Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

From Recovery to Discovery -- A Mental Health Peer Support Group in Halifax

2012-02-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

TODAY, Thursday, February 2nd!

Meetings

Every Thursday Evening

6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

The Hub

Halifax, Nova Scotia

The From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group is open to anyone affected by any type of mental illness, and this includes family members and friends.

TODAY, Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

The Value of a Vacation

A Peer Support Group Meeting

Please join co-facilitators Vince Daigle and Lisa Corra for this week's From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group meeting consisting of a group discussion on the topic of The Value of a Vacation.

Some of the questions to be used to guide the discussion include:

What happened to you when you took a vacation that you really enjoyed?
If you are receiving a fixed income – income assistance, disability benefits, or a retirement pension, for example – how do you define a vacation?
Do you do anything special when preparing to take a vacation?
How long should a vacation be in order for it to have value to you?
A vacation can be a chance to reflect and look at opportunities for growth, discovery, and change; can you think of an example when this happened to you?
Returning from a vacation can sometimes be a let-down, what do you do to manage for this possibility?
A change of time zones and/or your usual surroundings can sometimes be problematic in terms of staying well; have you ever had any difficulties in this regard, and, if so, how did you manage these difficulties?
What is your favourite vacation spot?

Image credit

Organized through a partnership between the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia and the Healthy Minds Cooperative, the From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group is special because it moves beyond the expectation of simply existing with minimal symptoms of mental illness. Our message is that we all have the opportunity to manifest our strengths, to recover a sense of empowerment, and to live with meaning and purpose. Through the mutual sharing of our own wisdom and experience, we are reminded to reach for hope and fulfillment in our lives, and to help one another realize our potential.

The From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group is open to anyone affected by any type of mental illness, and this includes family members and friends. The format generally involves an interactive presentation on topics of interest to the group in the first hour, and a group discussion during the second hour.

To download the From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group's meeting flyer (PDF), please click here.

If you have any questions, or would like more information, please contact:

Nadine Jacquard, Peer Support Facilitator, Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, by phoning 465-2601 (toll free 1-800-465-2601) or sending an email to ssns2@ns.sympatico.ca; or

Vince Daigle, Peer Support Worker, Healthy Minds Cooperative, by phoning 404-3504, or sending an email to healthyminds@eastlink.ca.

First Visit - Transforming Access to Community Mental Health in the Capital Health District

2012-02-02T07:30:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, February 3rd, 9:00 am!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

The Nova Scotia Hospital is located at 300 Pleasant Street, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Also see:

Stats, research lead to sooner First Visit

Community Mental Health: First Visit

The Eating Disorders Action Group - Community Forum

2012-02-02T06:30:00.001-04:00

Next Wednesday, February 8th, 7:00 pm!

Also see:

Eating Disorders Action Group

The Self-Help Connection

The Halifax Community Health Board

Halifax Community Health Board Blog

Annapolis County Support & Education Group

2012-02-02T06:30:00.000-04:00

Thursday, February 9th, 3:00 pm!

Annapolis County

Support and Education Group Meeting

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Middleton Baptist Church

111 Commercial Street

(Please use the entrance on School Street)

Middleton, Nova Scotia

A new Support and Education Group for those affected by schizophrenia or another mental health disorder will meet on the second Thursday of every month (except July and August) at the Middleton Baptist Church. Family members, caregivers, friends and those with lived experience of mental illness are welcome to attend. The next meeting will be held on Thursday, February 9th, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Please see the church secretary for the meeting room location.

For further information about this group, please contact the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia at 1-800-465-2601 or send an email to ssns@ns.sympatico.ca..

Photo credit

Wellbeing: The continuing struggle to raise awareness for mental illness

2012-02-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

An article published in the January 30th edition of the National Post:

By Melody Lau

In its first year, the Bell Let’s Talk campaign managed to rally more phone traffic than the 2010 Olympics moment when Sidney Crosby scored his famous game-winning goal, a previous Bell volume record. Now entering its second year, the campaign is bigger than ever.

The extensive five-year initiative aims to get people across the country talking about mental health, in order to create awareness and raise money to fund programs. This year, Bell will donate 5¢ to mental health for every text and long distance call made by a Bell customer on Feb. 8. Last year alone generated more than $3-million. Not with Bell? Then just hop on Twitter; every retweet about the campaign also contributes 5¢ to the cause.

“We’ve had incredible support from so many places, from our advertising partners but also from our competitors,” says Mary Deacon, chair of the project. “Just in terms of getting involved and supporting this initiative, we don’t know how big it can get, but all we want to do is do better than last year, and we’ve added so many new dimensions.”

Such forms of expansion include a heavier focus on local stories and experts, a more comprehensive website to help inform people about mental health and the addition of two new spokespeople. Joining national spokeswoman and Olympian Clara Hughes [pictured] will be actor-comedian Michel Mpambara and author, composer and performer Stefie Shock.

“Clara came forward herself and said this is something she wanted to be part of, which is remarkable for somebody obviously as busy as she is,” says Deacon, about Hughes’ role in the campaign. “She’s a remarkable human being and we’re excited to have two more spokespeople this year.”

“We wanted to ensure that the messages that we’re sending were going to resonate with our various audiences,” Deacon adds. “What we want to do is help bring a voice to mental health that it maybe hasn’t had before.”

At least one in five Canadians will suffer from mental illness in their lifetimes and Bell hopes this initiative will shine a light on the underfunded and highly stigmatized subject.

“We really felt that it was an area where we could make a difference,” says Deacon about the impetus behind Bell’s decision to back this cause.

Deacon has spent the past 25 years in the business of not-for-profits and 10 years specifically focusing on mental health issues. She is proud of Bell’s efforts, adding that, “it was really refreshing, for me, to see a company apply the same kind of talents and strengths to something that was charitable.

“At the end of the day what this means is more money for mental health programs all across the country which we really want to help.”

For more information on the initiative, visit letstalk.bell.ca

Photo credit

Statistics provided by Bell Canada:

At least 1 in 5 Canadians experiences a form of mental illness at some point in their lives – every one of us has a family member, friend or colleague who will experience mental illness

Mental health funding is modest relative to other health care issues – mental illness represents 15% of Canada’s health care burden but receives only 5% of health care funding

Just one-third of Canadians who need mental health services actually receive them

Mental illness is the number one cause of workplace disability in Canada – accounting for 30% of disability claims and 70% of disability costs

Mental illness costs the Canadian economy $51 billion each year in lost productivity – every day, 500,000 Canadians are absent from work due to a form of mental illness.

Also see:

Stefie Shock and Michel Mpambara join Clara Hughes for second annual Bell Let's Talk Day on February 8, 2012.

How antipsychotic medications cause metabolic side effects such as obesity and diabetes

2012-02-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

An media release posted today by EurekAlert!:

Sanford-Burnham study suggests that many antipsychotics affect metabolism because they activate the TGFbeta pathway -- a finding that could lead to safer therapeutics for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia patients

LA JOLLA, Calif. -- In 2008, roughly 14.3 million Americans were taking antipsychotics — typically prescribed for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or a number of other behavioral disorders — making them among the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. Almost all of these medications are known to cause the metabolic side effects of obesity and diabetes, leaving patients with a difficult choice between improving their mental health and damaging their physical health. In a paper published January 31 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) reveal how antipsychotic drugs interfere with normal metabolism by activating a protein called SMAD3, an important part of the transforming growth factor beta (TGFbeta) pathway.

The TGFbeta pathway is a cellular mechanism that regulates many biological processes, including cell growth, inflammation, and insulin signaling. In this study, all antipsychotics that cause metabolic side effects activated SMAD3, while antipsychotics free from these side effects did not. What's more, SMAD3 activation by antipsychotics was completely independent from their neurological effects, raising the possibility that antipsychotics could be designed that retain beneficial therapeutic effects in the brain, but lack the negative metabolic side effects.

"We now believe that many antipsychotics cause obesity and diabetes because they trigger the TGFbeta pathway. Of all the drugs we tested, the only two that didn't activate the pathway were the ones that are known not to cause metabolic side effects," said Fred Levine, M.D., Ph.D. [pictured], director of the Sanford Children's Health Research Center at Sanford-Burnham and senior author of the study.

In a previous study aimed at developing new insights into diabetes, Dr. Levine and his team used Sanford-Burnham's high-throughput screening capabilities to search a collection of known drugs for those that alter the body's ability to generate insulin, the pancreatic hormone that helps regulate glucose. That's when they first noticed that many antipsychotics alter the activity of the insulin gene. In this current study, the researchers set out to connect the dots between antipsychotics and insulin. In doing so, experiments in laboratory cell-lines showed that antipsychotics known to cause metabolic side effects also activated the TGFbeta pathway—a mechanism that controls many cellular functions, including the production of insulin—while the drugs without these side effects did not.

Wondering whether their initial laboratory observations were relevant to the human experience, the researchers reanalyzed previously published gene expression patterns in brain tissue from schizophrenic patients treated with antipsychotics. What they found supported their earlier findings—TGFbeta signaling was activated only in those patients receiving antipsychotic treatment. Looking further, they found that the extent to which each antipsychotic drug activated the TGFbeta pathway in human brains correlated very closely with the extent to which those same drugs activated SMAD3 and affected the insulin promoter in their cell culture experiments.

The TGFbeta pathway also plays an important role in metabolic disease in people who don't take antipsychotic medications. "It's known that people who have elevated TGFbeta levels are more prone to diabetes. So having a dysregulated TGFbeta pathway—whether caused by antipsychotics or through some other mechanism—is clearly a very bad thing," said Dr. Levine. "The fact that antipsychotics activate this pathway should be a big concern to pharmaceutical companies. We hope this new information will lead to the development of improved drugs."

###

This study was funded by a gift from Mr. T. Denny Sanford to the Sanford Children's Health Research Center at Sanford-Burnham. Co-authors include Thomas Cohen, Sanford-Burnham and University of California, San Diego; S. Sundaresh, NextBio; and Fred Levine, Sanford-Burnham.

About Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute

Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute is dedicated to discovering the fundamental molecular causes of disease and devising the innovative therapies of tomorrow. The Institute consistently ranks among the top five organizations worldwide for its scientific impact in the fields of biology and biochemistry (defined by citations per publication) and currently ranks third in the nation in NIH funding among all laboratory-based research institutes. Sanford-Burnham is a highly innovative organization, currently ranking second nationally among all organizations in capital efficiency of generating patents, defined by the number of patents issued per grant dollars awarded, according to government statistics.

Sanford-Burnham utilizes a unique, collaborative approach to medical research and has established major research programs in cancer, neurodegeneration, diabetes, and infectious, inflammatory, and childhood diseases. The Institute is especially known for its world-class capabilities in stem cell research and drug discovery technologies. Sanford-Burnham is a U.S.-based, non-profit public benefit corporation, with operations in San Diego (La Jolla), Santa Barbara, and Orlando (Lake Nona). For more information, please visit our website (http://www.sanfordburnham.org) or blog (http://beaker.sanfordburnham.org). You can also receive updates by following us on Facebook and Twitter.

Contact

Heather Buschman, Ph.D.
hbuschman@sanfordburnham.org
858-795-5343
Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute

Image credit

Also see:

Antipsychotics activate the TGFβ pathway effector SMAD3

Meet Halifax's Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team

2012-01-31T11:31:00.003-04:00

An article posted on January 27th by CBC.ca:

Halifax's Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team is shrouded in secrecy.

They don't wear uniforms, they don't travel in marked vehicles and they keep the location of their headquarters a secret, to ensure the safety of the people working there.

Mary Pyche (pictured, centre), the program leader for crisis emergency services for the Capital District Health Authority, said the idea for a crisis team first started taking shape back in 2003.

"We started putting that proposal together to the department of health. Took a little while," she said.

"By 2006, we had the partnership up and running. We also included in the partnership the IWK as well, so that the service would offer crisis response in the community right across the age spectrum."

In a recent interview with CBC News, Pyche said the team handles about 1,000 cases a month. That's based on 300 to 350 people each making multiple calls for help to the team.

Pyche said 95 per cent of those calls are new — first-time callers or people who haven't called the crisis line for at least two months. That turnover is proof the team is successful, she said.

Mary-Beth Flory (pictured, right), a registered nurse and the clinical practice leader for the crisis team, spends her mornings preparing for when the team hits the road in the afternoon and evenings.

"Come 1 o'clock in the afternoon, the team sits down," Flory said.

"That's three clinicians and our two officers who are on for those hours. And we triage again where we're going to be going throughout the day — where we need to go first, what kind of supports do we believe the team is going to be needing to provide."

Halifax Regional Police support

Four members of Halifax Regional Police are assigned to the team. They work in plain clothes.

Const. Angela Balcolm (pictured, left), one of those officers, said a uniform wouldn't work in her job.

"We try to make people as comfortable as we can and of course, decriminalize mental illness," she said.

"We're there for the person's safety, not to look into any criminal matters."

Balcolm said officers operate under a memorandum of understanding, so they don't share what they hear on the crisis team with other police officers.

Pyche said the police officers give the team extra power.

"We knew if we could partner with police, that they had the authority to do wellness checks and we could go along with them," she said.

That police presence allows the team to respond when friends or family members warn about a person's deteriorating mental condition.

Not all 'lights and sirens'

Mary-Beth Flory said the team doesn't require family intervention to act.

"A person can refer themselves," Flory said.

"It's very easy access. It can simply be a phone call. A person does not need a referral from a physician or from a psychologist to access support, and that it is a wide range of intervention and services that can be provided."

For Angela Balcolm, working with the crisis team offers a different facet to police work.

"People watch TV and they see all the shows like Cops and all that," she said.

"Is that a reality in our work? Absolutely. Sometimes."

Balcolm said her work isn't all "lights and sirens."

"I think it's huge to see this program that is assisting people because the police role in this is huge — getting people, detaining people and taking individuals into hospital, if that's what needs to happen," she said.

Photograph by Blair Rhodes / CBC

Also see:

Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team

Mental Health Mobile Crisis Team (PDF)

Emergency Crisis Services - Mental Health Services - Cape Breton District Health Authority - Call (902) 567-7767

How to refer someone to the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

From the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program (NSEPP) website:

Because NSEPP is located in Halifax, within the largest of the Nova Scotia health regions; Capital Health, the program provides direct clinical services to residents of the Capital Health district.

Referrals to NSEPP can be made by anyone, including mental health care professionals, family physicians, community agencies, educators and school counselors, family members, friends and any young person who suspects they may be suffering from a first episode of psychosis.
Criteria for referral of individuals who reside in the Capital Health district are:
Any individual between the ages of 15-35 who is suspected of experiencing or has been diagnosed with a first episode of psychosis, and
Has been treated for less than 6 months with an anti-psychotic medication, and
At the time of referral has had active, untreated psychosis for less than one year.
If you or someone you know meets these criteria please contact the NSEPP immediately at (902) 473-2976.

What can I expect if I refer someone who resides in the Capital Health district?
The intake coordinator from NSEPP will usually contact the person making the referral within 1- 2 working days after NSEPP receives the referral. The purpose of this contact is to obtain information necessary to decide if the person being referred meets the criteria for the NSEPP program and to also determine the urgency of the referral.
All information regarding new referrals is presented by the intake coordinator to the NSEPP multidisciplinary team at their weekly meeting. At that meeting the NSEPP team will determine if the individual referred meets the criteria for the NSEPP program. If a referral meets criteria, NSEPP endeavours to assess those individuals within 1-2 weeks.
Priority for appointments for initial assessments will be determined by the NSEPP team based on their assessment of the degree of urgency.
Urgent referrals are assessed, whenever possible, within 1-2 working days.
The individual making the referral to the NSEPP will be notified of the date of the assessment appointment and, after the assessment is completed, will be notified of the outcome.
If it is determined that an individual referred to NSEPP does not meet criteria for the program, the individual making the referral will be notified by the intake coordinator and will be provided with information regarding referral to other appropriate mental health services.

Under the provincial service delivery model developed by the Nova Scotia Department of Health and as one of the Dalhousie University Department of Psychiatry clinical academic programs, NSEPP provides clinical consultation for residents of the Maritime provinces who reside outside the Capital Health district.
Criteria for referral of individuals who reside in the Maritime Provinces outside of the Capital Health district:
NSEPP only accepts referrals for consultation from health care professionals including any mental health care professional or family physician, and
Any individual between the age of 15-35 who is experiencing early psychosis (within the first 5 years of the onset of psychosis), may be referred for a consultation regarding diagnosis and/or treatment.

NSEPP does not provide ongoing clinical services to individuals who reside outside of the Capital Health district.

What can I expect if I refer an individual who resides in the Maritime Provinces outside of the Capital Health district?
The intake coordinator from NSEPP will usually contact the person making the referral within 1 week after NSEPP receives the referral. The purpose of this contact is to obtain more detailed information regarding the reasons for the referral for consultation from the NSEPP.
All information regarding consultations is presented by the intake coordinator to the NSEPP multidisciplinary team at their weekly meeting. At that meeting the NSEPP team will determine if the consultation referral to NSEPP meets the program criteria for consultation from NSEPP.
If a consultation referral meets the NSEPP criteria, the NSEPP endeavours to assess all individuals referred for a consultation within 4 weeks after NSEPP receives the referral
The individual making the referral to the NSEPP will be notified of the date of the consultation appointment. Once the consultation is completed, the individual making the referral will receive a written report.
If it is determined that an individual referred to NSEPP does not meet criteria for referral for a consultation from NSEPP the individual making the referral will be notified by the intake coordinator and will be provided with information regarding referral to other appropriate mental health services.

At this time, persons referred for a consultation with the NSEPP must be willing to travel to Halifax/Dartmouth Nova Scotia for an assessment

To make a referral for a consultation please contact (902) 473-2976.

Image credit

Also see:

Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program - Information for Family Members (PDF)

Mending Minds

Strengthening Families Together - HRM

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

Ongoing!

Cole Harbour

and

Lower Sackville

Do you have a relative or friend living with a serious mental illness?

Would you like to learn more about his/her illness?

Strengthening Families Together, a ten-week program for families and friends, provides information, skill building, and support.

Delivered by family members who have direct experience with the psychiatric illness of a loved one, and enhanced by invited speakers with topical expertise, Strengthening Families Together is a Canadian-based educational program focusing on:

Facts about psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression
Early intervention & recovery
Treatments & supports
Coping with the challenges of daily life
Navigating the mental health system

There is no cost to participate in the Strengthening Families Together program. Each Strengthening Families Together session runs for 10 consecutive weeks (not including statutory holidays), and two hours are allotted on a single day each week (with a break half way through).

The HRM Chapter of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia
is hosting the next two sessions

Tuesdays

6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Bedford-Sackville Community Mental Health Clinic

Cobequid Community Health Centre

40 Freer Lane

Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia

Thursdays

6:30 to 8:30 pm

Cole Harbour / Eastern HRM Community Mental Health Clinic

Cole Harbour Place

51 Forest Hills Parkway

Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia

Registration Is Free!

To register for either 10-week session, please contact Donna Methot by calling 462-8658 or sending an e-mail to hrmchapterssns@accesswave.ca. There is still time to register for either of these ongoing sessions!

For further information on the Strengthening Families Together program, please click here.

I am not sick, I don't need help!

2012-01-18T07:30:00.000-04:00

Dr. Xavier Amador is an internationally sought-after speaker, clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City, the Founder and Director of the LEAP™ Institute and author of eight books including the national best seller I’m Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help!™

In this video he talks about dealing with anosognosia, the lack of insight regarding a mental illness. The video was recorded during the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's Annual Conference in 2005.

For a PowerPoint presentation on Dr. Amador's Listen-Empathize-Agree-Partner (LEAP) approach, click here.

Part 1 of 2 (57 minutes)

Part 2 of 2 (53 minutes)

This video was reviewed by Schizophrenia.com on December 27, 2006. To read the review, please click here.

Other videos featuring Dr. Amador:

2011 Nordic Psychiatry Academy Interview with Dr. Amador

"I am not Sick, I don't need help!" presentation at the 2011 Nordic Psychiatry Academy

Anosognosia Workshop — July 3, 2010 (NAMI Conference)

Also see:

I am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help! How to help someone with mental illness accept treatment. 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovery Quilt Raffle

2012-01-10T07:04:00.000-04:00

Theme - Support

Draw Date - Saturday, May 5th, 2012!

Please click on the photograph to magnify it.

Help support the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia by purchasing tickets on a hand-made Recovery Quilt ($1,200 value). Tickets are $2.00 each or 3 for $5.00.

To purchase tickets, please contact the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia by telephone at (902) 465-2601 or 1-800-465-2601 (toll-free in Nova Scotia), or send an email to ssns@ns.sympatico.ca.

The draw will take place during the 4th Annual Road to Recovery Walk held on May 5th, 2012, at the Olympic Community Centre, 2304 Hunter Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia Lottery Licence No.: AGD005716-11

Key facts and trends in mental health: Updated figures and statistics

2012-01-07T09:30:00.000-04:00

Please click on the image to magnify it.

To download the entire document, please click here.

Also see:

The NHS Confederation

Mental Health for All Coffee House

2012-01-05T22:54:00.002-04:00

Every Saturday, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm!

Bloomfield Centre, Rm 114, 2786 Agricola Street, Halifax

Please click on the image to magnify it.

Also see:

CMHA Halifax-Dartmouth Branch

HRM Family Education & Support Group

2012-01-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Monday, February 13th, 7:00 pm!

HRM Chapter of the SSNS

Family Education & Support Group Meeting

Family members, friends, co-workers, and other supporters of those living with schizophrenia and related illnesses are cordially invited to attend Family Education & Support Group meetings of the HRM Chapter. The next meeting is ...

Date
Monday, February 13th, 2012

Time
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Place
Room 1243A, Halifax Infirmary
Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre
1796 Summer Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Agenda

7:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Topic

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Psychosis

with

Dr. Jason Morrison
Staff Psychiatrist, Capital District Health Authority
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the mostly widely used and best studied psychological intervention in mental health. It can be helpful for people with psychosis to help with symptoms such as ongoing delusions, chronic hallucinations, anxiety, and depression, as well as problems with relationships, self-esteem, assertiveness, etc. In this presentation Dr. Morrison will outline the basic principles of CBT and how they can be used in people with psychosis giving case examples. A focus will be on the principles and assumptions of CBT for psychosis that may allow family members to better understand and communicate with their loved one.

8:15 pm to 9:00 pm

Group Discussion

To download the HRM Chapter's brochure, click here (PDF).

To join the HRM Chapter of the SSNS, or for more information, contact Donna Methot at (902) 462-8658 or send an email to hrmchapterssns@accesswave.ca.

The HRM Chapter of the SSNS will accept members from outside the boundaries of Halifax Regional Municipality.

Photograph of downtown Halifax by Derek Rodgers.

Support for Family and Friends of Persons Living with Mental Illness

2012-01-05T07:30:00.000-04:00

Monday, February 13th, 7:00 pm!

New Minas

A Self-Help Group in Kings County, Nova Scotia

Caring for a loved one who is dealing with a mental illness can require emotional and practical support. You are not alone. This self-help group was started in the fall of 2008 to share personal experiences in response to the need of support for the families and friends of persons living with serious mental illness.

While it originated through families involved in the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia (SSNS), the group feels it can offer support to families dealing with a wide range of brain illnesses, including psychosis (a break with reality), major depression, and bipolar disorder. This is not a resource group to provide technical, medical or legal aid, or for advocacy - although our experiences may have touched on these issues. Everything shared within the group is confidential.

We meet on the second Monday of each month from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, except then this day is a statutory holiday. Meetings are not held during the summer months of July and August.

Location

Evangeline Club
8752 Commercial Street
New Minas, Nova Scotia

If someone you know or meet might be interested, please encourage them to contact us through the SSNS by calling 1-800-465-2601 (toll-free in Nova Scotia) or by emailing us directly at kc_schizophrenia_society@hotmail.com.

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia exists to improve the quality of life for those affected by schizophrenia and psychosis through education, support programs, public policy and research ... including their families.

Helping hands graphic courtesy of Lincalinca.

Pictou County Support & Education Group

2012-01-05T07:00:00.001-04:00

Tuesday, February 14th, 7:00 pm!

Pictou County

Support and Education Group Meeting

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

NSCC Pictou Campus, Room B166

39 Acadia Avenue

Stellarton, Nova Scotia

A new Support and Education Group for those affected by schizophrenia or another serious mental disorder will meet on the second Tuesday of every month (except July & August) at the Nova Scotia Community College in Stellarton. Family members, caregivers, friends and those with lived experience of mental illness are welcome to attend. The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 14th, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Room B166 is located on the first floor (use back entrance of school).

For further information about this group, please contact the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia at 1-800-465-2601 or send an email to ssns@ns.sympatico.ca.

Image credit

NAMI Principles of Support

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

National Alliance on Mental Illness (United States)

Principles of Support

We will see the individual first, not the illness.

We recognize that mental illnesses are medical illnesses that may have environmental triggers.

We understand that mental illnesses are traumatic events.

We aim for better coping skills.

We find strength in sharing experiences.

We reject stigma and do not tolerate discrimination.

We won’t judge anyone’s pain as less than our own.

We forgive ourselves and reject guilt.

We embrace humor as healthy.

We accept we cannot solve all problems.

We expect a better future in a realistic way.

We will never give up hope.

Source

Healthy Minds Series

2012-01-04T09:00:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, February 15th, 6:30 pm!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

Kings County Chapter of the SSNS

2012-01-04T08:30:00.001-04:00

Meetings of the Kings County Chapter of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia are held the third Wednesday of each month, beginning at 7:00 pm, at the Kentville Lions Club, 78 River Street, Kentville, Nova Scotia. Meetings are not held during the summer months of July and August.

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

7:00 pm

Kentville Lions Hall

78 River Street

Kentville, Nova Scotia

The Kings County Chapter of the SSNS

presents

Alternative / Substitute Decision Makers

Appointing a Family Member of Someone with a Mental Illness

with

Leroy M. Lenethan, QC

Taylor MacLellan Cochrane

Kentville, Nova Scotia

Open to the Public - Everyone Welcome!

Snowstorm Information

If schools are closed because of weather, this meeting will be cancelled.

Board of Directors of the Kings County Chapter

Front row: Pam Langille, Rick Ball, Margaret Burton

Middle row: Roger Cann, Margie MacNeil, Tony Nette

Back row: John Eakin, Sadie Cann, Pat MacLean

Please click on the photograph to enlarge it.

Also see:

Support for Family and Friends of Persons Living with Mental Illness: A Self-Help Group in Kings County, Nova Scotia

Lunenburg County Chapter of the SSNS

2012-01-04T08:30:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, February 21st, 7:00 pm!

In September 2011, the Lunenburg County Chapter moved its monthly support meetings for people living with mental illness, their family members, and friends, to Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 68 Alexandra Avenue, Bridgewater.

The fifth regular meeting in the new location will take place on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Meetings are every held the third Tuesday of every month, except during the summer months of July and August. For more information please call (902) 527-1893 or (902) 527-1692 or visit ssnslcc.blogspot.com.

Cumberland County Chapter of the SSNS

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, February 21st, 7:00 pm!

Cumberland County Chapter meetings are held the third Tuesday of each month, beginning at 7:00 pm, in the Dr. Carson & Marion Murray Community Centre, 6 Main Street, Springhill, Nova Scotia. Meetings are not held during the months of July and August.

Photograph courtesy of the Town of Springhill.

Yarmouth area attracts MDs

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

An article published in the January 3rd edition of The Chronicle Herald:

By Brian Medel, Yarmouth Bureau

YARMOUTH — Several physicians, including a number of psychiatrists, began practising in southwestern Nova Scotia during the summer and fall of 2011.

Three psychiatrists joined Southwest Health recently, bringing the number of psychiatrists to six in Nova Scotia’s westernmost health district.

All psychiatrist vacancies for the district are filled for the first time in more than 10 years, Southwest Health said in a news release.

Dr. Olufemi Banjo came in August, followed by Dr. Razi Hemani in September and Dr. Lourdes Soto-Moreno (pictured) in October.

"It certainly is good news, and hopefully we’ll hold on to them; there’s certainly the need," said John Roswell, a Digby Clare Mental Health Volunteers co-ordinator, on Sunday.

"It’s terrific if we have the full complement. Hopefully, it will mean that people get to see a psychiatrist and eliminate the lengthy wait process.

"It has been practically impossible to get to see a psychiatrist within six months, and it’s very heartening to hope that wait times may be decreased somewhat because of this."

The common wisdom is that 20 per cent of people will require psychiatric services or will experience a mental illness at some point during their lifetime, said Roswell.

The reporting of mental illness and the number of people seeking help has increased, he said.

Dr. Faten Germanus began working at a family medical practice in Barrington Passage in December. She is not yet accepting patients but an announcement will be made soon when she is ready to take on new patients, according to a news release.

Dr. Navdeep Mangat also began working in Digby General Hospital’s emergency department in December and will provide services at the Digby Well Womens Clinic starting this month.

And southwestern Nova Scotia residents with no family doctor but who have high blood pressure may take advantage of a new cardiovascular program at Yarmouth Regional Hospital, to be based in the facility’s wellness centre.

(bmedel@herald.ca)

Photo credit

Promoting Recovery in Mental Health: Mobilizing Knowledge & Strengthening Partnerships

2012-01-03T18:52:00.000-04:00

Friday, March 23rd!

Whitby, Ontario

Please click on an image to magnify it.

To download a PDF version of the document, please click here.

Healthy Minds Cooperative Newsletter - January 2012

2012-01-03T07:01:00.000-04:00

Please click on the image to magnify it.

To download the entire newsletter (PDF), please click here.

Also see:

Healthy Minds Cooperative

Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) - Dartmouth

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

Thursday, April 26th & Friday, April 27th!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

To download the registration form (Microsoft Word), please click here.

For more information about ASIST please click here.

SSNS Facebook Page

2012-01-02T07:01:00.000-04:00

Blessings from schizophrenia? Believe me, they exist

2011-12-27T08:12:00.000-04:00

An article published in the today's edition of The Globe and Mail:

By Anne Aspler (pictured)

There was a ticking time bomb in my head that deactivated at the age of 26: the probability of schizophrenia. That’s when, for first-degree relatives, the statistical likelihood of developing the disease drops from 13 per cent to that of the general population: 1 per cent.

My mom is afflicted with schizophrenia. Despite never having had signs or symptoms, I used to live in constant fear that, one day, I might develop it. The path of my life was driven by this fear. I overworked myself to ensure a livelihood that would enable escape from the stigma of mental illness and unemployment. Becoming a doctor seemed the best I could do to champion my own mental sanity, and to further understand an illness that has never made sense to me.

For some, Christmas aggravates their heart failure – all those salty holiday indulgences. For others, the season precipitates their “brain failure” – the stress, anxiety and loneliness is amplified by the process of reflection on years past.

For part of last year’s holiday season, I found myself on the crisis-psychiatry team at one of the busiest inner-city centres in Canada: St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto. “Crazy” became the new norm, all day, every day, suicide and self-harm an acceptable and prevalent psychological exit.

My worst moment of flashback to my own experiences occurred when I had to make a phone call to the Children’s Aid Society. I’d just spent an hour developing a good rapport with a newly divorced, newly unemployed, suicidal single parent – courageous in seeking help. Calling CAS was a decision that would result in the removal of her children from her home – at Christmas.

To me, it was the ultimate betrayal of her trust. I felt as though I had betrayed my own mother. Instead of going home for the holidays last year, I externalized my distress by going to Haiti as a volunteer physician working on cholera-relief efforts.

As early as Grade 3, I had an understanding of the societal taboos around mental disease. That year, our art-project assignment was to “depict your parent’s career in a drawing.”

My mom? Unemployed. And so I developed a knack for creativity. I didn’t understand exactly what was wrong with my mother, so making up a career for her wasn’t a big stretch.

In high school, my sister and I were recruited for a University of Alberta study of children with a parent who had schizophrenia. Enrolling in this was like facing my biggest fear. I was sure the survey would uncover that, secretly, my mental stamina of steel had been blocking out symptoms that would eventually resurface with a vengeance.

Quite the opposite happened: It was a first step toward freedom. Not only did they declare my sister and I mentally “healthy”; they did something far more important to me – they normalized the disease.

I understand now that “mentally healthy versus ill” is an often unhelpful dichotomy. The psyche of the population exists on a spectrum. Scientifically, we have constructed an arbitrary standard. Past a certain point of dysfunctionality, some will be labelled, recommended for therapy and medically treated.

The rest of us can retain our status as “normal” and obtain socially acceptable therapy in the form of free counselling from family members and friends, self-therapy in the form of reflection, and perhaps moderate doses of self-medication.

Even for one individual, mental wellness fluctuates immensely over time. Practising medicine has reaffirmed for me that there is not one among us who is 100-per-cent mentally sound in all day-to-day exchanges and decision-making. Most of us could probably cite one or two mental hang-ups they could do away with. Thankfully, we escape any permanent labelling and write these off as a mood, an anxiety, impulse or worry.

I realized I'm tired of the silence around mental illness. I'm tired of contributing to the stigma by hiding the reality that these patients are our sisters and brothers, our parents, our closest friends – the ones in our lives whom we love but don’t know how to reach out to.

The reality? My mother is a great parent. With age, I’ve come to appreciate that her demeanour has given me a positive outlook on life; and it has imbued me with an inordinate capacity to tolerate chaos and disruption. They are traits that have served me well as an emergency resident physician in Toronto and working overseas in resource-poor settings in South America, Asia and Africa.

It's also taught me to value my clarity of mind and to put it to use. It gave me the opportunity to benefit firsthand from Canada’s social safety network. It has bred a doctor and a teacher (my sister) who will be strong lifelong advocates for redressing social inequity.

To my colleagues who work with those affected by mental illness: Thank you for showing them patience and understanding and treating them as equals, even when society, or sometimes their own family, doesn’t.

My mom has really done her best. She’s spent her entire life struggling to cope with the mind inside of her, as well as to cope with the reactions of the world around her.

She’s amazing, really. My sister and I will probably try to micromanage her symptoms until the end of her days. But we love her. And we owe her and her illness everything.

Anne Aspler lives in Toronto.

Photo credit

Whispers - A collection of poems by Brian Malay

2011-12-15T07:30:00.001-04:00

Published by Gaspereau Press, Whispers is a collection of poems written between 2000 and 2009 by Brian Malay (1983-2010).

Compiled and edited after his death, Whispers provides insight into the joy of what it means to be fully alive and seeking answers to everyday mysteries, as well as the pain and sorrow of Brian’s truly exceptional nature.

From his early years until the last days of his life, Brian expressed himself through his writing. He was an imaginative free thinker whose poetry reflects a keen sense of his own world and the world about him.

Although Brian lived with schizophrenia, his diagnosis did not disable him; conversely, he worked harder at his writing and discovered it to be a wonderful expression of his creativity. Ultimately, poetry simply flowed from him, thus making him a true master of the written word.

Brian’s mother, Cindy Crowell, is kindly donating proceeds from the sales of Whispers to the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia.

To place an order for Whispers, please mail a $20.00 cheque made out to the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, along with the address to which the book should be shipped, to:

Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia
Room B23, E.C. Purdy Building
P.O. Box 1004, Station Main
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
B2Y 3Z9

Orders with payment by credit card are also accepted. Please call the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia at (902) 465-2601 or 1-800-465-2601 (toll-free in Nova Scotia).

Portrait of Brian Malay by Jared Malay. Please click on the image to magnify it.

Mental Health First Aid Roleplay Video

2011-12-12T08:00:00.001-04:00

From the YouTube posting:

The Jack Project at Kids Help Phone, in partnership with the Mental Health Commission of Canada / Mental Health First Aid has produced this role play video. It outlines the need for mental health awareness and the Mental Health First Aid helping actions that can be used to support someone who is struggling.

The Honourable Michael Kirby speaks to the importance of peer support

2011-12-11T09:30:00.000-04:00

From the YouTube posting:

Chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the Honourable Michael Kirby spoke to the importance of peer support in the Mental Health Strategy for Canada at the Peer Project event in Ottawa on October 5th, 2011.

Putting the focus back on the patient

2011-12-04T10:00:00.001-04:00

An article published in the December 1st edition of The Chronicle Herald:

IWK hopes to whittle down wait for youth mental health services

By John McPhee, Health Reporter

Add value and keep it simple.

It sounds like a business marketing pitch but actually it sums up an increasingly popular system for treating young mental health patients.

Two child psychiatrists from Britain have been working with staff at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax this week to see if the Choice and Partnership Approach will work there.

About 1,100 people are on the waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax. That wait can be as long as 18 months, compared with the standard acceptable wait of about a month.

"They’ve noticed some of their systems haven’t helped users as well as they would like," Steve Kingsbury [pictured], a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in London, said in an interview Tuesday during a break in the training session at a Halifax hotel.

"How you organize services (and) the paperwork you have to do? And I don’t think they could see any way of doing it better until they heard about this."

Kingsbury and Ann York, who also works in London, have taken the "reduce bureaucracy and focus on the patient" message to 11 countries in the past six years. They and other clinicians came up with the system as a way of tackling long wait times and unacceptable outcomes, York said.

"The central premise is how to design services to make things better for the young person and their family, a better experience and more effective for them. All the things we then do organizationally and clinically are around having them at the heart of it."

The usual treatment approach would see a doctor do a thorough assessment of the patient. But recommendations are often made based solely on such assessments, without finding out what makes sense to the family or the child or what they want, the doctors said.

The question of wants, not needs, is crucial to the Choice and Partnership Approach. If the patient is asked what they want, the list is usually short and can be addressed right away by giving the patient and family goals to work on at home.

"They wouldn’t be put on a waiting list for something," York said. "They would go away with an appointment in their hands to see somebody with the right skills to help them with the goals they wanted."

This method has reduced wait times at their London clinics from a year to several weeks. Similar successes have been reported in the countries where they have trained staff and managers. Those countries include the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium.

York and Kingsbury came to Nova Scotia on the recommendation of a doctor now working in Halifax who underwent the training in New Zealand.

The IWK couldn’t provide an exact cost of the three-day session, but York and Kingsbury said they don’t charge full consultant’s rates. Rather they are paid the equivalent of what they would earn as clinicians in London. It is their first visit to Canada and they combined the working sessions with their vacation.

"It’s not our day job," joked York, who said they continue to work full-time as psychiatrists and devote an average of one day a month to their consultant work.

Sharon Clarke, clinical leader for mental health services at the IWK, said she was impressed by the Choice and Partnership Approach just from reading the material on the website.

"The exciting part for me is that they’re taking a business approach, in the sense of lean thinking, and using these ideas of demand and capacity to really be able to have an accurate assessment of what the needs are in the system — to put people in the right places, to do the right job at the right time."

The IWK will begin using the system in wait list interventions in January and it will be fully implemented by April.

(jmcphee@herald.ca)

Image credit

Also see:

The Choice and Partnership Approach Website

Evaluation Of The Choice And Partnership Approach In Child And Adolescent Mental Health Services In England

Taking stock of schizophrenia

2011-11-10T07:24:00.000-04:00

An article definitely worth reading.

Also, you might want to listen to the audio interview with Prof. Sir Robin Murray (pictured) accompanying the article .

Image credit

Your Recovery Journey

2011-11-08T07:22:00.000-04:00

An article published in the Fall 2011 edition of SZ Magazine:

Please click on an image to magnify it.

To download the entire article (PDF), please click here.

Also see:

Your Recovery Journey

Schizophrenia Society of Canada

23rd Annual Conference

2011-11-05T10:19:00.000-03:00

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's 23rd Annual Conference, held at the Dalhousie University Club on November 4th, 2011, was attended by over 160 people.

Please click on the image to magnify it.

Please click here to download the conference program
and presenter biographies

Conference Photographs

Please click on any photograph to enlarge it.

Cecilia McRae, president of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, prepares to sell raffle tickets on the Recovery Quilt.

Hilary Thorne, the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's project coordinator, distributes parking passes outside the conference venue.

Annette Murphy (foreground, left), a member of the Conference Organizing Committee, registers a conference participant.

Chris Croke (left) accepts the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's 2011 Janine Williams Memorial Bursary from Cecilia McRae.

Christine Parsons (left) receives the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's 2011 Special Bursary from Debbie Gladstone, a member of both the Conference Organizing Committee and the SSNS's Board of Directors.

Dr. Susan R. McGurk delivers the conference's plenary presentation. To download Dr. McGurk's presentation slides (PDF), please click here.

Dr. McGurk receives a thank you gift from Cecilia McRae, president of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia.

Dr. David Gardner speaks about antipsychotic medications and their side effects during his keynote address. To download Dr. Gardner's presentation slides (PDF), please click here.

To purchase Dr. Gardner's book, Antipsychotics and their Side Effects, please click here or here. For information on the MED ED booklet and accompanying passport, please click here and here.

Dr. Gardner is thanked by Phil Rogers, a member of the Board of Directors of the SSNS, as well as the Board of Directors of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada.

Vince Daigle, a peer support worker with the Healthy Minds Cooperative and co-facilitator of the From Recovery to Discovery Peer Support Group, speaks about peer support.

Donna Methot, a member of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's Board of Directors and president of the HRM Chapter of the SSNS, thanks Vince Daigle.

Terry Vernon, a member of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's Board of Directors and the Conference Organizing Committee introduces speakers from the Beacon Program.

Valerie Davis presents an overview of the Beacon Program. To download the Beacon Program's presentation slides (PDF), please click here.

Pam Langille, an occupational therapist, talks about the goals and activities of the Beacon Program.

Will Moerman talks about his experience as a participant of the Beacon Program.

Valerie Davis is thanked by Terri Vernon.

Terri Vernon thanks Pam Langille.

Will Moerman receives a thank you gift from Terri Vernon.

John Murphy, a member of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's Board of Directors, introduces Dr. Jason Morrison.

Dr. Jason Morrison presents on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and how it can help with relationships.

For a list of references for further reading on CBT for psychosis, please click here (PDF). These references were provided to the SSNS by Dr. Morrison after the conference.

John Murphy presents Dr. Morrison with a framed Nova Scotia photograph by John (Randy) Ross.

Patrick Burke QC, a member of the Board of Directors of the SSNS, introduces presenters from Connections Halifax and the Mindful Mango Café.

Gail Kelly, an occupational therapist with Connections Halifax, speaks about social enterprises in general and the Mindful Mango Café in particular.

Jude Williams speaks about her life experience and her current position as kitchen supervisor with the Mindful Mango Café.

Marting Hoben talks about his job as supervisor at the Mindful Mango Café.

Patrick Burke thanks the speakers from Connections Halifax and the Mindful Mango Café.

Dr. Zenovia Ursuliak presents on a wellness program that she developed and helped deliver at the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program. To download Dr. Ursuliak's presentation slides (PDF), please click here.

Patrick Burke thanks Dr. Ursuliak.

A big THANK YOU to our conference sponsors!

Conference Organizing Committee

Stephen Ayer
Executive Director
Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

Debby Gladstone
Secretary, Board of Directors
Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

Annette Murphy
Community Volunteer

Terri Vernon
Director, Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

All photographs by Stephen Ayer

Outpatient Art Group - Abbie Lane Art Room

2011-11-04T06:57:00.000-03:00

Every Tuesday, 6:00 pm!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia Conference - Recovery

2011-11-03T07:31:00.000-03:00

Today's media advisory from the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia:

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia Conference: Recovery

With its theme of recovery, the 23rd Annual Conference of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia promises to deliver a message of hope. The conference takes place at the Dalhousie University Club, 1 Alumni Crescent, Halifax, from 8:45 am to 4:30 pm on Friday, November 4th, 2011.

Recovery from a mental illness involves progressing from a state of distress arising from active symptoms, through the stages of acceptance, rehabilitation, and reintegration into family, work, and societal roles. “Recovery is not an endpoint, but a process and a state of being,” says Vince Daigle, peer support worker with the Healthy Minds Cooperative. This conference will prove that recovery is not only possible, but expected in most cases.

A variety of experts will present on state-of-the-art approaches to optimizing recovery from serious mental illnesses. Cognitive remediation, psychosocial rehabilitation, psychopharmacology, peer support, supported employment, and a well-designed wellness recovery program will all be featured.

The plenary speaker, Dr. Susan McGurk (pictured) of Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, will present her recent research results on the Thinking Skills for Work program. This unique program involves combining supported employment with methods to help a person improve cognitive skills through focused practice using computerized cognitive exercises, and to develop cognitive compensatory skills to “work around” persistent difficulties.

“Clients target work as an important recovery goal,” says Dr. McGurk, who also notes that rejoining the workforce is destigmatizing and has many other benefits, including social and financial ones. Building on this theme, Gail Kelly from Connections Halifax, and staff from the Mindful Mango Café, will describe important advances that have been made locally in supporting people in returning to work.

Dr. David Gardner of Dalhousie University will address medication, “major part of the road to recovery.” Using his unique interactive presentation style, Dr. Gardner will open the floor to questions and use that opportunity to discuss antipsychotic medications and how they can be part of a “set of investments” for recovery.

Healthy, fun, active, and creative – this is how Dr. Zenovia Ursuliak describes the wellness program recently created for participants in the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program. “This program was very dear to my heart. I put so much energy into this program because I really believe that we can help people reach their full potential by providing environments and services that engage them as human beings, in addition to what I’ve been trained to do as a psychiatrist – give them medications, monitor their medications.” Dr. Ursuliak describes the participants’ regaining of hope, self-efficacy, and motivation as being critical to recovery.

The support of one’s peers and the guidance based on direct experience of a mental illness is invaluable. As Mr. Daigle points out, the role-modelling and insight that a peer support worker provides cannot often be matched by that of a mental health clinician who has no direct experience. A peer support worker’s example contributes hope – both for people challenged with an illness, as well as for their family members.

Healthy relationships are critical to anyone’s mental health, and Dr. Jason Morrison of Dalhousie University will outline how they can be promoted through cognitive behavioural therapy. Additionally, Valerie Davis and Pamela Langille of Kentville’s Beacon Program will present their organization’s multidisciplinary approach to empowering and supporting the development of individuals through psychosocial rehabilitation.

Describing possible outcomes of the conference, Dr. Ursuliak anticipates “that the audience comes out of there inspired that recovery is possible.” She adds, “From that positive attitude, people will advocate for change.”

FOR BROADCAST USE

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia is holding its 23rd Annual Conference beginning at 8:45 am on Friday, November 4th, at the Dalhousie University Club, 1 Alumni Crescent, Halifax. The theme of the conference is Recovery.

The objective of the conference is to demonstrate that recovery from a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia is not only possible, but, with treatment and other supports, can be expected. The plenary speaker, Dr. Susan McGurk of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, will present her recent research results on the Thinking Skills for Work program. This unique program involves combining supported employment with methods to help a person improve cognitive skills through focused practice using computerized cognitive exercises. Other topics to be covered include peer support, psychosocial rehabilitation, medications, cognitive behavioural therapy, and a wellness program. On-site registrations are available. For further information visit www.ssns-conference.com.

About the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia works to improve the quality of life for those affected by schizophrenia through education, support programs, influencing public policy, and encouraging research. In addition to the provincial office located in Dartmouth, the Society has chapters conducting monthly support group meetings in Cumberland County, Halifax Regional Municipality, Kings County, and Lunenburg County.

Media Contact

Dr. Stephen Ayer
Executive Director
Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia

Phone: (902) 465-2601
Toll-free in Nova Scotia: 1-800-465-2601
Fax: (902) 465-5479

Room B23, E.C. Purdy Building
300 Pleasant Street
P.O. Box 1004, Station Main
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
B2Y 3Z9

Website: www.ssns.ca
Weblog: www.blog.ssns.ca

To download a printable version of the media release (PDF), please click here.

Computerized Brain Training Can Produce Functional Changes in Schizophrenia

2011-11-01T07:31:00.000-03:00

An article posted online on October 31st by Psychiatric News:

Successful training of the brains of people with schizophrenia in discrete attentional tasks is possible and appears to translate into improvements in quality of living, said Sophia Vinogradov, M.D., winner of APA’s Alexander Gralnick Award (pictured with past APA President and current APA American Psychiatric Foundation Treasurer Richard Harding, M.D.) At APA's Institute on Psychiatric Services in San Francisco, Vinogradov described research showing that computerized games aimed at training the brains of patients in very specific tasks can have effects on multiple interactive systems resulting in changes in global functioning. The finding marks a new direction in what has been called “cognitive remediation.” Further coverage of Vinogradov’s remarks will appear in a future issue of Psychiatric News. For further information about cognitive remediation, see "Neurocognitive ‘Training’ May Undo Schizophrenia's Brain Damage" and American Psychiatric Publishing's Essentials of Schizophrenia by Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D.

Photo credit

Memoir About Schizophrenia Spurs Others to Come Forward

2011-10-23T10:28:00.000-03:00

An article published in today's edition of the The New York Times:

Researchers have long wondered how some people with schizophrenia can manage their symptoms well enough to build full, successful lives. But such people do not exactly line up to enroll in studies.

For one thing, they are almost always secretive about their diagnosis. For another, volunteering for a study would add yet another burden to their stressful lives.

But that is beginning to change, partly because of the unlikely celebrity of a fellow sufferer. In 2007, after years of weighing the possible risks, Elyn R. Saks [pictured], a professor of law at the University of Southern California, published a memoir of her struggle with schizophrenia, “The Center Cannot Hold.” It became an overnight sensation in mental health circles and a best seller, and it won Dr. Saks a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

For psychiatric science, the real payoff was her speaking tour. At mental health conferences here and abroad, Dr. Saks, 56, attracted not only doctors and therapists, but also high-functioning people with the same diagnosis as herself — a fellowship of fans, some of whom have volunteered to participate in studies.

“People in the audience would stand up and self-disclose, or sometimes I would be on a panel with someone” who had a similar experience, Dr. Saks said. She also received scores of e-mails from people who had read the book and wanted to meet for lunch. She told many of them about the possibility of participating in a research project.

She now has two studies going, one in Los Angeles and another in San Diego, tracking the routines and treatment decisions of these extraordinary people. The movie producer Jerry Weintraub has optioned the book.

It has been a remarkable response, considering that the book was almost abandoned. Dr. Saks surveyed friends and colleagues for years before publishing it and got very mixed advice. Her husband was against it; the risks were too high. Academic colleagues warned her that coming out with a disorder as serious as schizophrenia could only harm her. “You want to be known as the schizophrenic with a job?” one said.

Her friend Stephen Behnke, director of ethics at the American Psychological Association, was supportive of her decision. “I remember talking about it just on the cusp of when she was going to send off the manuscript,” Dr. Behnke said. “I said that we needed to sit down and make sure she was ready for this. It was like she was about to jump off of a cliff.”

Jump she did. With the MacArthur money, she founded the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics to study mental health and society. She is now working on another book, “Mad Women: A Most Uncommon Friendship,” with the author Terri Cheney, who has written about her struggles with bipolar disorder.

“I was very lucky, being in academia, where people have been very accepting of this,” Dr. Saks said. “Most people struggling to manage a severe mental illness do not have the luxury to do what I did.”

Image credit

Also see:

A High-Profile Executive Job as Defense Against Mental Ills

Changing the face of Schizophrenia

FREE - Get your GED - Spryfield

2011-10-18T06:58:00.000-03:00

Please click on the image to magnify it.

From an October 18th email received from Chebucto Connections:

The GED class is a go at the Captain William Spry Community Centre and we are recruiting students. Participants should be strong Level 2 students who are available and can commit to classes 4 days per week: Monday to Thursday / 9:30 am - 3:30 pm for 20 weeks. Those who call will be assessed for eligibility and classes will begin as soon as we have a small group.

Do you value the work of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia?

2011-10-17T07:36:00.000-03:00

We hope you do.

Your donation will help us to continue our important and crucial work. To make a donation, please click here. Tax-deductible receipts are issued immediately.

Or send a cheque to:

Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia
Room B-23, Purdy Building
P.O. Box 1004, Station Main
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
B2Y 3Z9

A photograph taken during the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia’s Annual General Meeting held September 24th, 2011, in Springhill, Nova Scotia (please click on the photograph to enlarge it)

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia is working very hard to improve the quality of life for those affected by schizophrenia and psychosis through education, support programs, influencing public policy, and encouraging research.

www.ssns.ca

Psychiatrists Outline Plan to Tackle Stigma and Discrimination in Medicine: New Paper Released at Annual Conference of Canadian Psychiatric Association in Vancouver

2011-10-14T07:34:00.000-03:00

An October 13th media release from the Canadian Psychiatric Association:

VANCOUVER, Oct. 13, 2011 /CNW/ - Today the Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA) made public a paper that outlines how psychiatrists can tackle stigma and discrimination in medicine.

"Stigma and discrimination are one of the primary reasons that the one in five Canadians who will experience a mental illness in their lifetime either don't get help or delay getting help until their situation worsens," says Dr. Susan Abbey, author of the paper and member of the CPA Stigma and Discrimination Working Group. "People can recover from mental illness but until we address these issues, efforts to provide better mental health care will continue to be hampered," she adds.

Like their fellow Canadians, physicians, including psychiatrists, have been socialized with the same stigmatizing views towards people with mental illness. "Physicians are a reflection of their society when it comes to stigmatizing attitudes but it's devastating when patients who need help encounter such attitudes," explains Dr. Manon Charbonneau, Chair of the CPA Stigma and Discrimination Working Group. "That's why CPA chose to focus its efforts on tackling this issue in the house of medicine. As physicians and psychiatrists it is our responsibility."

Children and youth and health professionals are the two initial priority areas for the Mental Health Commission of Canada's anti-stigma, anti-discrimination initiative.

The three-prong approach on how physicians can reduce stigma presented by the paper can be summed up in three words, Protest, Educate and Contact. The CPA paper invites all psychiatrists to lead by example and protest stigma and discrimination when they encounter it, use education to counteract it and promote direct contact with people with lived experiences with mental illness.

"We need to protest discrimination at every level from the small injustices we witness in daily practice, in our clinics and hospitals, in our medical schools up to the federal and provincial level," says Dr. Abbey. The lack of funding for mental health is striking. While mental illnesses constitute more than 15 per cent of the disease burden in Canada, in the 2003-2004 fiscal year mental health care received only six per cent of total health funding—below the level in most European and developed countries.

Education is the second key to preventing stigma and making stigma it visible. "It's relatively easy to spot discrimination but it's harder to identify stigmatizing attitudes. Often people don't even realize they have these attitudes," notes Dr. Charbonneau.

The paper proposes education initiatives at many levels including making stigma and discrimination part of the formal medical school curricula, continuing physician education on the issue, talking about stigma with patients and engaging fellow physician organizations to effectively address discriminatory behaviour against psychiatric patients where they seek care—the emergency department, on inpatient medical and surgical wards, in walk-in clinics and when they see their family doctor.

Contact, the third pillar of the strategy, is crucial. "Research tells us that direct contact with people with mental illness who have recovered is a powerful tool that effects lasting change in attitudes," notes Dr. Charbonneau. The paper encourages medical schools to promote and teach direct personal contact with patients, both inside and outside the clinical context. It also advocates patients, as experts in their own care, be actively involved in their diagnosis and treatment and that patient advice be sought when new treatment and clinical structures are being planned.

"Tackling stigma and discrimination towards people with mental illness is the key to better mental healthcare. Canadian society and Canada's physician community efforts are in their infancy and much work remains to be done, but it can be done," says Dr. Charbonneau.

Read the position paper online: http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=1221

The Canadian Psychiatric Association is the national voice for Canada's 4,100 psychiatrists and more than 600 psychiatric residents. Founded in 1951, the CPA is dedicated to promoting an environment that fosters excellence in the provision of clinical care, education and research.

For further information:

Helene Cote
hcote@cpa-apc.org
1-613-297-5038

Bold emphasis is mine.

How to gain insight into schizophrenia and other mental illnesses

2011-10-12T06:59:00.000-03:00

From the YouTube posting:

Bill MacPhee takes Don's question that asks how someone develops insight into their illness. Bill talks about how people think that they are alone, but once they are educated and see the big picture, they will gain insight into their illness.

Bill MacPhee lives with schizophrenia.

Also see:

SZ Magazine

MagpieMedia1

More than daily bread

2011-10-11T07:09:00.000-03:00

An article published in the October 10th edition of The Chronicle Herald:

At Stone Hearth Bakery, people restart their lives, build life skills

By Holly Fraughton

THE SMELL OF FRESHLY BAKED BREAD, bagels and sweet loaves wafts through the air in the lower level of The Village at Bayers Road shopping centre. If you follow your nose, the aroma will lead straight to the Stone Hearth Bakery.

Many Nova Scotians will recognize the brand. The kosher bakery has been producing freshly baked bread since 1982, but what many don’t know is the story behind the bakery.

Stone Hearth is just one of the programs operated under the MetroWorks umbrella, a non-profit organization that has been offering training since the late 1970s to people who face barriers to employment.

Chuck Weatherbee [pictured], 40, of Dartmouth, has worked at the bakery for over five years. Today, he is responsible for packaging and distributing the finished product. Bakery manager Shawn Patterson points out that Chuck is also their quality assurance monitor, making sure that every loaf is perfect.

"He’s the guy that makes sure the customers get the good stuff," Patterson said.

Weatherbee was diagnosed with schizophrenia 19 years ago when he was just 21. Before he found Stone Hearth, he had only done seasonal work, picking fruit.

Weatherbee had just finished a six-week, day-hospital stay when one of the nurses suggested he look into Stone Hearth’s program.

For Weatherbee, working at the bakery has created structure in his life and offers a sense of fulfilment. "Now, I’m to the point that I’m training other people, so that makes me feel good. It makes me a little sad when they leave, but it makes me feel good that I can actually pass skills on and help somebody out!"

The bakery used to be in north-end Halifax, but moved in September 2010 after MetroWorks centralized its operations to The Village at Bayers Road. The new state-of-the-art facility is perfect for training bakers and has been very good for business, allowing them to expand their product line and develop new working relationships.

"Because of our new facility and equipment, community colleges noticed us; they’ve put people here on placements, and then we’ve been able to hire those people, and then they’ve got the experience to expand our product list. It’s just a complete chain reaction," Patterson said.

That chain reaction has also been felt by participants.

"They’re very proud of their products and they’ll go to the grocery stores on their time off and straighten out the shelves," Patterson said with a smile.

Soon, more delicious aromas will also be emanating from the kitchen of the Stone Hearth Bistro.

MetroWorks is getting ready to expand their food service training program, opening a 7,000-square-foot restaurant in The Village at Bayers Road in late October. The bistro will offer participants hands-on training in a restaurant setting, preparing them for future employment in kitchens throughout the province.

The idea for the restaurant evolved out of research into Halifax’s current labour market, and will build on MetroWorks’ existing food service program, which is currently largely classroom-based. They plan to start with a class of 12 participants, and by the first quarter of 2012, have between 36 and 40 participants working in the bistro.

The bistro will also feature a small market section, where Stone Hearth can showcase bakery products and, Patterson hopes, the story behind Stone Hearth.

"I go to farmers markets on the weekends . . . and sell our bread and I’m always educating people that, ‘You can buy our product and support a program that’s helping people either restart their lives or help them better themselves,’ " Patterson said.

Stone Hearth currently sells to large retail commercial customers, local restaurants, and distributes outside of Halifax through Canada Bread. Since moving to the new facility, they’ve been able to take on more clients, and Patterson estimates the business from restaurants has doubled, as well.

"It’s a not-for-profit, but it is a business. . . . All the money that we make goes back into programming, so the more money we make, the more money we can invest in other programs," Patterson explained.

The main objective at the bakery and new restaurant is to build skills. Participants work alongside paid professionals, and many also take courses on job searching and resume writing.

Not all will go on to pursue careers as bakers or as kitchen staff. Some will realize that they want to go back to school, instead.

"Some people may never work, but to maybe learn to get along with people is a huge success for them. So each person’s success is measured differently," Patterson said.

But for those who do go on to get jobs, the economic spinoff can be significant.

"When we start to measure some of our impacts on the local economy and local tax burden, if you can take someone off of assistance that is costing real dollars, tens of thousands of dollars a year, and move that person from being entirely dependent on the public purse to a taxpayer, it’s huge!" pointed out Mark Lever, MetroWorks’ president and CEO.

MetroWorks does look to various levels of government for capital funding, but the idea is to work towards creating self-sustaining programs, like the bakery.

And Lever is quick to point out that they aren’t looking for charity: "We recognize that the product has to be, first and foremost, second to none and the best it can be."

(hfraughton@herald.ca)

Photograph by Adrien Veczan / The Chronicle Herald

World Mental Health Day - A Revolution, Simple

2011-10-10T10:20:00.000-03:00

An article posted today by the UK edition of the Huffington Post:

By Professor Richard Gray [pictured]

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." Henry Ford

To enable people with mental health problems to lead full and productive lives, we need a revolution in care and treatment.

Today is world mental health day. Looking at mental health practice right now it feels sadly devoid of the revolutionary, imaginative and creative thinking that we take for granted in so many other areas of our lives. In a very real sense the outcomes for patients with long term mental illnesses like schizophrenia are getting worse, not better.

This is a tragedy; mental illness is painful and distressing. It is hard to imagine the torment that someone with schizophrenia experiences when they hear voices telling them that they are evil and deserve to die. To understand the pain of these symptoms we have to recognise that this is their reality and it is absolutely terrifying. These are symptoms of an illness, an illness where there is dysfunction in the patient's brain.

Medicines are essential to alleviate the distress and torment of psychotic symptoms. Reducing the intensity of the delusion or pushing the voices into the background antipsychotic drugs rarely completely eliminate symptoms and are certainly no cure.

In many respects, the medicines we have now are little different to those like chlorpromazine, that we used in the 1950s. The new generation of antipsychotic drugs are more refined and cause fewer side effects, but fundamentally they work in the same way. Metaphorically drug researchers have bred slightly faster horses, there has been no great jump forward.

Where will new treatment advances come from?

There is a sense that investment, both intellectually and financially, in the development of new drug treatments has faded and shifted; in part because of the negative public perception drugs for mental illness have, and an increase in demand for talking treatments as an alternative to pills.

Sensational media stories of antidepressants making patients suicidal are ill informed but attention grabbing and have contributed to our negative image. Even among mental health professionals there is widespread "anti medication" sentiment. A senior and influential Clinical Psychologist suggested to me recently that pharmaceutical industry research was "little more than propaganda".

Do psychological (talking) treatments represent the paradigm shift from horse to car that we need? I want to argue that our current obsession with improving access to psychological treatments reflects society's Freudian belief that mental illness is located in the mind and not the brain and can be sorted out by talking.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is probably the most popular talking treatment.

Researchers have demonstrated that when delivered by a skilled therapist, CBT is as effective as antidepressant medication in the treatment of depression. Against schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, CBT also seems to be effective for example in helping patients cope with voices. But, and it is an important but, CBT only works (in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), if patients are already on medication.

CBT, like all talking treatments, are complex interventions that need to be provided by skilled therapists. The problem; there simply aren't enough to meet demand and there never will be. A major initiative to improve access to psychological therapies (IAPT) consumed £170 million of new money.

Three and a half thousand new therapists have been trained and over 600,000 patients have entered the programme. Impressive; but rather than receiving the 20 sessions of CBT necessary for the treatment to work patients on average get just 3. Unless patients get 20 sessions the therapy can't work; this is what the research tells us. So whilst CBT is effective it is not the mental health equivalent of the Henry Ford's Model-T [pictured] providing effective psychological treatment for everyone.

Mental health practice is littered with countless examples of effective but complex interventions that work in theory but not in practice. The reason that they don't work is that they are too complex. Perhaps rather than focusing on ever more complex intervention we should consider simple intervention that can be reliably provided to all patients with mental illness. In a time of austerity making sure that everything we do really counts makes a lot of sense.

Back to medication. Mental illnesses such as schizophrenia , bipolar disorder and quite often depression, are long term conditions that require patients to stick with their medication, often indefinitely.

Whilst we need new treatments we could get much more out of the medicines we already have. Virtually every patient with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder misses doses of medication; this increases the risk of relapse and the return of painful and distressing psychotic symptoms. In fact the single biggest cause of relapse is that patients stop taking medication. There are many simple things that we can do to enhance adherence to treatment. I passionately believe we should be more positive about promoting the benefits of medication to our patients and their families.

For many patients, those with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder particularly, medication is a foundation to effective treatment and we should do everything to make sure that they stick with treatment. This is perhaps one of the most important things we do as mental health professionals.

There are other things we can do to help patients manage their medication; help them make choices about which drug will suit them best; closely monitor the effects and side effects of medicines, offer long acting injections rather than daily pills, use mobile phone text prompts to remind patients to take pills, prescribing a tablet that can be taken once once rather than four times a day. Simple things that work and help patients stick with treatment.

Ever more complex treatments that can never be scaled up to meet the need within the population seems to me like flogging, if it's not extending a metaphor to far, dead horse.

Our customers (patients) want greater access to talking treatments. I am far from convinced that the investment in psychological therapies has reaped the rewards that were promised when the IAPT programme was launched.

We need new medications and this requires intellectual as well as financial investment. When Henry Ford launched the Model-T, when Apple launched the iPad, these were leaps of imagination.

I want to argue for a simple revolution; we stop doing the complex badly and focus of doing simple things exceptionally well. But my real plea on world mental health day is to stop listening quite so much and start imagining.

Now more than ever we need real invention in mental health care and treatment.

Image credit

Model-T image credit

Mental Health Commission struggles to find balance in developing strategy

2011-10-09T10:03:00.000-03:00

An article published in the October 8th edition of the National Post:

By Joseph Brean

As Senator Roméo Dallaire [pictured], Canada’s best-known traumatized soldier, launches the Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta’s Circle on Mental Health & Addiction and Queen’s University unveils its own mental health commission in response to a series of suicides, both may cast a cautionary eye on the travails of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, a 10-year, $130-million federal project.

Since a draft of its national strategy on mental health was leaked this summer, the agency has been squirming under accusations of dysfunction, anti-psychiatry bias and neglect of the most serious mental illnesses.

Critics point out the 30-page document mentions “recovery” 67 times and “support” 125 times, but there is no reference to “psychiatry.” Or “schizophrenia” or “bipolar.”

In a “letter to Canadians” last month, Louise Bradley, the agency’s chief executive, promised to “correct” the strategy before its planned release next year, because “the current draft does not sufficiently reflect the essential role neuroscience, treatment and psychiatry have to play.”

In doing so, the MHCC is trying to strike a balance between the two major ideologies of mental health: empowerment, based in social science, in which recovery is seen as a personal growth experience; and psychiatry, based in neuroscience, in which recovery sometimes must be imposed against a delusional will.

At its most extreme, this clash of ideologies turns on the question of whether the fundamental problem of mental illness lies in the brain itself, or in the stigma imposed by society.

At stake is a key part of the MHCC’s dual mandate — to develop a national strategy on mental health — which will influence the allocation of research funding and the priorities provinces set on this unique issue, spanning health care and social policy.

The other part of its mandate is to combat the stigma of mental illness through public outreach and professional advocacy, which have largely focused on health-care providers, often the first point of contact between the mentally ill and the government.

As the strategy gets revised, the ideological balance continues to elude the MHCC, although a spokesman said the flawed draft is “relatively close,” and the Commission stands by it “fundamentally.”

Focused on “recovery,” the draft strategy highlights suicide prevention, self-directed care, improvement over cure, and calls for an end to the seclusion and restraint of psychiatric patients.

However, its focus on health promotion and prevention, including the role of employers in creating healthy workplaces, has fuelled criticism that this is not a strategy about mental illness, but rather mental wellness.

“They’ve stolen the word ‘recovery,’ ” said Herschel Hardin, president of the North Shore Schizophrenia Society in B.C., whose latest bulletin accuses the commission of hiding behind upbeat euphemisms and claims “those who understand severe mental illness no longer take [the MHCC] seriously — except to regard it as a menace.”

He said the agency exaggerates the notion recovery cannot be imposed by others and must be a self-directed personal achievement.

“For the seriously ill, that’s a small part of recovery that comes after treatment for the illness itself, which is part of recovery, which requires a lot of not just support but structure, provided by others,” he said.

“Here [at the MHCC] we have a bunch of people who really haven’t done the homework that they had to do, and buried the most important considerations in bureaucratic fluff and vague wording.”

More than most health issues, vocabulary clouds this debate.

Patients are recast as “survivors,” “consumers,” or “experts by experience” on the one side, and a schizophrenic’s lack of insight medicalized into “anosognosia” on the other.

“The idea of recovery in mental illness circles has a certain meaning that is not translated well for the general public,” said Bill Honer, head of the department of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and a clinical expert on schizophrenia.

It is not like remission in cancer, in which the disease metaphorically retreats, or recovery from a cold, in which it disappears completely. Recovery in mental health, as the MHCC describes it, is an orientation, a way of life.

The danger, Prof. Honer said, is that a strategy in which individuals must guide themselves to recovery could be unfair to those who are unable to do so, because they cannot understand their own illness.

“On a strict interpretation [of that strategy], we risk not fulfilling our social responsibilities,” he said.

At the same time, there is rampant confusion about these words and what they imply, he said. “The social constructs of labelling and diagnosis are real, but it’s not the same as what we do [in psychiatry]. Having a diagnosis is not a bad thing. That’s how we work. But labelling and stigma are, and that’s how society works.”

Ms. Bradley refused to be interviewed, but strategic advisor Howard Chodos, who prepared the draft strategy, said it was developed through face-to-face meetings and an online survey.

The “vast majority” of participants in consultations were “supportive of the overall thrust of the strategy,” he said, but the review process now includes “some of more public discussion that’s taken place once the draft reached a wider audience than we originally intended.”

“Was everybody included? No. Did we have the resources to do that at this time? No,” he added.

“But we felt confident that we would get the kind of feedback from that group that would enable us to strengthen the document.”

Mr. Chodos acknowledged the criticism and said the draft’s language “is not where we would like it to be, in terms of connecting with people, resonating with people in a way that will help to galvanize support for the document.”

But he rejects the notion that the focus on consensus obscures the hard cases.

“What I don’t accept is that there is a fundamental opposition between those two elements,” he said.

“We can find a way to have that balance, and we’re not sacrificing one on the altar of the other.”

jbrean@nationalpost.com

Image credit

Also see:

Mental Illness Awareness Week: Canada Stands Ready for Positive Change

He Wants To Stop Taking His Medication

2011-10-07T19:27:00.000-03:00

Dr. Xavier Amador has posted a new video on his website:

Question

Our son is 22 years old & diagnosed with schizophrenia. He first became ill at 18. He’s been hospitalized many time, 5 times within the last year. He’s also been arrested for miscellaneous crimes due to his thought disorder and delusions about what people are doing to him. He was given a guardian by the state last Dec and put in a long term care facility for 6 months and mandated medication. He was release several weeks ago, and immediately stopped taking medication. He’s all along said he does not feel he has schizophrenia, and will not take medication. He’s said he feels he has an anger problem. He does continue to see his psychiatrist. We see our son weekly, have a good relationship with him now, but are very afraid of when he gets ill again. Do you have any suggestions? – Carroll and her Husband from Alameda, CA

Dr. Amador's Answer

Mental Illness Awareness Week: opening Canadians’ eyes

2011-10-06T07:21:00.000-03:00

A letter to the editor published in today's edition of The Chronicle Herald:

By Stephen Ayer (pictured)

Mental Illness Awareness Week, Oct. 2-8, is an annual national public education campaign designed to help open the eyes of Canadians to the reality of mental illness. The week was established in 1992 by the Canadian Psychiatric Association. It is now co-ordinated by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health in co-operation with its member organizations, including the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, as well many other supporters across Canada.

As a kick-off event for the week, the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia (SSNS) presented a special screening last Sunday of the movie The Soloist, based on the true story of Nathaniel Ayers, a musician who develops schizophrenia and becomes homeless. The screenplay by Susannah Grant is based on the book The Soloist by Steve Lopez, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times.

The same day, the society also highlighted the recovery journey of Laura Burke, a young Nova Scotian who lives with schizophrenia, by screening Superhero — A Visual Poem, a documentary short film featuring Ms. Burke’s spoken word poetry. Ms. Burke was honoured during Mental Illness Awareness Week in Ottawa last year as a 2010 Champion of Mental Health.

Today, the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia is partnering with other local mental health organizations and supporters to present the Fourth Annual Festival of Hope, a celebration of hope, healing and recovery. This free event takes place from 3 to 8 p.m. at the Olympic Hall, 2304 Hunter St. (corner of Cunard and Windsor in Halifax).

The core belief of the SSNS is that people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia can live a life of meaning and purpose. The society’s focus is to promote the goal that each individual will be able to return to a quality of life which meets each person’s own perception of needs and expectations.

The vision of the SSNS is to reach all Nova Scotians who are directly or indirectly affected by schizophrenia — to focus on the individual, not the illness, to promote wellness and recovery, and to reduce the stigma and discrimination so often associated with mental illness.

The society’s mission is to improve the quality of life for those affected by schizophrenia through education, support programs, influencing public policy, and supporting research. The SSNS provides a community-based network of knowledgeable and dedicated volunteers whose personal experience with the illness allows them to share their stories of hope and recovery with people affected by schizophrenia for the first time.

Stephen Ayer is executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia. He lives with a mental illness and experienced homelessness in the 1990s. Dr. Ayer is a 2009 recipient of an Inspiring Lives Award from the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia and the CMHA — Nova Scotia Division.

Photograph by Ryan Taplin / Metro Halifax

New videos featuring Dr. Xavier Amador

2011-10-06T07:16:00.000-03:00

Dr. Xavier Amador has links to two new videos posted on his website:

2011 Nordic Psychiatry Academy Interview with Dr. Amador

"I am not Sick, I don't need help!" presentation at the 2011 Nordic Psychiatry Academy

To view Dr. Amador's presentation at the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's 2005 Annual Conference, please click here.

To order the book, I Am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help, please click here or here.

Also see the following videos:

Anosognosia 1 of 2 (Recorded July 3, 2010)

Anosognosia 2 of 2 (Recorded July 3, 2010)

Women & Wellness Nova Scotia

2011-10-06T07:00:00.000-03:00

SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012!

6:00 pm to 9:30 pm

Please click on the image to magnify it.

RSVP by contacting the CMHA Nova Scotia Division office at 902.466.6600 or by sending an email to suecmhans@eastlink.ca.

Also see:

Jessie Close

BringChange2Mind website

BringChange2Mind Facebook page

Mental Illness Awareness Week: Canada Stands Ready for Positive Change

2011-10-05T07:38:00.000-03:00

An opinion piece posted on October 4th by the Mental Health Commission of Canada:

Op-Ed to coincide with Mental Illness Awareness Week

By Louise Bradley (pictured)

I have worked in the mental health field in Canada for over three decades, and I can say without exaggeration that never before have I seen such a high level of awareness about mental illness in this country. At last, mental health and mental illness are taking centre stage.

From coast to coast to coast, Canadians are stepping forward to talk publicly about their own personal experiences with mental health problems and mental illnesses, and by taking this courageous action, they are making a real difference to countless others.

In September, after 17-year-old high school student Chris Howell, who had been bullied since grade school, committed suicide, 150 friends and family gathered in front his school to mourn his loss and call for an end to bullying. “I just want to stop it,” Chris’s mother Judy told the Hamilton Spectator. “I don’t want anyone else to have to pay.”

For their part, after their son Jack, a first-year student at Queen’s University, took his own life last year, Eric and Sandra Windeler established The Jack Project, a national program to help Canadian youth achieve optimal mental health as they transition from late high school into their college, university or independent living years.

And then there are people like Harmony Brown, Jeremy Bennett, Roberta Price, Shana Calixte, and Steeve Hurdle, who are this year’s “faces” in the Face Mental Illness Campaign coordinated by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health as part of this week’s Mental Illness Awareness Week national public education campaign.

By sharing their personal stories, these five, too, are helping to end stigma and bring mental illness out of the shadows forever.

Today, hundreds of organizations across the country are working tirelessly to raise public awareness about mental health problems and mental illnesses through advocacy and by providing services and supports to those in need.

Canadian companies, including Bell Canada, RBC, Great-West Life and Canada Post, are investing millions of dollars to raise awareness about mental health, improve children’s and workplace mental health, and support organizations on the mental health front lines.

Governments across the country are also addressing mental health in more meaningful ways with new strategies, action plans and investments.

Thousands more individual Canadians are empowering themselves by learning how to spot the signs of mental health problems in family, friends and even themselves through courses being offered by Mental Health First Aid Canada. To date, over 42,000 Canadians have become mental health first aiders.

It is little wonder we are seeing such a ground swell of action and support for mental health.

Canadians have woken up to the fact that ignoring mental health is detrimental to individuals, families, and communities, as well as our society and economy as a whole.

They are becoming aware that there is no health without mental health, and that no one is immune from mental illnesses. This year alone, more than seven million Canadians—that is one in five people—will experience a mental illness personally, and in turn, this will impact family, friends and colleagues.

We are making progress in changing attitudes about mental health, but there is still much work to be done.

We need to be doing more to improve access to mental health services, decrease stigma, support the needs of families caring for ill relatives, invest in research spanning the full spectrum of issues relating to mental health and mental illness, promote mental health, and prevent mental illness so that every Canadian has the opportunity to achieve the best possible mental health and well-being. All this and more will be addressed in the first-ever Mental Health Strategy for Canada, which the Mental Health Commission of Canada will release next year.

What can you do to help?

To start, I urge all Canadians to pledge to the cause of mental health, not just during this Mental Illness Awareness Week, but 365 days a year, by supporting a family member, a friend, a colleague, or a neighbour living with a mental health problem or mental illness and helping them build a better life for themselves. And potentially everyone will have a role to play in bringing the Mental Health Strategy for Canada to life and ensuring it has maximum impact.

Now more than ever, we have an opportunity to build a society that values and promotes mental health and helps people living with mental health problems and mental illnesses to lead meaningful and productive lives.

This will require some fundamental changes to our systems of mental health care and also to our collective way of thinking about mental illness, but if the past year is anything to go by, Canadians are ready to take on this challenge and ready, willing and able to work together to achieve positive change.

Louise Bradley is President and CEO of the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

Image credit

Also see:

Housing first for the mentally ill: Former MP wants changes to assist those in need

Mind Games - How should we define mental illness?

2011-10-05T07:33:00.000-03:00

An article written by Kurt Kleiner and published in the Autumn 2011 edition of U of T Magazine:

Mind Games

Doctors have been trying for decades to classify mental illnesses. So why do precise definitions still elude us?

Theories of human psychology influence not only how we treat mental illness, but how we understand ourselves. The ancient Greek notion of the four humours remains with us in our idea of sanguine or phlegmatic personalities. Freud’s ideas gave us unconscious motivations, egomaniacs, narcissists and more.

These days, if you know someone who’s suffered from major depression, or think you may have social anxiety disorder, or know a child with attention deficit disorder, you’ve been influenced by a more modern psychological viewpoint – one put forth by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which describes all recognized mental disorders. Psychiatrists in North America, and also elsewhere in the world, rely on the DSM to make their diagnoses and communicate them with others in the health-care profession.

But the manual’s immense influence is a problem says Edward Shorter, the Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at U of T. He thinks that many of the disorders described in the DSM are not actual diseases discovered through the scientific method. Instead, they resulted from political deal-making among different factions in the professional community, each with conflicting ideas about causes and treatments of psychological problems. The result, he says, is a description of mental disorders with too little relation to real diseases.

In Shorter’s opinion, the manual sometimes pathologizes perfectly normal behaviour, while actual diseases get lost in a thicket of non-existent syndromes and disorders. And as the association works through a new revision of the DSM, it looks like things will only get worse, he says.

“The DSM continues to run off the rails in terms of its ability to come up with true disease entities that exist in nature,” Shorter says. “The problem is that the document itself is profoundly unscientific.”

Shorter is a social historian of medicine. He has written books on obstetrics and gynecology, the doctor-patient relationship, psychosomatic illness and psychiatry. His books include Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire, and Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness (which he wrote with psychiatrist David Healy). One reviewer, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi of Tufts Medical Center in Boston, called his A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (John Wiley & Sons, 1997) “the best single volume to read on that topic.”

To read the entire article, please click here.

Illustration by The Heads of State.

Reprinted with written permission.

Correspondence to:

U of T Magazine
J. Robert S. Prichard Alumni House
21 King's College Circle
Toronto, Ontario,
M5S 3J3

uoft.magazine@utoronto.ca

I thank Rev. Dr. Roger Cann for bringing this article to my attention.

Mental health group ‘hard at it’: Minister

2011-10-05T07:32:00.000-03:00

An article published in yesterday's edition of Metro Halifax:

Health minister likes what she’s seen in mental health strategy

Liberal health critic says it’s time to focus on mental health issues

By Alex Boutilier

Nova Scotia’s minister of health says she expects a provincial mental health and addictions strategy by the end of the year.

Maureen MacDonald [pictured] said yesterday the volunteer working group putting together the strategy requested an extension of 30 days over their previous deadline of the end of September.

“The working group are hard at it, and I’m anticipating I should have this strategy certainly by the end of the year,” she said.

MacDonald said she was pleased at the pace of the working group.

“They’re a group of volunteers, they’re doing this on their own time, and I totally appreciate how much time it’s taken,” said MacDonald.

“They did a public consultation, they’ve seen more than 1,200 people participate in that process, they have some commissioned research.... It’s a big piece of work, and I’m very much looking forward to when they complete it.”

Some of the preliminary themes have been shared with MacDonald, and she said they look “great.”

MacDonald was responding to a call from the opposition Liberals, who demanded an update on the strategy’s progress.

Liberal Health Critic Leo Glavine said he suspects the strategy won’t see the light of day until 2012.

“There’s such a great need to get this out, to get it acted upon,” said Glavine.

“We’re hearing more and more from the school system and the early adult population that have major mental health needs … and we hope the strategy is going to address some of those.”

Upcoming Workshops at the Self-Help Connection

2011-10-05T07:24:00.000-03:00

Ongoing!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

Also see:

The Self-Help Connection

Chance encounters can change the world

2011-10-02T16:26:00.001-03:00

An article published in today's edition of The Leaf-Chronicle:

Students listen to Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times columnist, as he speaks at Austin Peay State University Thursday night. Lopez wrote a book called The Soloist that was required reading for APSU's The Peay Read program / THE LEAF-CHRONICLE/ROBERT SMITH

Author Steve Lopez tells APSU, 'one person can make a difference'

By Karen Parr-Moody

The Dunn Center at Austin Peay State University was filled to the rafters with a crowd that included students wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the words "The Soloist."

This sea of red was the class of 2015, which gathered Wednesday evening to hear Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez speak about his book, The Soloist. In it he chronicles his relationship with Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a formerly homeless, Juilliard-trained musician who has schizophrenia.

The speaking engagement was the culmination of The Peay Read, a program in which students of the introductory "First-Year Experience" class read a common book.

Prior to Lopez's keynote address, a group of 11 students joined him for a special dinner. Each had won a spot in an essay competition that included 1,200 entries. One winner, Nathan Borrero, said he was impressed that Lopez developed a friendship with a homeless man he met at random.

"That's not something you see every day," Borrero said. "Most people who pass a homeless person wouldn't give them a second thought."

In a variation on the theme, winner Destynee Horner said, "I was blown away by how he wasn't trying to gain anything for himself. He was truly concerned about Nathaniel's well-being."

Winner Lindsey Gudal focused on the transformative power of music in her essay.

"Music is the universal language, as corny as that sounds," she said. "I just think that's beautiful."

Samuel Cupp also wrote about music's healing.

"Music is ... the foundation of his soul," Cupp said of Ayers. "When (Ayers) loses everything else ... music keeps him sane."

When 7 p.m. arrived, Dixie Dennis introduced the award-winning students. Then university president Tim Hall took the stage, quoting Socrates from Plato's Apology: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Hall then said, "I'm here to warn you that the examined life is a dangerous life ... dangerous, at least, if what you want to do is stay uncommitted and uninvolved and unattached."

The examined life is what pulls a person in to help another person, Hall explained, calling Lopez "an example of the perils and rewards of the examined life."

Lopez then took the stage.

"What a great T-shirt that is," he said of the red "The Soloist" shirts. "I got one actually a little earlier tonight and I'm gonna take that to a good friend of mine."

He was referencing "Mr. Ayers," which is how he went on to refer to the gifted musician throughout his speech.

"He loves wearing 'Soloist' T-shirts and hats," Lopez said.

Lopez also thanked the students who "made a commitment to this book" and complimented the winners of the essay contest, saying "I'm so flattered and honored and impressed by the work they did."

He then relayed his astonishment that it has now been seven years since he first met Ayers on a Los Angeles street, noting with incredulity the various places it has taken him, both literally and figuratively.

Early on in the hour-plus speech Lopez confessed: "I would love to be able to tell you that I did something out of the goodness of my heart, but I didn't."

He said that writing a newspaper column, which he has done for 35 years, "means you live in desperation," comparing the deadline pressure to that of owing a teacher an assignment. When Lopez first heard Ayers playing a 2-string violin, he thought it might make for a good column. He couldn't get the "compelling image of a guy playing his heart out on a violin" out of his head.

What followed was a one-man investigation into the squalid streets of Los Angeles' Skid Row, which at that time were "home" to thousands of homeless people, many mentally ill.

After Lopez published his first column about Ayers, sympathetic readers sent in six violins and two cellos for the former Juilliard prodigy. As he wrote more columns, his personal life became more intertwined with that of Ayers. Throughout his narration of the key events, Lopez sprinkled in inspirational invocations to the mostly student audience. He urged students to open their eyes to the many opportunities to be had.

"You don't know who might change your life forever," he said.

The speech led into a question and answer session, during which Lopez informed the audience that Ayers continues to live in a Los Angeles apartment, surrounded by musical instruments, rather than on the street.

One of the last things Lopez told the audience was "I get very tired of people congratulating me, because I have to remind them that this gentleman has done as much for me — more for me — than I have done for him. And I tell them that what this story tells us — and I'd like for you to keep this in minds, students — is that one person can make a difference ... there's grace in giving. It's a great privilege to (attend) a school like this. Think of giving something back. Each one of us has the power to make a difference in someone's life. Mr. Ayers has made a difference in mine."

Karen Parr-Moody, 245-0203
Features Reporter
karenparrmoody@theleafchronicle.com

Also see:

REVIEW: Wellspring of human beauty sprung in 'The Soloist'

11 APSU first-year students, middle college student named essay winners

Nathaniel Ayers plays the Foshay Learning Center

Steve Lopez on Nathaniel Anthony Ayers

Mr. Lopez Meets Mr. Ayers (60 Minutes Video, 2009)

The Self-Help Connection - Fall 2011 Newsletter

2011-09-29T07:02:00.000-03:00

Please click on the image to magnify it.

To download the entrire newsletter (PDF) please click here.

Also see:

The Self-Help Connection

International mental health conference opens today in Sydney, Nova Scotia

2011-09-26T07:49:00.000-03:00

An article published in today's edition of the Cape Breton Post:

SYDNEY — For the past few weeks, Linda Alderson [pictured] has been working long hours to make sure an international conference on mental health goes off without a hitch.

As manager of rehabilitation services with the Cape Breton District Health Authority’s Mental Health Services, Alderson helped organize the district-sponsored annual conference of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Canada, a national association of individuals and organizations committed to the provision and growth of psychosocial rehabilitation services to support the recovery of persons with serious mental health issues.

Enhancing Recovery: Community, Culture and Family is the theme of the conference, which takes place from today until Thursday at the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre. Participants from across Canada as well as the United States, Sweden, United Arab Emirates and Singapore are taking part in the conference.

“The conference is not only a wonderful opportunity to network and share information,” says Alderson, “but it also allows people from Cape Breton to attend a high-quality event that features the latest research and advancements in the field.”

The conference is open to Cape Breton District Health Authority staff, anyone with mental illness and their families, community agencies and employers who have staff with mental illness.

Bursaries to help with registration are available for district staff, people with mental illness and/or their families. So far, fundraising efforts have managed to raise enough money to allow more than 30 Cape Bretoners to attend the conference who normally wouldn’t have the resources to pay the $350 needed for the entire registration package.

“We are really good at fundraising,” she says. “We were committed to giving the general public a chance to attend the conference.”

About 250 people are expected to take in the conference, a number which Alderson says reflects well on Cape Bretoners.

“That’s a statement in itself,” she says. “At last year’s conference in Ottawa, they had the same number of participants. Here we are, attracting the same number as in a major centre.”

The first full day of sessions on Tuesday begins with a presentation from Keith Anderson, a local lawyer who will discuss his journey through depression. Louise Bradley, president and CEO of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, will give an update on the commission. Concurrent presentations and workshops will take place throughout the afternoon.

Ambassador Awards will also be given out that day, including one to Alderson herself. Alderson will receive an Ambassador Award for making Cape Breton a leader in psychosocial rehabilitation in Nova Scotia. She is founding member of PSR Canada, past member of PSR Canada’s board of directors and past-president of PSR Nova Scotia. Alderson also currently sits on the PSR policy committee as well as several other committees and boards, locally, provincially and nationally.

“I’m quite humbled to be receiving this award,” she says. “I’ve been in the the mental health field for more than 30 years. My passion is in supporting people to live better and have more fulfilling lives. To receive an award like this is fabulous.”

Dr. John Higenbottam, clinical associate professor in the schizophrenia division of the University of British Columbia, will receive the other Ambassador Award.

The second day of the conference on Wednesday features presentations, concurrent sessions and workshops.

The final day of the conference on Thursday is a half-day session that features Sheila Morrison’s presentation “Lessons I Have Learned — A Mother’s Story.” In her presentation, Morrison will talk about how she helped and encouraged her daughter to move forward following treatment for a difficult psychosis. Jocelyn Greene from St John’s, N.L., will discuss social enterprise and building a community where those with mental illness are included. There will also be a presentation from the First Nations culture perspective.

Conference sponsors are include Addiction Services, Mental Health Services, Department of Psychiatry-Cape Breton District Health Authority, Family Working Group and the Department of Psychiatry-Capital Health/Dalhousie University.

If you are attending this conference, be sure to visit the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's Information Booth!

Photo credit

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia - 2011 Annual General Meeting

2011-09-25T10:37:00.000-03:00

The Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia’s 2011 Annual General Meeting was held in Springhill, Nova Scotia, on Saturday, September 24th, 2011.

Please click on any photograph to enlarge it.

Cecilia McRae, president of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, delivers her President's Report

Phil Rogers, treasurer of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, delivers his Treasurer's Report.

Hilary Thorne, the SSNS's project coordinator, speaks about the growth of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia.

Frank Allen, president of the Cumberland County Chapter of the SSNS introduces the guest speaker, Dr. Pippa Moss.

Dr. Pippa Moss, Chief of Psychiatry, Cumberland Health District, talks about strategies to reduce the stigma and discrimination so often encountered by people who have experienced mental illness, as well as by those who love them. To view Dr. Moss' PowerPoint slides, please click here (PDF).

Rev. Dr. Roger Cann, president of the Kings County Chapter of the SSNS, speaks about the activities of the Kings County Chapter.

Donna Methot, president of the HRM Chapter of the SSNS, speaks about the activities of the HRM Chapter.

Photographs by Stephen Ayer

Michael Kimber at the University of King's College media symposium

2011-09-23T07:21:00.001-03:00

From the YouTube posting by the Mental Health Commission of Canada:

Michael Kimber, a King's College graduate, speaks about his personal experience with mental illness at the King's College media symposium.

Michael Kimber suffers from intense anxiety and isn't afraid to tell anyone. He writes about his experience in a personal, heart-felt and riveting blog and receives thousands of hits daily. Today Michael is still blogging, writing a book, and continuing to attract attention on the impact of stigma and mental health.

Schizophrenia: A Recovery

2011-09-19T07:33:00.000-03:00

Recovery and Respect - Dr. Frank Shelp

2011-09-18T10:36:00.000-03:00

Text accompanying the video:

Respect and recovery from a mental illness are inextricably linked, said Dr. Frank Shelp, Georgia's Commissioner of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. Dr. Shelp was addressing the 20th annual conference of the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network at St. Simons Island, August 2011.

Also see:

RESPECT International: Joel Slack

RESPECT International

The History of the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network: Larry Fricks

Peer-Run Employment Supports - Benefits, Roles, and Opportunities: George Brice

Visions for the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities: Dr. Frank Shelp

News from the Schizophrenia Society of Canada's national conference

2011-09-16T07:33:00.000-03:00

The Schizophrenia Society of Canada held its national conference from September 13th to 15th, 2011, in Regina. The theme of the conference was Changing Minds.

Below are links to three news articles summarizing some of the presentations at the conference.

Taking away the stigma

Good housing linked to health

Pot poses psychosis puzzle

L.A. Times columnist, author of ‘The Soloist’ to speak September 29th in APSU Dunn Center

2011-09-10T10:29:00.000-03:00

An article posted today by Clarksville Online:

Clarksville, TN – In 2005, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez [pictured] strikes an unlikely friendship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician with schizophrenia who slept each night on one of skid row’s most dangerous streets.

Lopez learned Ayers had been a promising violinist, and that he had left the prestigious music program at the Juilliard School because of his struggle with mental illness. The journalist chronicled Ayers’ struggle in several columns at the Los Angeles Times, inspiring readers to send instruments to Ayers through Lopez.

The friendship that Lopez formed with Ayers eventually helped the musician get off the street, settle into an apartment and find help for his schizophrenia.

This story since has inspired newspaper columns, a book titled The Soloist and a movie of the same name starring Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Ayers.

Lopez will share his discovery of Ayers and how their relationship left a profound impact on the writer’s life at 7:00pm, Thursday, September 29th in the Dunn Center at Austin Peay State University. The talk is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow his talk.

Lopez joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times in May 2001 after four years at Time Inc., where he wrote for Time, Sports Illustrated, Life and Entertainment Weekly.

Prior to Time Inc., Lopez was a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune. His work has won numerous national journalism awards for column writing and magazine reporting. In addition to The Soloist, Lopez is the author of three novels.

Lopez’s book and September 29th appearance are part of a reading initiative at APSU called The Peay Read, designed to provide a unifying experience and contribute to the academic experiences for freshmen students. However, the reading program also offers opportunities for sophomore, junior and senior students.

A committee reviewed several books and chose The Soloist as The Peay Read’s common reading book, with homelessness as the theme. Committee members also have worked with other academic departments to plan activities culminating in Lopez’s keynote address, all supporting the current theme of homelessness. For instance, student organizations have been encouraged to plan and implement campus-wide, theme-based programs related to homelessness. In addition, piggy banks have been distributed to all APSU 1000 First-Year Experience classes to raise money for organizations that support Clarksville’s homelessness population.

Other examples of The Peay Read student activities and memorabilia include the following:
T-shirts with “The Soloist” printed on them and given to freshmen students enrolled in the APSU 1000 First-Year Experience program, which is including the book in its classroom discussions.
Bookmarks with book quotations, which will be used in student discussion groups focused on those quotations.
Faculty-student class discussions, including how to help the homeless population and the issues that affect them.
Student book reviews, with authors of the “best 10” essays invited to a dinner with Lopez.
A showing of the movie The Soloist.
A mobile app detailing all events and activities associated with The Peay Read has been developed and can be downloaded via Apple’s iTunes.

For more details about this year’s book reading selection or The Peay Read, visit www.apsu.edu/Read/ or visit Peay Read on Facebook.

For more information about Lopez’s upcoming talk, contact Dr. Dixie Dennis, chair of The Peay Read committee at APSU, by telephone at 931.221.7415 or by email at dennisdi@apsu.edu.

Photo by Giles Mingasson

Living with Schizophrenia

2011-09-04T11:07:00.001-03:00

To view the entire video (25.5 minutes), please click here.

Also see:

Living with Schizophrenia: A Call for Hope and Recovery

Overcoming Schizophrenia

A New Blood-Based Diagnostic Aid for Schizophrenia

2011-09-02T11:49:00.001-03:00

An letter to the editor published in the September 2011 edition of Psychiatric Services:

To the Editor: Many people with schizophrenia exhibit poor insight into and lack of acceptance of their illness (1,2). The absence of objective proof of this disease contributes to this problem. Investigators have been interested in developing a blood-based biomarker test to help identify a biological signature to aid in diagnosis of schizophrenia, particularly in the prodrome of the illness (3,4).

Such a test has recently been developed, validated, and marketed in the United States. This test, VeriPsych, uses a multiplex immunoassay technology that profiles a proprietary disease signature comprising 51 analytes. The test has been found to be 83% sensitive and specific in distinguishing persons with schizophrenia from those without the disorder; the study in which the test's validity was established included more than 500 patients in the development phase and more than 800 patients in the validation phase (5). However, little has been subsequently published about this test, and its clinical utility remains unclear.

Our treatment team administered the test to a 30-year-old woman with a five-year history of schizophrenia who did not accept the fact that she had schizophrenia and who had problems remaining adherent to antipsychotic medications. The test yielded a positive result for the diagnosis of schizophrenia (score of –9199), with a conditional probability score that indicated a 95% chance of having the illness. After being informed of these results, our patient began to accept that her symptoms could be attributed to schizophrenia. For the first time, she expressed interest in learning about schizophrenia, acknowledged a personal connection to her family history of the disorder, and accepted her need of antipsychotic medications. Her therapeutic alliance with her psychiatrist and treatment team has improved, she has enrolled in a college-level class, and her attitude toward antipsychotic treatment remains positive. Her psychiatrist notes that this remarkable change was the result of her confidence in the blood test results—for the first time she had objective data about her illness.

Improving insight and illness acceptance among patients with schizophrenia has proven to be no small task. Psychoeducation, meta-cognitive training, cognitive therapy, and family intervention aimed at developing an understanding and acceptance of schizophrenia have shown only some success (1). Our interest in the test was not to confirm a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia but to help a patient with schizophrenia accept her illness. We feel that if this test or future serum tests are more widely utilized, then their use as an aid in helping people who have no illness insight or who lack acceptance of their illness may be an important application. We hope that our letter will bring attention to this new test and encourage further research to replicate and validate our results. We also need to develop a better understanding of the clinical and research uses of this blood-based diagnostic aid and of its potential role and place in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia.

Deanna L. Kelly, Pharm.D., B.C.P.P., Sheryl Thedford, Pharm.D. and Gopal Vyas, D.O.

Dr. Kelly is affiliated with the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore.

When the test was administered, Dr. Thedford was with the Department of Pharmacy Practice, School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland. She is now with the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy, Shenandoah University, and the Pharmacy Department, Winchester Medical Center, Winchester, Virginia.

Dr. Vyas is with Spring Grove Hospital Center, Baltimore.

Acknowledgments and disclosures

Rules Based Medicine supplied the VeriPsych test but had no involvement in the use of the test, the results, or publication.

The authors report no competing interests.

References
Lysaker PH, Buck KD, Salvatore G, et al: Lack of awareness of illness in schizophrenia: conceptualizations, correlates and treatment approaches. Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics 9:1035–1043, 2009 [CrossRef][Medline]
Buckley PF, Wirshing DA, Bhushan P, et al: Lack of insight in schizophrenia: impact on treatment adherence. CNS Drugs 21:129–141, 2007 [Medline]
Schwarz E, Guest PC, Rahmoune H, et al: Identification of a biological signature for schizophrenia in serum. Molecular Psychiatry epub ahead of print PMID , 2011 [Medline]
Dudley E, Hassler F, Thome J: Profiling for novel protemonics biomarkers in neurodevelopmental disorders. Expert Review of Proteomics 8:127–136, 2011 [CrossRef][Medline]
Schwarz E, Izmailov R, Spain M, et al: Validation of a blood-based laboratory test to aid in the confirmation of a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Biomarker Insights 5:39–47, 2010 [Medline]

Mental health strategy draft doesn’t go far enough

2011-09-01T07:29:00.000-03:00

An article published in today's edition of The Globe and Mail:

By André Picard (pictured)

Copies of the “confidential” draft of Canada’s highly anticipated mental health strategy are circulating widely among “targeted stakeholders.” So let’s take a look at what’s being offered up.

Canada is the only G8 country without a mental health strategy, so the document – and, more important, the underlying philosophy that we need to make life better for those with psychiatric and psychological illnesses – is long overdue.

After all, one in five Canadians will suffer a bout of mental illness; it is the principal cause of absenteeism and disability, and costs the economy a staggering $51-billion annually.

A strategy is essentially a way of setting priorities, of ensuring that no group is overlooked or neglected, that services are co-ordinated and that voices are heard in the corridors of power.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada, whose role it is to draft and implement the strategy, more or less has its priorities right, as evidenced by its six “strategic directions”:
Shift upstream and across sectors. This means emphasize the promotion of mental health (not merely the absence of mental illness), intervene early when people are sick – at school, at work or wherever – and tackle the stigma of mental illness.
Transform relationships and uphold rights. The draft document emphasizes recovery (most, but not all, people with psychiatric illnesses get better) and the need to get the sick out of the criminal justice system.
Strengthen capacity in the community. The strategy calls for a shift to community-based care and underscores the importance of housing and income support to aid the recovery of those with mental illnesses.
Improve equity. Access to mental health services varies markedly across the country and among various age groups (with access to care for children being particularly abysmal), and the gaps need to be closed.
Seek innovation with first nations, Inuit and Métis. Some communities, such as aboriginals, have specific challenges like sky-high rates of addiction and suicide that need particular attention.
Mobilize leadership. The strategy calls for a “whole of government” approach, meaning mental health is not strictly a health issue – it affects the workplace, housing, justice and so on. The draft also calls for a strengthening of the mental health infrastructure.
The commission and the strategy have their genesis in a landmark 2006 Senate report entitled Out of the Shadows at Last: Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada. The 567-page report was thoughtful, reasoned, forward-looking and, sometimes, even bold in describing the shortcomings of mental health treatment, dubbed the orphan of the health system, and in proposing solutions.

The committee, headed by then-senator Michael Kirby (who now heads the MHCC), made 118 recommendations, most of which find echo in the new document.

But there are some subtle, yet important differences between the tone and content of Out of the Shadows at Last and the draft strategy.

First, the language is more bureaucratic and wishy-washy. Mr. Kirby and his senatorial colleagues were refreshingly blunt on what needed to be done; the anonymous drafters of the strategy are far more circumspect.

Far more troublesome is what you can read between the lines of the proposed strategy. There is far too much emphasis on the “recovery model” – the notion that everyone will get better with support – and not enough emphasis on brain science. It’s a legitimate approach for those with mild and moderate mental health problems but not those with severe conditions such as schizophrenia.

In fact, reading the draft strategy, one is left with an unpleasant aftertaste: the distinct feeling that psychiatry and medications have no place in Canada’s approach to tackling mental illness.

There are distinct – and sometimes clashing – views in the mental health field. But the strategy gives too much credence to social science and not enough to neuroscience.

It also pays far too much attention to the views of “psychiatric survivors” who hide their vehemently anti-treatment views in the promotion of “peer support” and the language of “rights.”

But hope – and false hope – cannot be allowed to take the place of care. Where in the strategy, for example, is the call for investment in brain research, psychiatric beds and more addiction treatment facilities?

The draft also gives short shrift to the sickest of the sick, those with severe (and often intractable) cases of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, who often suffer from anosognosia (where people don’t even recognize they have a mental illness).

This group, while small (less than 1 per cent of those with mental illness), are those who populate our streets and prisons. They don’t need the right to refuse treatment, they need the right to be well. And their families need to be empowered to help them, not cast aside.

Susan Inman, author of the memoir After her Brain Broke: Helping my Daughter Recover her Sanity, offers up a detailed critique of the strategy’s shortcomings in this regard in her article Suppressing Schizophrenia, published this week by The Tyee.

One of the MHCC’s key goals has been to help create a social movement, one that empowers people living (or having recovered from) mental illness. This is how women with breast cancer, men with prostate cancer and people living with HIV-AIDS have brought their issues to the forefront and made great strides.

But the mental health movement has to learn an important lesson from these other movements: You have to be inclusive, you have to embrace science, you have to be mainstream and you cannot allow those with ulterior motives to set the agenda.

There is a lot of good in Canada’s draft mental health strategy. But it’s not good enough yet.

Also see:

An open letter to Canadians from the Mental Health Commission of Canada

North Shore Schizophrenia Society Advocacy Bulletin (September 2011)

Suppressing Schizophrenia

2011-08-30T07:58:00.006-03:00

An article posted yesterday by TheTyee.ca:

Schizophrenia is invisible in Canada's new mental health strategy.

By Susan Inman (pictured)

It is hard to imagine that life could get any harder for individuals living with schizophrenia (one per cent of the population) and the families who provide support to them. However, the controversial choices made by the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC), in the latest draft of the new Mental Health Strategy, make it likely that their situations can actually get worse. These choices, which were not apparent in any earlier MHCC documents, are not receiving the public scrutiny that is needed because this draft is not available for the public. This draft, which was shared with a very small number of people, is currently being polished, and the Canadian public will not see it until it is unveiled in early 2012.

Through both what the strategy suggests and what it fails to support, this plan represents decisions that are dangerous to the well being of people with schizophrenia.

None of the MHCC documents have provided even the most basic information about this often misunderstood mental illness. For instance, the public has never learned that 40 to 50 per cent of psychotic people don't understand that they are ill and so have no reason to ask for or consent to treatment. Nor does any of the educational material promoted by the MHCC in its Mental Health First Aid program mention that 90 per cent of people with schizophrenia who stop taking their medications will have a relapse. A clearer understanding of this neurobiological disorder can help people understand the mental health policies that are most appropriate.

One major problem with the strategy is its approach to legal issues. The new draft strategy promises funds for court challenges to human rights abuses. The public deserves to have open access to this document to find out exactly what the MHCC intends with this action. Since the MHCC has allied itself with groups opposed to involuntary treatment of psychotic people, it is likely that federal funds could be made available to challenge involuntary treatment orders that have been made under various provincial mental health acts. Some human rights activists insist that no one should be treated for psychosis unless they choose this option; however, the notion of choice does not make sense in this context because people experiencing a profound psychosis do not have access to their rational thinking processes. They are not able to act in their own best interest, which is why mentally ill people frequently end up homeless or, increasingly, in prison.

To read the entire article, please click here.

Photo credit

Also see:

Mental Health Strategy for Canada - DRAFT (June 3, 2011)

Re: The lost, beautiful mind of Ivan Car, Aug. 21.

2011-08-28T10:13:00.000-03:00

A letter to the editor published in yesterday's edition of the Ottawa Citizen:

After reading this article, I wish first to offer thanks to Anouk MontpetitCar for sharing her story about her husband Ivan Car's [pictured] struggles with depression - a battle he fought bravely but sadly lost.

Car's story is more common than one might think - and so often, these kinds of stories go untold and unnoticed. By sharing her husband's story with Citizen readers, MontpetitCar has not only provided a glimpse into what is a severe, chronic and disabling illness, but also the frustrations that someone with mental illness faces in seeking appropriate treatment as quickly as possible.

As with any other severe, chronic and disabling illness, quick response, expertise and ongoing care are all necessary if one is to recover. Unfortunately, it appears that by the time Car decided to seek the services offered at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, it was too late; he was too tired to face what lay ahead.

Perhaps he would have received the proper care and treatment if the waiting lists for psychiatric treatment at mental health facilities weren't so very long and if the Ministry of Health hadn't decided over 10 years ago that psychiatric emergency services should only be provided at local hospitals that have certain emergency-room capabilities. (An exception was made for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, which still operates emergency services at the Clarke Institute on College Street.)

Because of this government decision, the Royal - which has obvious expertise in mental health - was forced to close its emergency services department in 2000. Former patients of the Royal speak fondly of the empathetic, caring environment and expert care received at the emergency room prior to this forced closure.

I and many other families I know have experienced the extreme difficulties of sitting for hours in a hospital emergency waiting room with a severely ill loved one who is in immediate need of psychiatric services. Often, very sick people never receive psychiatric services because, due to their illness, they are unable to wait and are unlikely to return, no matter how severe the symptoms.

There are real practical benefits to receiving emergency service at a mental health centre as opposed to an emergency room geared to treating fevers and broken bones. When someone is suffering from mental illness, it is imperative that appropriate mental health care begin at the first encounter between the health provider and the client. It can make the difference between success and failure.

Given the recent discussions about "client-centred" care, it is incumbent that two things happen - that the wait list for psychiatric services be addressed and that emergency services be returned to the Royal where specialized, therapeutic care goes beyond dispensing of medication.

Cynthia Clark, Ottawa Chair, Family Advisory Council, ROMHC

Image credit

Capital Health changes guards

2011-08-26T07:07:00.000-03:00

An article published in today's edition of The Chronicle Herald.

Paladin to take over from RMAC, commissionaires

By Brian Medel

Most Capital Health hospitals will be protected by a new security company beginning Oct. 1.

Paladin Security, Canada’s largest supplier of health facility security, will begin a five-year contract that will cost Capital Health more than $18 million, paying out $3.63 million annually, said a recent notice to staff.

Capital Health now pays about $3 million annually for security, spokesman Peter Graham said Thursday.

The existing contract with two suppliers, RMAC Security and the Nova Scotia division of the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, will expire Sept. 30.

"We did go out with a (request for proposals) earlier this year," said Graham.

The existing security providers did submitted bids.

"Neither of them were successful," said Graham.

The memo to staff said "RMAC Security and the Corps of Commissionaires have provided us with quality service, for which we are very grateful."

The current security providers will be on the job until midnight Sept. 30, when Paladin Security will take over.

About 100 security officers, 78 of whom are commissionaires, work in Capital Health buildings.

Security staff employed by either the Corps of Commissionaires or RMAC Security will be given opportunity to apply for positions with Paladin, with interviewing and hiring expected to begin almost immediately, said the memo.

The job search website now-hiring.ca said Paladin Security held a job fair in Halifax over two days last week at the Lord Nelson Hotel & Suites, where the company recruited health-care security officers.

Paladin recently opened an office on Spring Garden Road in Halifax.

Two hospital departments that have special security needs are the mental health and emergency units.

Paladin managers will meet with staff from the emergency and mental health departments to ensure the transition is smooth. All Paladin staff receive training that enable them to work in mental health and emergency settings, said the memo.

Health-care security is different from all other types, often involving aggressive patient behaviour, said Leo Knight, chief operations officer with Paladin Security.

"We’re about halfway through our (hiring) process, so we’re probably looking for another 50 to 60 people," Knight said Thursday from Vancouver.

"We got into the Nova Scotia market by doing an acquisition of a local company. . . . Reliant (Security Services)."

It was not a requirement to work here, he said.

"We were coming to the Nova Scotia market anyway. We’re the largest full-service security provider in Canada and we’re the fourth-largest guard company in the country.

"We’re the largest provider of health-care security in the country."

Paladin provides security for every hospital in Alberta and many in British Columbia and Ontario, he said.

Col. Mike Brownlow, chief executive officer of the Nova Scotia division of the corps, said the organization has provided security at Halifax hospitals for many years.

"We’re extremely disappointed, as you can imagine," Brownlow said about not being retained.

"Our relationship has always been a very positive one,"

He said the corps was always concerned with the safety of staff, patients and visitors.

The corps must now look for alternate employment for the 78 veterans hired to work at Capital Health, Brownlow said.

Most commissionaires are military veterans, with some coming from RCMP and municipal police force backgrounds.

Of the 1,700 commissionaires in Nova Scotia, 1,200 are in the Halifax area.

"We’re presently engaging in getting them all placed in different locations," said Brownlow. "There’s a number of them that are retiring.

"Our main mandate is to get employment for veterans."

(bmedel@herald.ca)

Image credit

Police learn to use words instead of force

2011-08-25T07:06:00.000-03:00

An August 23rd posting by bryancountynews.net:

A recent Crisis Intervention Team graduate went to work one day earlier this month, expecting just another day on the job, but the situation he faced could have ended in violence had he not been part of Georgia’s CIT training program.

The CIT-trained police officer recently shared his story:
“We were called to a situation where a male was physically abusing his mother. He had been drinking and was armed with a gun. The individual was known to be schizophrenic and had been noncompliant with his treatment,” the officer said. “Using our CIT training skills, we de-escalated the situation and got him to give his gun to us. I couldn’t believe it. We had just graduated the week before from CIT training.

“Through the intervention skills we learned, we were able to bring a safe conclusion to this potentially deadly situation for the mother, the individual and our team.”
Law enforcement from the sheriffs’ offices of Tattnall, Toombs and Bulloch counties, along with the police departments of Pembroke, Glennville, Reidsville, Vidalia and Baxley, spent 40 hours in CIT training to help them effectively and humanely interact with persons affected by mental illness, developmental disabilities, Alzheimer’s disease and addictive diseases.

Since 2004, the Georgia CIT program has sought to equip Georgia law-enforcement officers with the skills to recognize and assist people with behavioral-health disorders in crisis, thereby advancing public and citizen safety and reducing stigma, according to a news release.

The recent training class was hosted Aug. 8-12 by the Tattnall County Sheriff’s Office and staffed by local Georgia Association of Community Service Boards member Pineland MH/DD/AD, with assistance from NAMI.

It included clinical classroom instructions, practical de-escalation role-play exercises, experiences of consumers and family members and site visits to Pineland facilities.

The training covered a variety of subjects, including understanding and preventing suicide, signs and symptoms of mental illness, de-escalation techniques, legal issues and mental health law, addictive diseases and child and adolescent interventions.

“CIT is vital for law enforcement to take part in, and our goal is to have our whole team trained,” Capt. Kevin Keyfauver of the Tattnall County Sheriff’s Office said. “On a day-to-day basis, we not only encounter individuals on calls that may be experiencing behavioral issues, but we also regularly transport individuals to our community mental-health care facilities. CIT helps our team learn how to use words instead of force when diffusing situations. It makes it safer for everyone involved.”

Through Georgia CIT partnerships, more than 4,000 law enforcement officers have received special training since the program’s inception.

“The specialized training of CIT enables officers to better understand and relate to individuals with mental disabilities or disorders when in the field,” said GBI Special Agent Debbie Shaw, CIT coordinator for state law enforcement. “This program brings law enforcement, mental-health providers and the community at large together to provide the best service possible to all its citizens.”

Image credit

Rochester group launches website devoted to schizophrenia

2011-08-23T07:05:00.002-03:00

An article posted on August 22nd by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

By Michael Zeigler

A Rochester-area organization that raises money for research and education about schizophrenia is marking its 25th anniversary by taking to the Internet.

CARES (Committee to Aid Research to End Schizophrenia) has launched cares-web.com, a website offering information about the complex mental disorder that can cause depression, delusions and paranoia.

The site includes more than 100 videos by medical professionals about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment; the emotional impact on families; dealing with stigma; and community resources for families and caregivers.

Beginning this fall, the site also will include "CARES Corner," a monthly feature in which viewers can interact with health professionals on specific subjects.

"We'll be able to reach hundreds and thousands more people than we have before," said the organization's president, John Delehanty of Penfield.

CARES was started in 1986 by Barbara Swigert of Penfield after her daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Since then, the organization has held fundraisers and donated $250,000 to assist more than 90 research projects.

CARES had planned this year to end large fundraising events, such as golf tournaments, because its members were aging.

The group still planned to accept donations, however.

But at a luncheon in June, Dr. J. Steven Lamberti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and health educator Thomas Conant unveiled a proposal to develop a website that would be a resource for people with schizophrenia and their families, Delehanty said.

The organization agreed and the site was up and running by early August.

The website includes a donation function. The organization also will continue its plans to conduct mail-in fundraisers, Delehanty said.

MZEIGLER@DemocratandChronicle.com

A Moment of Silence for Kelly Thomas in Beverly Hills

2011-08-19T07:38:00.004-03:00

Also see:

Kelly Thomas' father fights for justice

The Canadian Medical Association Awards Medal of Honour to Dr. Austin Mardon

2011-08-17T07:16:00.000-03:00

An August 16th media release from the Canadian Medical Association:

OTTAWA, Aug. 16, 2011 /CNW/ - The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) will present the 2011 CMA Medal of Honour to Dr. Austin Mardon, PhD, who has demonstrated outstanding public commitment to raising awareness of mental health issues and diminishing the stigma and discrimination faced by Canadians living with mental illness.

"The CMA Medal of Honour recognizes personal contributions to the advance of medical research and education," said CMA President Dr. Jeff Turnbull. "Dr. Mardon has worked tirelessly to help Canadians better understand the issues around mental illness. In courageously talking openly about his own experiences, he is truly making a difference in coaxing mental illness out of the shadows in this country."

Diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirty, Dr. Mardon uses his own experience and his road to recovery in advocating in the areas of stigma, service delivery, awareness and education. He tries to improve the lives of those with schizophrenia through public education. His efforts have led him meet with politicians, clergy, academics and others in positions to effect change. He has influenced public policy in Alberta through his service as vice-chair of the Alberta Disabilities Forum steering committee and as chair of its low-income working group; as a member of the Premier's Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities; as an addiction and mental health committee member of Alberta Health's service integration working group; and as chair of the Edmonton Champions' Centre advisory committee. He also was instrumental in winning changes to Alberta's income assistance program for the severely handicapped.

"I have put my experiences out there for all to see, but it hasn't been easy and for some people it's impossible," said Dr. Mardon. "My goal continues to be to see the unfair and debilitating stigma our society holds against the mentally ill wiped out for all time."

Austin Mardon, PhD, has been a public educator and tireless advocate for the mentally ill, particularly those with schizophrenia, since he was diagnosed with that illness in 1992. At the time he was a promising graduate student and Antarctic explorer, and the diagnosis of schizophrenia could have ended his academic career and severely limited his prospects in life. Instead, he survived many setbacks through his sheer determination to continue his studies, to make a difference, to contribute to society, and to help others.

Dr. Mardon graduated with a major in geography from the University of Lethbridge in 1985. The following year, at age 24, he was investigating meteorite impacts 170 km from the South Pole as a junior field member on an Antarctic meteorite recovery expedition sponsored by NASA and the National Science Federation. He received the U.S. Antarctic Service Medal for his work. However, the extreme hardships of the expedition affected him mentally and physically. While he went on to earn masters degrees in science (South Dakota State University) and education (Texas A&M University) and published a number of articles and books, his health issues persisted. At the age of 30 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Although some of his abilities are compromised by the disease, he earned a PhD in geography from Greenwich University, Australia; continued his remarkable publication record, including articles in both Science and Nature; was elected an International Fellow and Corresponding Fellow of the Explorers Club of New York; and was inducted into the International Academy of Astronautics.

Equally impressive has been his work on behalf of the mentally ill. In addition to giving countless interviews to the media on the topic of mental illness, he has published articles about faith and schizophrenia, homelessness, medication, and income support. He has provided leadership as a member of the board of directors of both the Edmonton and Alberta chapters of the Schizophrenia Society, and for a number of years he was coordinator of the Alberta Mental Health Self-Help Network.

"I hope to soon see the day when schizophrenia is treated like any other disease and is finally detached from the stigma that makes a difficult burden to bear even worse," added Dr. Mardon.

Dr. Mardon has received a number of awards, including the Order of Canada (2007). Others include: the Flag of Hope Award (2001) and the Bill Jefferies Family Award (2007) of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada; the Distinguished Alumni Award of the University of Lethbridge (2002); the Presidents Award of the Alberta chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association (2002); the C.M. Hincks Award from the national division of the Canadian Mental Health Association (2007); and the Medal of Honour of the Alberta Medical Association (2010).

A popular member of the Speakers' Bureau of Alberta, Dr. Mardon has publicly assisted the medical profession by supporting development of policy positions that have helped medical providers treat those with mental illness.

Dr. Mardon is the 28th recipient of the CMA Medal of Honour, the highest award bestowed upon someone who is not a member of the medical profession. He will receive the award at a ceremony at the D.F. Cook Recital Hall, Memorial University, in St. John's, N.L., on Aug. 24 as part of the CMA's 144th annual meeting.

For further information:

Lucie Boileau, Manager, Media Relations
Tel: 613-731-8610 or 1-800-663-7336 ext. 1266
Mobile: 613-447-0866
lucie.boileau@cma.ca

Photo credit

Also see:

Austin Mardon to receive honorary Doctor of Laws degree from University of Alberta

Austin Mardon on Schizophrenia

Government cuts hurt people with disabilities

2011-08-16T07:11:00.001-03:00

An opinion piece published in today's edition of The Chronicle Herald:

By Wayne MacNaughton [pictured]

Last week, the government announced that it was "clarifying" the rules around "special needs" for people living in poverty (re: "Social assistance won’t cover pot," Aug. 10). However, the news coverage thus far has failed to explain the scope and severity of the government cuts that have occurred, and the fact that they will hurt people living with disabilities, on fixed incomes, who cannot afford to pay for their own medical needs.

Far from simply "clarifying" the previous law, the amendments significantly reduce government assistance for essential health needs. In addition, people will be subject to a cookie-cutter approach: If their need does not fall within a pre-existing list, it will not be considered, no matter how essential for health or necessary to alleviate pain and suffering. The government cuts were made without notice, public consultation or input from health or disability rights groups.

The cutback on special needs will have a number of repercussions. On an individual basis, it will undermine people’s health, and increase pain and suffering. This is not good for society, but in addition it will increase the social burden on the health care system, as people struggle with poorly managed medical conditions and illnesses without access to the services they need.

People who had no other alternatives, who had a recommendation from their doctor and needed medication or other services to alleviate pain and suffering, or because it was essential to their health, could apply for "special needs" assistance. As a result of government amendments to the law, that access to those medications and services is now no longer available.

The Department of Community Services has suggested the cuts won’t have a big impact. But ask any person with disabilities who needs to pay higher rent to obtain allergen-free housing, or needs to meet the cost of the only medication that works but isn’t on the list of approved medications, or needs access to counselling for post-traumatic stress, and they will tell you these needs are essential, not frills.

Let’s look at the single biggest justification the government relies on in making these cuts: medical marijuana. Medical marijuana is prescribed by doctors for pain management. Patients who are permitted to use medical marijuana do so on a doctor’s recommendation, under a licence from Health Canada, where no other method or drug for pain management has worked. In denying access to medical marijuana, the government forces people back to reliance on Dilaudid and Oxycontin, drugs that have many more side effects and fewer positive individual outcomes, and have been the subject of inquiries and concerns regarding social costs and addictions. Big Pharma wins, and people with disabilities lose and the rest of us see Pharmacare costs escalate.

Don’t believe the government’s portrayal of "special needs" requests as frivolous wastes of taxpayers’ money. Under the previous regulations, needs that are "essential to health" and "necessary to alleviate pain and suffering" were recognized as "special" and people living in poverty were forced to meet a stringent test to qualify for assistance. These were needs that many of us take for granted because they are essential for health. (In an era when people are trying to decide whether to buy an iPhone 5 when they come out this fall, recipients of social assistance are not even given funding to have a basic telephone in order to look for a job.)

Why is the government cutting back on essential health services for people with disabilities? Figures cited by Community Services in a media release identify only 20 to 25 cases. The release fails to provide comparison figures for increases to other, already listed special needs and Pharmacare (formulary costs), or what we can expect in increased costs to the Pharmacare program and other health services as a result of these cutbacks. The auditor general’s report cited in the release criticizes government accounting procedures, but makes no recommendations concerning the merit of the requests and cannot be interpreted to justify these cutbacks.

Special needs assistance must be restored. When the law was introduced in 2001, special needs for people with disabilities was described as the "cornerstone" of the program. That cornerstone needs to be rebuilt, and fast, to avoid pain and suffering and protect the right to health of all Nova Scotians — including those living with disabilities.

Wayne MacNaughton is an anti-poverty activist living in Halifax.

Photo credit

Also see:

Critics slam changes to special-needs funding

Clear, Consistent Access to Special Needs Funding for People on Income Assistance

Welfare Rights Guide

Income Assistance and Nutrition: Are You Getting What You Need?

Mental Health Commission of Canada - 2010/2011 Annual Report

2011-08-11T22:08:00.001-03:00

Please click on the image to magnify it.

An email from the Mental Health Commission of Canada which the SSNS received today:

Hello,

On behalf of the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) I am pleased to present the English and French versions of our 2010-2011 interactive annual report.

Together we can. It is our theme this year because our accomplishments are due in large part to collaboration with a wide variety of individuals, groups and organizations. Alongside our partners we worked to promote mental health, reduce stigma and improve services and supports. With our hundreds of partners, we are helping to make mental health a priority for all Canadians.

MHCC Annual Report

Our Annual Report outlines the significant progress we have made towards achieving our goals. Among other updates, readers will learn that we have now housed hundreds of people in five Canadian cities through At Home/Chez Soi – our national research project on mental health and homelessness. We have now trained over 20,000 people across the country in Mental Health First Aid. This represents an increase of over 100% since it became an official MHCC program in 2010. These are just two milestones made possible through support from the Government of Canada.

I hope you will find this document engaging and informative and will enjoy flipping through its pages. Please forward it along to your colleagues, friends and families. I look forward to your feedback.

Yours sincerely,

Louise Bradley
President and Chief Executive Officer

To download the PDF version of the MHCC Annual Report, please click here.

Clear, Consistent Access to Special Needs Funding for People on Income Assistance

2011-08-08T21:20:00.010-03:00

An August 8th media release from the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services:

Clearer regulations now make it easier for income assistance clients to understand what special needs funding they can receive, and ensure funding decisions are consistent and fair province wide.

The amended Employment Support and Income Assistance Regulations Around Special Needs funding take effect today, Aug. 8.

"We know that some people on income assistance have special needs and often need help with medical issues, or even to get to work," said Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse [pictured]. "We are committed to meeting those needs, and have been increasing our budget to do so.

"At the same time, the criteria for receiving special needs funding must be clear, fair and consistent so that people are treated the same no matter where they live."

Over the past two years, the department has increased the special needs budget by 15 per cent, or about $6 million, bringing the total investment in funding to more than $45 million. These funds are intended to help income assistance clients with medical and employment-related special needs.

Over the years, the department has received special needs requests for items and services like hot tubs, gym memberships, and humming touch therapy. These were never intended to be covered under special needs, but because the regulations were not clear, about 20-25 of these requests were approved either by a caseworker or through an appeal.

The department has also received a number of special needs requests for medications and substances, such as medical marijuana. The amendments now make it clear that Community Services can only cover medically related items and services that are covered by MSI or listed on the Nova Scotia Pharmacare Formulary. This is consistent with how other provinces handle requests for medical marijuana.

The amendments are also consistent with recommendations from the auditor general who said clear systems and controls must be in place to ensure special needs funding is being spent as intended, which is to fairly meet the needs of income assistance clients.

The change only affects new applications for special needs funding received after Aug. 8. Income assistance clients now receiving special needs funding will continue to do so as long as the special need exists.

In addition to the more than $45 million invested in the Employment Support and Income Assistance Special Needs program, the department is also investing an additional $18.25 million this year to help income assistance clients and low-income Nova Scotians make ends meet. These include a 22 per cent increase per child, per month to the Nova Scotia Child Benefit, a $15 per month increase in the Income Assistance Personal Allowance, indexing the Affordable Living Tax Credit and the Poverty Reduction Credit to keep up with inflation, and allowing working income assistance clients to keep more money each month.

FOR BROADCAST USE:

Clearer regulations now make it easier for income assistance clients to understand what special needs funding they can receive, and ensure funding decisions are consistent provincewide.

Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse says the criteria for receiving Special Needs funding must be clear, fair and consistent so that people are treated the same no matter where they live.

Community Services invests more than $45 million in special needs funding annually. The funds are intended to fairly meet the special needs of all income assistance clients.

The amendments now make it clear that Community Services can only cover medically related items and services that are covered by MSI or listed on the Nova Scotia Pharmacare Formulary.

The change only affects new applications for funding received after August 8th. People now receiving special needs funding will continue to receive it as long as the need exists.

-30-

Media Contact:

Susan Tate
Community Services
902-424-4038
E-mail: tatese@gov.ns.ca

Image credit

Also see:

Employment Support and Income Assistance Policy Manual (PDF) (Chapter 6 - Special Needs, pages 106 to 150)

Employment Support and Income Assistance Act

Employment Support and Income Assistance Regulations

Assistance Appeal Regulations

New mental health treatment worth fighting for

2011-08-08T07:03:00.005-03:00

An opinion piece published in yesterday's edition of the Daily Record:

By Valerie Fox

I had planned to write about involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC) once it was finally up and running in New Jersey, but the editorial in the July 28 Daily Record (“Treatment funding is a good investment”) has prompted me to write at this time.

When Governor Corzine signed IOC into law, I was invited to the bill signing. Cathy Katsnelson [pictured], a Burlington County woman who lobbied for the new law, introduced herself to me. I felt honored. We both expressed our joy that, after many years, IOC was finally law. Over the years at legislative hearings in Trenton, I would hear Ms. Katsnelson testify as a mother who lost her son because of untreated mental illness. I am very pleased the IOC law is called “Gregory’s Law.”

I am not a family member. I am a person who has lived with schizophrenia since first being diagnosed in 1963. I have been fortunate that I can function pretty well, as long as I take my medication and take care of myself both physically and mentally.

Over the years, I only had one very severe setback, which changed the course of my life forever. I stopped taking my psychiatric medication for what I thought was a good reason — against the advice of my psychiatrist. I tumbled into homelessness and untreated schizophrenia for a two-year period.

A healthy, normal person cannot imagine living homeless in a schizophrenic state. It is not pretty. It is very dangerous to oneself and possibly others. Voices were my guide during this period. As a result, some decisions I made were risky. I was very vulnerable and I suffered tremendously. When I regained my health, I had to reconcile my healthy self with the trauma of living exposed with untreated mental illness. It was difficult. Good mental health supports helped me tremendously.

Almost immediately after I stabilized, I heard about involuntary outpatient commitment and knew I would advocate very hard to bring this treatment option to New Jersey because I believed it could help others from living with untreated mental illness that put themselves and possibly others in danger.

My first testimony was at least 20 years ago. Many mental health advocates were and still are against this treatment. It is my belief that, if any of these advocates lived the horror of untreated schizophrenia or other severe mental illness and homelessness, their opinions would change quickly — if they were lucky enough to have treatment and regain mental health.

Finally, IOC became law in 2009. Proponents of IOC had given the Legislature a good picture of untreated mental illness and the law passed unanimously.

Since the passage of IOC, unfortunately, it has faced a number of pitfalls. Implementation was stalled because the Department of Human Services waited until the day of supposed implementation to state there was no money allocated for it. IOC has been discussed in private, invitation-only meetings. I believe some who were invited were agaist involuntary commitment. I was not invited, even though I advocated tirelessly in an appropriate manner for IOC.

I once sat at a mental health conference at which a high-ranking state mental health administrator told a roomful of impressionable people that, while he does not want to implement IOC, it is law and he has to do it. It would have been so much better to say that he hoped IOC could make a difference in someone’s life. I further think $2 million will be too little money to do an adequate job of effectively rolling IOC out.

It is my hope that, when all the negative rhetoric about this treatment is proven untrue and some mentally ill people avoid the inevitable collision course of homelessness and voices because of this treatment, that those who have been so adamantly against IOC will see they did not fully understand the dangers that IOC can prevent — including violence, death and physical illness.

Photo credit

Also see:

Schizophrenia, Medication, and Outpatient Commitment

Personal Accounts: Schizophrenia and Socialization

OneInFive.ca - A Focus on Psychosis

2011-08-04T07:11:00.001-03:00

To read more, please visit OneInFive.ca.

Also see:

Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program

Nova Scotia Housing & Homelessness Network - First Annual Provincial Housing Conference

2011-08-04T07:06:00.000-03:00

Tuesday & Wednesday, November 22nd & 23rd!

Please click on the image to magnify it.

From an email received from the Nova Scotia Housing & Homelessness Network on August 4th:

Theme: Fast Forward

The Conference will be an opportunity to strengthen the non-profit, private and public housing sectors by bringing together leaders from across the Atlantic Provinces. This event will be a leading regional resource, attracting a full spectrum of people living in and working within the affordable housing industry - people who are committed to advancing what Nova Scotians have asked for in their communities – safe and affordable housing.

Beginning on Tuesday, November 22nd, National Housing Day, the programme will include:
Launch of the Nova Scotia Housing & Homelessness Network

Plenary Session

Keynote Speakers

“Meet the Dragons” - bring your development project ideas to our expert ‘Dragons’ panel for qualified expert advice

Open Space workshops

Award Luncheon and Dinner

Book Launch

Further programme details will be posted as they become available.

Who should attend?

Everyone involved in the housing industry, particularly builders and developers, finance specialists, policy-makers, municipal, provincial and federal government representatives, both elected and appointed, as well as those involved in community grassroots efforts to promote affordable housing:
Architects and HRM city planners

Housing authorities

Affordable energy associations

Neighbourhoodgroups

Affordable housing advocates

Professional associations

Public agencies

Service and shelter providers

Sustainable development experts

Tenants/subsidized housing consumers

Sponsors/Partners:

Canadian Mortgage and Housing Cooperation (CMHC)

Conference Program Planning Committee
Network Steering Committee

email the Committee

Overview - Mental Health Commission of Canada

2011-08-04T07:02:00.006-03:00

Overview of the Mental Health Commission of Canada as posted on LinkedIn:

People living with mental illness have the right to obtain the services and supports they need. They have the right to be treated with the same dignity and respect as we accord everyone struggling to recover from any form of illness.

The goal of the Mental Health Commission of Canada is to help bring into being an integrated mental health system that places people living with mental illness at its centre.

To this end, the Commission encourages cooperation and collaboration among governments, mental health service providers, employers, the scientific and research communities, as well as Canadians living with mental illness, their families and caregivers.

The organization of publicly funded mental health services and supports to the general population is the responsibility of each provincial and territorial government, not of the Commission.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada will:
Be a catalyst for the reform of mental health policies and improvements in service delivery;

Act as a facilitator, enabler and supporter of a national approach to mental health issues;

Work to diminish the stigma and discrimination faced by Canadians living with mental illness;

Disseminate evidence based information on all aspects of mental health and mental illness to governments, stakeholders and the public.