The survey, released Thursday, indicates 14 per cent of Canadian adults have been diagnosed with depression by a doctor, with a higher incidence in women (18 per cent) than men (11 per cent). Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed (72 per cent) know someone who has been diagnosed with depression.

Eight in 10 Canadians said they believe depression is a "life-threatening illness," while just 24 per cent think depressed people could "just snap out of it if they really wanted to."

Seventy-nine per cent of workers said they believe a person diagnosed with depression would keep the fact secret to avoid damaging their future opportunities at work, and nearly half believe someone missing work because of depression would be more likely "to get into trouble and maybe even fired." They're often right, says Donna Hardaker, community mental health analyst at the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association and co-founder of its Mental Health Works program. Workplaces are still "in the Dark Ages" in terms of dealing with depression, she says, and the slippery nature of mental illness only adds to the challenge.

"When someone has depression, the symptoms co-workers see are behavioural," Hardaker says. "They don't see someone who needs to lie down, they don't see someone who has to go for chemotherapy treatment. Instead, they see someone who may be irritable, withdrawn, not meeting deadlines, blaming people for problems."

Despite the challenges of recognizing and understanding the disease, the poll suggested a vast majority of Canadians (88 per cent) believe CEOs should make helping employees with depression "a key human resources priority." Mental illness costs Canadian businesses $33 billion a year in productivity, says the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health. The workplace is an ideal environment in which to identify the early signs of depression, Hardaker says.

Business tends to be performance-oriented and filled with benchmarks and deadlines that act as red flags when they're not met. In contrast, people's personal lives are complex so it can be harder to notice when there's a problem, she says. The poll results are promising, in her view, because they show the public is starting to recognize the seriousness of depression and the necessity of accommodating it in the workplace like any other disease. However, Hardaker says there is still a long way to go in educating employers about mental illness and the best ways to help their employees cope. "I see managers who really want to do the right thing and they're afraid of doing the wrong thing, so many times they don't do anything at all," she says.

The Ipsos Reid study was conducted across the United States and Canada, with 1,000 adult Canadians and 1,000 Americans participating.

The Canadian statistics didn't differ significantly from the North American averages. The poll results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The poll is being released at the U.S.-Canada Forum on Mental Health, hosted by Canadian ambassador Michael Wilson at the embassy in Washington.

The forum brings together leaders in the fields of business, science and mental health in an effort to develop treatments for mental illness and craft a strategy to deal with its toll on the North American labour force.

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