New brain sciences centre at Sunnybrook hospital aims to accelerate research....

“Even before the pandemic, numbers were rising but certainly now there is an explosion,” said Levitt, who’s chief of the brain sciences program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “There is no doubt that all the social pressures that have come from the last two years of the pandemic have had a dramatic impact on a variety of people who were already ill at the beginning of the pandemic but also those people who weren’t necessarily ill … and that is putting incredible strain and stress on the health-care system right now.

"The wait times for mental health services in the community are much greater than they’ve been historically (as are) the number of people seeking help.”

A new facility that is currently under construction at Sunnybrook and is expected to be completed late next year aims to address the upswing in demand for brain health services while offering an integrated approach to brain health.

“The in-patient service is going to be expanded,” Levitt said. “We’ll have more adult beds and more youth beds than we had before and that would be helpful to the system.”

The three-storey, 121,000-square-foot facility, called the Garry Hurvitz Brain Sciences Centre, will bring together specialties such as psychiatry, neurology and neurosurgery to produce a comprehensive model of patient care and accelerate research.

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“We’re bringing all these specialties together for the benefit of our patients. … They get seen quicker and decisions and treatments are made quicker,” Levitt said. “That marriage of the nervous system from the neck up is not something that’s done in many places, but we believe that that’s going to be the best way to (provide) care.”

Levitt suggested the new facility will not only allow for more collaboration among specialists but also with researchers.

“We’re all about discovery and trying to discover new and different treatments,” he said. “The whole cycle of discovery is enhanced and made more rapid and meaningful when the clinicians who have the questions can speak with the researchers who are embedded there, and the answers can feed back to the clinicians more quickly.”

In February, Sunnybrook Foundation launched a campaign, dubbed 'For Everyone with a Brain', as a final push of a multi-year fundraising effort for the Garry Hurvitz Brain Sciences Centre. The project began in 2014 with a $20-million donation from the Garry Hurvitz Foundation.

Levitt said there’s still a lot of stigma associated with mental health and other brain conditions, noting mental illness and addictions “belong in the same breath as” any other illness.

“(The) more we understand that mental illness is part of a brain disorder, the more that stigma is reduced,” he said. “How do we get (people) to understand that when you have an episode of depression, that it’s not your fault, that there’s a sequenced treatment approach, that there’s an outcome and there’s recovery, and it’s not exactly the same as a fractured leg, but it has many of the same principles and we stigmatize one and not the other.”

The new brain sciences building will also be home to the province’s first Circadian Sleep Centre, which will allow for longer and more accurate sleep studies.

“The key feature of this is it’s going to be soundproof and built in a way that’s isolated from the rest of the hospital and the outside world,” sleep neurologist Dr. Andrew Lim said. “There’s a lot of trial and error involved in the way we manage patients with biological clock dysfunction … and this (centre) has the potential, when it’s built and fully operational, to over the course of a day of study in the lab replace months of trial and error in arriving at a good treatment strategy.”

STORY BEHIND THE STORY: When reporter Andrew Palamarchuk learned about a campaign to raise money for the completion of a new brain sciences centre at Sunnybrook hospital, he wanted to find out more about the project and the impact it will have on patients with brain conditions.