A 10-year-old girl watches YouTube with a friend during their after-school program. An ad pops up. A two-minute quiz can tell her if she has ADHD. She takes it, of course. And just like that, she comes home to talk to her child psychiatrist dad about how she has ADHD.
This story is not unique. Mental health awareness has become one of Canada’s most visible public health projects. The messaging is everywhere: Bell Let’s Talk, school wellness e-mails, workplace campaigns, social media initiatives.
Yet despite these efforts, population-level mental health keeps declining. Medication use is increasing. How can this be?
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies self-control, has found that when people report deliberately using willpower, they succeed about half the time. When they do not report making that deliberate effort, they still succeed about one-third of the time.
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