed mental health condition also reported not getting care because of cost, a reminder that access and affordability are separate, compounding problems rather than one and the same.

The queue behind the referral is where the wait actually happens

It’s worth being precise about where in the process people get stuck, because “wait time” in mental health care usually means the interval after someone has already been referred — not the moment they first try to reach out. CIHI tracked roughly 94,000 referrals for community mental health counselling across Canadian provinces and territories in its most recent reporting year. Half of those people received care within 30 days of that referral. One in ten waited longer than four months — 131 days — before their first counselling session (CIHI).

Notice what isn’t driving the delay: the video call itself. CIHI’s own breakdown by delivery method found a median wait of 24 days for people whose counselling was ultimately delivered virtually, against 29 days for in-person counselling — virtual delivery is, if anything, a little faster once someone is in the queue. The bottleneck sits earlier, in the interval between a person deciding they need help and a provider confirming an appointment exists for them.

The bottleneck happens before the appointment is ever booked

This is the part the wait-time statistics don’t fully capture, because they only count people who successfully got a referral logged. CIHI’s broader access data shows just how strained that first point of contact already is: only 27% of Canadian adults could get a same- or next-day appointment for non-urgent care in 2024, and in a 2023 international survey of ten high-income countries, Canadian adults were the least likely of any of them to be able to see their regular provider on the same or next day (CIHI). Mental health intake sits downstream of that same strained front line — most referrals still start with a call to a family doctor’s office or a direct call to a mental health clinic, at a moment when the person calling is often already anxious, uncertain whether they’re calling the right place, or unsure what to say.

None of the national datasets cited here measure how many of those calls simply don’t get answered, or how many callers hang up rather than leave a message and wait for a callback. That’s not because it doesn’t happen; it’s because almost no clinic tracks it as a metric, which is itself worth naming plainly. A missed intake call doesn’t show up in a wait-time report — the person who couldn’t get through was never logged as a referral in the first place, so they don’t appear in the 94,000, and they don’t appear in the “unmet needs” survey unless they happen to be reached by a national interviewer months later. The gap between rising demand for virtual mental health care and the visible wait-list numbers is, in part, a measurement gap: some share of the true unmet need is invisible precisely because it never became a data point.

For a clinic, that has a very concrete operational shape. Offering virtual consults removes the geographic ceiling on demand — a person two hours away can now book the same slot as someone across the street — but it does nothing to add capacity to a reception desk that’s staffed nine to five and already fielding calls about billing, prescription renewals and general inquiries. Every call that arrives outside those hours, or during a Monday-morning peak, competes for the same few phone lines. The person calling to ask about a virtual mental health consult for the first time is, by definition, not yet a patient of record — there’s no existing relationship pulling them back if the first attempt fails.

What closing that gap looks like

Reducing that first-contact loss doesn’t require expanding a wait-list program or hiring more counsellors, both of which take years and provincial funding decisions well outside a single clinic’s control. It requires making sure the front door itself is never closed — that a call asking to book a first virtual mental health consult gets a response regardless of what time it comes in, how busy reception is, or whether the caller knows the right department to ask for.

This is the specific problem Arbol is built around: an AI voice and WhatsApp agent that answers every inbound call and message for a clinic, day or night, and gets a booking or a callback confirmed on the spot instead of leaving the caller to try again later. It doesn’t change how many counsellors or psychiatrists a clinic has, and it doesn’t shorten a provincial counselling wait-list — but it does make sure that the number of people who ask for help matches the number who actually get logged as having asked, which is the step every wait-time statistic above assumes already happened.

None of this replaces the work of expanding counselling capacity in Canada, which is a policy and funding question well beyond what any single clinic decides. But a clinic that already offers virtual mental health consults is uniquely positioned to close the smaller, fully solvable gap: making sure that everyone who tries to reach it actually gets through. For more on how proactive, always-on contact changes clinic operations more broadly, see how Arbol works across English-speaking markets, and how the same access gap plays out differently in Australia’s telehealth mental health system and on the UK’s mental health waiting lists.