Yonah Budd

The Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada has released a report with some interesting troubling results pertaining to pandemic and post-pandemic drinking levels, mental health, addiction.

We are here with Yonah Budd, a mental health and addiction specialist for Chorus Entertainment, who...

You can find it at yonabud.com.

Yonah, welcome to the show.

So I think for me, one of the most interesting results, and I think for you, there's some other interesting results, is during the pandemic, I feel like all these home delivery apps, like all the restaurant apps, Uber Eats, all of it.

I don't know if it was like this in Toronto, but where I was, they completely unrestricted

at-home booze delivery this was something that was like very difficult to get uh all of a sudden restaurants could deliver cocktails with a little saran wrap on top of the plastic thing and we were all drinking at home all the rage was ordering at-home drinking cocktail kits everyone got into mixology i myself had just sobered up before the pandemic so i thought it was kind of lame but at-home drinking was something that really surged during the pandemic

which I guess is fine.

We were stuck at home, but it looks like drinking levels, you know, six, five years later, they haven't really gone down the way you'd expect.

I'm not saying there weren't daily problem drinkers.

I don't know what we're blaming John Doe, but let's use John Doe as the example.

I'm saying the daily at home drinking increased during the pandemic and those levels haven't dropped according to this report.

Like if we look at 2019 levels and look at levels today, it's gone up by about 40%.

Like it was 7% of people drank on the daily and now it's about 10% of people.

I know these percentages are getting thrown around a lot, but it's 40% increase over six years.

Is that not alarming to you?

Sure.

I think my focus on drinking is perhaps clouded by my own sobriety journey.

But things like people reporting serious psychological distress, that's gone up by like two times.

People who've had suicidal ideation on the regular, that's gone up by like, I don't know, 75%.