Psychology Profiles

Psychological scientists incorporate climate into their studies

When a researcher or student applies for money to conduct research, they have to convince the funders not only that their idea is a good one, but that they are the person who should be doing that research. Funders look at a lot of things including the impact of the research, the way the knowledge will be shared, the time it will take to complete, and the return on their investment (value for money).

In the Prime Family Lab at York University, lab director Dr. Heather Prime is discussing the future with her student Alex Markwell. Because of how they apply for and receive their funding, their research projects must be closely tied to the lab itself – in their case, that is the study of family dynamics. How parents and siblings influence children from birth to adolescence, or how major or minor external events affect families. The lab launched in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic became a major external event that upended family dynamics across Canada and around the world.

Students come to a lab because of the expertise that the research program and supervisor bring to that lab. This is what drew Alex to the Prime Family Lab. Her area of interest is child development within a family systems framework and this is the lens through which she looks at potential projects. She has a keen interest in acting on climate change, but this was not something that was part of the discussion before her arrival. Only through conversations with her new lab director did they discover that this was a shared passion. Heather says,

“Alex brought up a year or two ago that the way we study the pandemic is really transferrable to the way we might study climate change.”

So they started thinking about ways they could integrate climate change into their established research program. As Alex thinks ahead to her Ph.D., which she will be starting in September, she has written a proposal for a scholarship focused on the pathways linking climate change to child and family well-being. One aspect of this proposal is the creation of a theoretical model from a family system perspective.

“Because climate change is going to be more and more relevant to more and more people, you need a map – which sounds annoying because it’s theoretical, but it can create a framework of ‘here’s what we think is going to happen based on everything we already know’. That takes a lot of work – you’re scouring the literature, bringing together a number of theories, and then creating this ‘map’.”

Specifically, Alex is talking about looking at how climate changes and climate change-related events may affect children’s mental health through disruptions to family functioning. She’s thinking that would be similar to the COVID family-disruption model that Heather published, about how the pandemic’s social and economic disruptions trickle down into families and affect their dynamics.

They can start looking at feasible interventions – something psychoeducational that could teach parents and caregivers how to talk to their children about climate change. Or maybe the social and economic ripple effects of climate change impacting family relationships where children may suffer, given that kids are so dependent on their relationship with their parents. First though, they must define the parameters of their study.

Are we talking about families who have experienced a major climate event – like losing a home to a wildfire – or families who are under threat of such an event (live in proximity to a flood zone) – or are we talking to families who are just generally anxious about the whole thing? Can they survey those people in Toronto?

There are many questions to answer before applying for research funding. Many more questions arise after that funding is secured.

Canadian climate scientists are still feeling stifled

Many of us remember the protests staged by scientists in 2013 over what they described as the ‘war on science’ being waged by the federal government at that time. Science funding was drastically cut, and the scientists who were still able to do research were prevented from communicating the results of that research to the public – which is kind of the point of doing research in the first place. An enormous amount of that muzzling was done around climate science, as the federal government sought to downplay the most dangerous effects – and even the very existence – of climate change.

Dr. Alana Westwood at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University researches natural resource management and science. Her lab recently completed two studies into interference with environmental research in Canada. Of the 741 environmental scientists surveyed, 92% reported experiencing interference with either the conducting or the communicating of their research. Dr. Westwood, along with her research associate Manjulika E. Robertson and Master’s student Samantha M. Chu, wrote an article in The Conversation discussing their findings and the ramifications of these pervasive invisible barriers.

Since that time, the policies at the federal level have changed. In theory, this means that scientists can get back to their work and can share their results with impunity. Alana’s studies suggest that this is, sadly, not the case.

An atmosphere of uncertainty is partly to blame – for a long time, certain kinds of science went unfunded and specifically shunned. Can scientists go back to those subjects, studying pollution and endangered species and emissions? Will they get funding if they do? What about funders – there is now a fair amount of external pressure on them to fund only certain kinds of research, pressure which has not necessarily abated just because of a change in federal policy. Alana says,

“We identified interference in two categories. One is externally imposed – when a researchers’ employer is putting restrictions on their ability to conduct or communicate their research. That could come from workplace policies, it could come from their manager, senior leadership, or their communications departments. The category we found that was new and more insidious was internalized interference. This happens when researchers themselves don’t want to communicate with the media, either out of fear of being misrepresented or of public backlash.”

Climate scientists exist within a system where the trickle-down effects of the war on science are still being felt. What has resulted is that a Canadian climate science environment that became fractured a decade ago remains fractured to this day, and important work in this space has been delayed or shelved entirely.

Back in the Prime Family Lab at York, Dr. Prime says she has not felt any external pressure that could be considered muzzling, and has not experienced any interference when it comes to the subjects she chooses to tackle. This may partly be a result of her lab being so new. It might also be because until now, her lab has chosen to focus mainly on COVID. But it’s likely that a lot of the reason is that the Prime Family Lab is a psychology lab – a discipline that has not been targeted by the same kind of scrutiny and interference over the past two decades.

Psychology has a role in the climate science conversation

“I think at this point, psychology probably has a primary role in the response to the climate crisis. Climate scientists and ecologists and environmental engineers have pretty much figured out the solutions to our problems. There’s a lot of work to do still, obviously, but now it’s more about people taking up those solutions.”

Dr. Katherine Arbuthnott is Professor Emeritus from Campion College at the University of Regina. She has spent the past couple of decades studying the health benefits of connection with - and spending time in - nature. Spending time outdoors, interacting with trees and wildlife and sun, has benefits for both our physical and mental health – and it has the added bonus of nudging us in the direction of environmental sustainability.

Katherine is quick to point out that psychology has long been a science focused on individual behaviours. What makes A person do A thing. In her time as a cognitive neuroscientist she would study individual brains to look at the processes of cognition. Clinical psychologists generally work with one person at a time, to help that individual in a personalized way that works best for them. A lot of the psychology around climate change interventions has been focused in this area.

Dr. Jiaying Zhao is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. She has led studies like the one demonstrating that putting images of turtles and dolphins trapped in plastic debris on recycling bins and garbage cans reduced the amount of plastic waste people threw away.

“We found that when we placed those images on garbage stations, the amount of plastic waste was reduced – that is, the amount of plastic waste going into all streams, garbage and recycling alike. People are responsive to those images, and the principle is trying to connect our actions (throwing stuff away) to the downstream consequences of those actions (dolphins in distress).”

Jiaying has also launched an effort to connect sustainable behaviours with happiness. Jiaying, a behavioural scientist, collaborated with her colleague Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, a UBC psychology researcher specializing in the study of human happiness. What resulted was an idea for reframing the discussion around climate change from one of sacrifice (give up meat, shop less) to one of happiness. So many things that are better for the environment (eating more vegetables, riding a bicycle) are also things that improve our mental health and make us happier people!

Jiaying gave a TED Talk on that very subject which includes what the kids would call “hacks” to make you happier while benefiting the environment at the same time – like feng shui-ing your fridge. Or making the effort to carpool with people who can make the dreary drive in to work in rush hour traffic a more enjoyable and brain-stimulating experience.

To truly make a difference in the battle against climate change, it will take many people doing many little things, and many countries doing many big things. Individuals who do the little things are more likely to demand the big things of their communities and countries. And we’re getting there. More people than we realize are willing to take the actions that are required to stave off the worst of what climate change might bring.

Katherine speaks a lot about trust. The trust we have in other people to do the right thing, and the gap between our perceptions and the reality when it comes to the intentions of others. We, as people, tend to greatly underestimate the level of commitment in strangers to do the right thing, when in fact each of us is more likely than not to want to take actions that benefit all of us collectively. She also recognizes that truly addressing the climate crisis goes beyond simply engaging individuals to act differently.

Psychology can help. Yes, psychological science is a little late to the game. But it is now a player in the climate discussion – and can be an essential one, bridging the gap between the conclusions and solutions proposed by climate scientists and the implementation of those solutions by people and communities. Environmental scientists in Canada have been set back, and are only now starting to regain their footing. But they’ve done a tremendous amount of work over decades telling us all what’s happening and what we need to do. They are not ringing the alarm bell alone. Jiaying, Katherine, Heather, and soon Alex and many others like her will be adding their expertise in a truly interdisciplinary collaborative effort to put us all on the right path – toward sustainability, planetary health, and our own collective happiness.

The United Nations first recognised climate change as a major, urgent, global issue in 1992. In that year, the Rio Earth Summit resulted in the first international agreements on climate change. Then in 1997, the Kyoto protocol required developed countries to reduce emissions by 5% below 1990 levels – but developing countries (including China and India at the time) were exempt. Since that time, the developed countries have managed to reduce emissions by 17% (collectively). Germany had reduced their emissions 30% by 2020. The US backed out of the Kyoto accord in 2001.

More conferences, meetings, and summits have followed. 2009 in Copenhagen, 2010 in Cancun, 2011 in Durban, 2012 in Doha, 2013 in Warsaw. Agreements are reached, targets are set, countries back out, targets are missed, agreements fizzle.

In 2015, a landmark in climate change action was achieved in Paris. 196 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, the most significant global climate agreement ever. The results? To be determined…countries can choose their own targets and there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure they meet them. Since that time, there have been a lot more meetings…with mixed results.

All this said, many countries – including some of the most important ones – have made a concerted effort to meet the targets set by these series of agreements and accords and pacts. Although there is no enforcement mechanism by which they can be held accountable, the mere action of signing on to a global accord has, in fact, encouraged many of the world’s powers to move toward renewable energy and a greener infrastructure, though not nearly as quickly as many of us would like.

Climate progress is slow. But it is progress nonetheless. It may be frustrating. It may feel like it happens at a snail’s pace and not nearly fast enough considering the urgency of the issue. But it is happening, and hopefully the worst of what climate change could portend might be averted as a result.

In the past year, York University’s Psychology Department has joined the global 1 in 5 project. The project is a framework to allow the academic community to focus some of its collective brainpower on climate and biodiversity, and York is the first psychology department in Canada to sign on. The idea is that academic institutions commit to ensuring that one out of every five assignments, projects, or courses has an element related to climate change attached to it. Like other climate accords, agreements, and pacts, there is no enforcement mechanism, and no accountability – just the desire to improve the future for everyone on Earth.

Dr. Heather Prime, director of the Prime Family Lab at York University, has become a strong supporter of this project, which has meant incorporating climate change issues into her own curriculum as well as thinking about the climate crisis more regularly. The universities and institutions that sign on to the 1 in 5 project are not specifically held accountable for following the mandate. But there is still an effect. It may be slow – slower than we would like – but that is not on today’s researchers. The slow pace of social science around climate change is the result of years (and years) of avoiding the issue by the community at large. Says Dr. Prime,

“[The 1 in 5 project] serves as a kind of challenge to everyone to think about how you can consider climate change in your discipline. Moreover, it involves students in the process. In many ways later generations are more committed to the cause, because they’re the ones that will be most impacted.”

It has not been a straightforward process for Dr. Prime to implement the 1 in 5 mandate to her courses, and it may not yet be fully integrated. Her lab is specifically interested in family dynamics – how children develop emotionally within their families, how stressors on parents and caregivers trickle down to the kids under their care - that sort of thing. At first glance, this might not seem like the kind of place where researching climate change can have a major role. But it does.

As Heather, and her students, say – climate change is a factor in virtually every facet of our lives, which means it can have an impact in virtually every research project one can imagine. Not just in environmental science, but in the social sciences as well. Researching income inequality? That will be exacerbated by climate change. Depression and anxiety? For many those are made worse thanks to thinking about the impending catastrophe that faces us all.

And so, while the York University Psychology Department signs on to the 1 in 5 project, they are in the early stages of implementing it and have not yet reached the goal where 1 in 5 of their assignments is about climate change. As with so many climate change initiatives, it’s more of an aspiration than a firm commitment. But it has an undeniable effect.

Paul De Luca is a Master’s student in Dr. Prime’s Family Lab at York.

“I think the mandate of the 1 in 5 project is very motivating, because dealing with climate change can feel like a major uphill battle. But when you go on the 1 in 5 website and you see all these amazing projects that are currently ongoing, you feel like you’re part of a collective movement. And that in some ways informs the work I do, because I’m able to scroll through and see what other schools are working on and what other labs are doing. I can take that and let it inform the work I’m doing, and maybe identify some of the gaps. I think of it as a collective movement toward this shared goal of talking about climate change.”

It is sort of a soft target. One in five projects will be about climate change…eventually. But the mere act of signing on to the project, and to the pledge, has brought York’s psychology department into the conversation, and its students into the realm of climate-related science, and has encouraged them to think about their own particular specialties through that lens. Paul continues, talking about a study he saw on the 1 in 5 website.

“There was one proposed project about how childrens’ understanding of climate change and attitudes toward the environment change as a function of age. There was a fair amount of research from the adolescent perspective, but not so much from the vantage point of younger school-age children. When I see something like that, I start thinking about the measures we currently have that have been shown to work with pediatric populations. Do we have the tools to deal with things like knowledge of the climate crisis, attitudes toward the environment, and anxiety arising from that knowledge. And I don’t know that we currently do.”

Alex Markwell, another student in the lab, is working toward her Ph.D. and considering dissertation topics. She hasn’t paid much attention to the 1 in 5 project, and hasn’t looked deeply into it – her commitment to addressing climate change was a pre-existing condition. She does find the website and the fact that York has signed on to be encouraging.

“It’s nice to know there are a lot of other students who are interested and passionate in the same kind of things. I’ve mostly been focused on looking at the research that has been published over the past decade, but this is a good resource to look closer at what’s currently going on.”

For now, that is what the 1 in 5 project is for students and faculty at York – a resource. It’s also an aspiration. Changes to the curriculum so far have been minor. For example, Dr. Prime teaches an undergraduate class called Atypical Development, which is about the assessment and treatment of child mental health issues. For the past three years, she has assigned them a class activity centred around designing studies on COVID and families. This year, the assignment was focused on climate change.

The students came up with really interesting study designs. One proposed looking at how food scarcity relates to brain development. Another thought to track calls to crisis lines as a function of catastrophic weather-related events. A third proposed a study would look at recurring droughts in rural Canada and how that related to mental health issues. The students embraced the project, and for those who were feeling anxious about the climate crisis it was a useful way to channel efforts toward it. It’s a way of connecting people to their role in the outcome of the world.

The changes are small – but they are changes. The idea of the 1 in 5 project is fairly simple, that academics from all disciplines can come together to collectively tackle the biggest issue in the world, all by doing something small. This, it seems, is the path forward and the way out of the worst of the climate crisis – we don’t all have to change our lives to devote ourselves to this cause. We can all do little things, and observe those around us doing little things as well, and collectively that is a big deal for today and for the future.

The unprecedented numbers of wildfires in the Northwest Territories (NWT) in the spring and summer of 2023 saw more than two-thirds (roughly 70%) of the territory’s residents displaced from their homes. Much of the population was evacuated from their homes for periods exceeding a month. Some communities faced multiple evacuations. On May 14 at 4:30 pm, Katlodeche Reserve, was evacuated across the river to Hay River. At 11 pm that very evening, the town of Hay River had an evacuation notice issued with citizens from (now both) communities urged to go to Yellowknife or head south into Alberta. On June 6^th the population were allowed to return.  Then on August 12^th, the population of Fort Smith was evacuated to Hay River. Less than 30 hours later the communities of Hay River and Katlodeche faced yet another evacuation, this time to Alberta, finally able to return after September 13^th. Communities north of Hay River faced evacuations through August, with Yellowknife being evacuated on August 13^th. In total approximately 25,900 people were evacuated from their homes in the NWT during the summer of 2023.

Gerald Antoine, Grand National Chief of the Dene Nation, has called for an independent public inquiry to encourage everyone to talk about their experiences as the NWT government’s planned wildfire review does not include public engagement.

The massive evacuations of both large and small communities in the NWT this summer highlighted problems that may not be totally unique to the north, but became much more acute because of the relative isolation and the language and cultural component of many of the Indigenous communities in the north. In the past, communities that faced evacuation were typically encouraged to seek shelter in the closest larger community within the territory, thus ensuring at least some cultural and language supports were available; however, the breadth of evacuations in 2023 sent families south. For families with their own transportation and experience with travel, the evacuations, though stressful and frightening, were manageable. For families from smaller communities, or even Yellowknife, who had limited means and no transportation, the evacuation presented bigger hurdles. Families were loaded onto planes to be flown south. They were allowed to bring only 1 small backpack per person. In a number of situations the people did not even know where they were going when their planes took off. At least one flight was rerouted in mid-air and the passengers were taken to Calgary instead of Edmonton. In some cases Elders, who are unilingual speakers of their Indigenous languages, were evacuated to cities where there were no language supports. One educator reported that her grandmother was sent to Vancouver on the medical evacuation and it took the family 4 days to locate her and have a family member travel to join her to act as a translator.

The National Association of School Psychologists wrote a 2017 article about helping children and families after wildfires. Their article talks about how massive evacuations upset security and normalcy. The need to relocate, even temporarily, causes trauma, emotional reactions and coping issues.

For children and families who evacuated the NWT by road in the summer of 2023, additional stress was created by having to drive through fire on either side of the road, while also experiencing extremely poor air quality and visibility because of smoke. During this summer, families driving out of the north drove through the community of Enterprise, where 90% of the community had been burned down a few days before the northern evacuation. The sight of the burned-out community was devasting to children and adults alike.

For some students in the NWT, evacuations caused them to experience interrupted schooling through May-June and again in September before they were allowed to go home. Those students who drove back to their communities were witness to vast expanses of burned land, and active fires still burning or smoldering. Air quality was still poor. These sights made it apparent to the children that, despite being allowed to return home, the fires were still very real and close by.

The evacuations in the north were costly for families. While accommodations were provided through the Red Cross, or local disaster organizations in communities that accepted evacuees (these accommodations were paid for by the Government of the Northwest Territories - GNWT), those who were most economically vulnerable still experienced considerable economic stress. Hourly wage earners were suddenly without income, families on income support had already spent much of their monthly stipend on food that they could not bring with them during the evacuation. Promises of funding were implied by the government, but it wasn’t until near the end of the evacuation when details were shared – and evacuation financial supports were quite minimal. As a result, children and families faced food insecurity both during and after the evacuation.

Returning to the north following the evacuation exposed families to the sight of considerable changes around their homes and communities. Houses outside of their neighbourhoods had been destroyed by fire, and the burn areas approached the communities - in some cases encroaching right into them. Driving in their hometowns, children and families were constantly exposed to reminders of the evacuation and ongoing threat. Wildfires moved underground in the north, into the peat and as a result, at the time of writing (January 2024), fires are still smoldering –  issuing smoke, and sometimes bursting into flames in the burn areas. While driving the highway between communities, where there was significant burn, people are still smelling and seeing active fires. While the burns are not currently threatening homes, their very presence causes unease and worry.

The massive number of people evacuated means that everyone in every community was affected. Teachers and counsellors were touched by the evacuation and threat of wildfires, and experienced the after-effects, just as their students and their families did. The added stress of financial strain caused by the evacuations has added to food insecurity and increased financial worries for families in the north.

Steps to support staff in schools, to ensure that they can also support their students, is important. The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) recommends that school staff be given the opportunity to share their experiences and feelings and process them so they can support their students. Staff need to be aware of possible trauma responses from their students and be prepared to share that information with parents, who might be expressing the view that their child’s behaviour has changed since the evacuations.

(Anecdotally, psychologists working in fire-affected communities are reporting an uptick in parental referrals for children experiencing anxiety and behavioural symptoms that emerged during the evacuation and have not resolved.)

Schools with counselling support should be encouraged to create group crisis intervention discussions with their students to encourage them to share their experiences, process concerns, and help them understand wildfires. In schools and districts that have school psychologists, they could be the ones leading these discussions. In the NWT there are no school- or school district-employed psychologists, but similar support could be found through mental health youth counsellors.

As the community begins to return, it is important that schools continue to provide supports that allow students the opportunity to explore and process their experiences. It’s also important to discuss concrete steps that students can take and how to involve themselves in actions that can help them develop problem-solving skills for the future.

As climate-related events cause more upheaval and disruption to large numbers of population groups, it is important that schools and systems develop plans to support both their students and their staff. As the lived experience in the NWT shows, there are stages of response – from the immediate needs that come with an evacuation to the longer-term worries, concerns and impacts that an extended evacuation will cause. School districts are encouraged to ensure they have “return to school” plans that include longer-term mental health supports for students and families. They are also encouraged to promote long-term actions regarding the climate-related crises that are becoming more and more common throughout the country.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/military-deploys-350-soldiers-to-northwest-territories-68-per-cent-of-population-evacuated-1.6527811#:~:text=Approximately%2025%2C900%20people%20have%20been,per%20cent%20of%20the%20population

In 2021, British Columbia spent late June suffering under a “heat dome”. Temperatures regularly reached 50 degrees Celsius, and by July 1^st almost 500 wildfires were burning across the province, including the one that destroyed the town of Lytton. In Nelson, in the Kootenay region, psychologist Dr. Todd Kettner was living with his wife and children in a new housing community with a small ecological footprint. The day after the final home in that community was occupied, a fire sprang up a kilometre away. These eco-friendly buildings were now occupied by anxious homeowners as embers from the nearby fire landed on their brand new roofs.

At the Kootenay Medical Centre in Nelson, Emergency Room department head Dr. Kyle Merritt was seeing patients come in presenting symptoms associated with the wildfire smoke and the heat dome. Acute cardiac events are more common when there is wildfire smoke in the area, and other health issues can become more severe with intense heat. The hospital was not overwhelmed, but there was enough of a concern for Dr. Merritt to take an additional step – and to make headlines doing so.

“I met a patient who had to be admitted because of the heat during the dome. So I made a note, the way all doctors do, indicating what’s going on when you see someone, and in my note I indicated climate change as the underlying cause. The same way you’d say a person was a smoker all their life and now they have lung cancer. You don’t diagnose someone with smoking cigarettes, you diagnose them with lung cancer – but you might write down use of tobacco as the underlying cause.”

This move caused something of a sensation, as newspapers both locally and globally picked up the story of a doctor who had diagnosed a patient with Climate Change. Of course, this was not really what Dr. Merritt had done. One cannot be “diagnosed” with Climate Change, and listing the underlying cause is not the same as the diagnosis. But a clickbait headline remains a powerful force in our society, and the story spread like mint in my garden.

Author’s note - it might be time for us to update our idioms when it comes to the speed with which something spreads. Right now, almost all of those sayings involve either pandemic-type diseases or wildfire. It seems like the wrong phrase to use given the fact that we are still dealing with a global pandemic that has killed millions, and in this case are talking about wildfires that displaced thousands and caused several deaths of their own. And so I humbly suggest “spreads like mint in my garden”. Let’s make it happen!

The heat, the fires, and the devastating problems they caused prompted Dr. Merritt  to join some colleagues in creating an organization called Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health (DNPH). Health care professionals were seeing the direct effects of climate change on the health of the people they served, and thought they could do more. Since then the organization has expanded to include healthcare professionals of all kinds, including Dr. Kettner. They are a lobbying group, an advisory body, and a collective dedicated to making the fight against climate change a central part of their own practices in and around Nelson, B.C.

Nelson is a small city / large town in the Kootenays, with a population of about 10,000 and deep roots in the resource sector. Founded as a mining town 130 years ago, and maintaining strong ties to the forestry industry today, Nelson residents tend to feel a connection to the land around them in the way many small towns with picturesque surroundings do. Combine that with the influx of young, mostly liberal, Americans evading the Vietnam draft in the late sixties and you have the kind of town where establishing a collective like Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health is a little easier than it might be elsewhere. As Dr. Kettner puts it, Nelson is going on “50 years of hippie-hood”.

Author’s second note – I really wanted to name this piece ’50 years of hippie-hood’ because I love the turn of phrase. I even promised, when I heard it, that I would do so. But I reconsidered at the last moment, because I am reticent to reinforce the harmful stereotype that climate action, and caring about environmental issues, is something ethereal that is solely the domain of aging hippies and young punk musicians. It is, of course, something that affects us all and something that people care about in all walks of life and across all cultural boundaries.

While the members of DNPH are environmental activists of one kind or another, it’s their position as healthcare providers that imbues their message with an authoritative tone. Dr. Kettner says “when we look at who people trust when it comes to the environment, it’s not politicians, or environmental activists or loggers or miners, it’s often healthcare professionals - nurses, or their family doctors.”

We’ve seen, over the past few years, an erosion in trust among the public when it comes to healthcare professionals. People protesting at hospitals, people disrupting life for everyone else over a false belief that the COVID vaccine is somehow responsible for people dying in greater numbers than COVID itself. While those people are the noisiest, they do not represent the majority of Canadians and doctors remain a profession that enjoys overall public trust.

This is especially true in Nelson. Another reason Dr. Merritt and Dr. Kettner and their group are able to produce results is that Nelson really is small. The people you play hockey with on Tuesday nights are the same people you see at the grocery store and the ones who reach out to you for professional help. In Dr. Merritt’s case, that means he has patients who have been under his care their entire lives. For Dr. Kettner, this means his practice and work is integrated into the community he has called home since he started his career as a psychologist nearly 25 years ago. Community connections create strong bonds, the kind that are tough to break. The kind that can weather the storm of online disinformation.

The DNPH group has been very effective in a number of ways (local infrastructure and transportation projects, reducing the footprint of their health system) but perhaps their biggest impact has been in making the connection between planetary health and human health. Recently they worked with the city to increase the delivery of electricity to homes while reducing the amount of fossil fuels in those homes. This not only benefits the environment, it improves the health of the people who are no longer living with emissions within their own walls.

Says Dr. Merritt, “you can’t have human health without a stable climate, healthy air, and healthy water. A lot of people aren’t making that connection all the time, and we try to think about it in everything we do”.

There are a lot of areas in every job where environmentally conscious and sustainable choices can be made. In healthcare-related settings, those choices almost always come with a health benefit as well. In Dr. Merritt’s case, it’s small things like ensuring the batteries used in the hospital are recycled, and bigger things like tackling the problem of anaesthetic gases and inhalers which include hydrofluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons that contribute a good deal to climate change.

“One of the advantages I have in working in primary care in a public system is that I get to interact with people from all walks of life, from cradle to grave within my community. It gives me a good opportunity to get to know what they’re going through. And in the emergency department, when events like wildfires or heat happen, it’s the most vulnerable people who are affected. And with mental health too – it’s people who have underlying mental health problems that get acutely exacerbated during these events, and they show up in the ER to compensate. Part of our role is doing advocacy for health, and climate change is now part of that.”

Author’s note number three. Dr. Kettner says that one of the things that keeps climate change top of mind for folks, and gets them to pay attention, is novel news and information. We’ve all heard a lot about polar bears and permafrost and the Great Barrier Reef for some time, and some have tuned out. Something new that might pique the interest of a person when you’re conversing could bring them back into the climate-aware headspace. Something like “hey did you know that anaesthetic gases are a significant contributor to ozone depletion and greenhouse warming?”

For Dr. Kettner, his involvement with organizations like DNPH allows him to share his expertise when it comes to the mental health effects of climate change. His work with the MIR Centre For Peace at Selkirk College has brought an additional lens of intersectionality with the climate crisis. Not only is there a crossover when it comes to health and mental health, there is a significant correlation between climate change and global peace, social justice, and inequality.

“I now feel like I’m focusing on the most important issues – the social determinants of health, greater access to mental health services for greater numbers of people, respect and reconciliation with Indigenous people. It’s where I want to focus a lot of my energy in the last 20 years of my professional career.”

Author’s note number four. While we were discussing Indigenous reconciliation, we spoke about the Haudenosaunee’s Seventh Generation Principle. It’s the philosophy they’ve abided by for hundreds of years, that states you are not only the steward of your environment for yourself and your offspring, but for their offspring and the generation after that and so on. Dr. Merritt shared what I think is an interesting thing to know – either for consideration in Canada or to one day help you win on Jeopardy! There is a new position that was created by the government of Wales in 2015. Sophie Howe completed the first term as Wales’ Future Generations Commissioner in 2023, the role is now held by Derek Walker.

There are several towns in the Kootenay region, and both Dr. Kettner and Dr. Merritt reference a sort of Springfield-Shelbyville type of rivalry between them. But this rivalry quickly disappears when it comes to achieving sustainable practices, and especially in the wake of the recent disastrous climate-related events. Dr. Kettner describes the situation as the wildfires of 2021 were abating.

“Teachers reached out to me from other towns around B.C. looking for resources to help their students with their anxiety when they returned to school after the raging forest fires that had sent them home for a month. That’s the kind of call I didn’t get as a one-on-one private practitioner seeing someone in my office for depression. Expanding our realm of influence to the public as well as to our patients is something I feel very strongly about.”

Stepping outside your immediate job always feels a little bit like a risk. It means doing something that may be outside your comfort zone, and risking a certain amount of venom from those inclined to oppose your initiative who demand you ‘stay in your lane’. It may feel a little less risky in a place like Nelson, B.C., but it still requires a little bit of daring. It’s a testament to the passion both Todd and Kyle feel, and to the immediate necessity of such action, that they have taken that step. And having done so has already made a significant impact.

Their DNPH group has been heavily involved with the city’s new Active Transportation plan, ensuring it is as sustainable and eco-friendly as possible. A number of their doctors and nurses present some of their advancements to neighbouring towns. The group is working with forestry experts on land adjacent to the city to decrease fire risk while increasing access for people to reap the mental health benefits of being able to go for a walk out in the woods. They are now being included in a lot of major decision-making, and their advice is sought on projects that have little to do with healthcare – except for the central thesis of Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health. That is, that planetary health and human health are inextricably linked.

Author’s final note – while we were speaking, Dr. Kettner reminisced fondly about a series of TV commercials from his youth, which featured the Kokanee glacier in ads for Kokanee beer. He bemoaned the speed at which that glacier is now disappearing, an additional reminder of the devastating effects of climate change right there in their own backyard. In the course of this discussion, we discovered that Kokanee beer remains one of Canada’s best-selling brands to this day. Which surprised me, I didn’t think it was even being brewed any more, at least not since I was in high school and also saw those commercials. I thought that was interesting enough to add to this piece – Kokanee, it seems, has a great deal more staying power than I imagined it did!

Glaciers, sadly, may not have quite so much.

“We did a three-hour boot camp over Zoom about how to create a presentation and become a better public speaker.”

The first lesson, when it comes to creating a presentation, is not to make that presentation three hours long. A boot camp though? That can be as long as you like. In this case, Nancy Tangon and her CPA Student Representative colleagues at the University of Alberta chose the boot-camp format – and the Zoom format – out of necessity. Because of the pandemic, many things have become more difficult. Finding ways to connect with people virtually has resulted in a fair amount of chaos – and a ton of creativity as well!

Such was the case when Nancy and her fellow student Priscilla Ojomu were looking to create a project. Pre-pandemic, they met in On-Site Placement’s Diversity Awareness & Skill Building Youth Program on campus – in-person, if you can remember when we used to do such things! Through that program they learned a lot about issues affecting diversity in a number of settings, and were tasked with creating a project at the end of the course. Unfortunately, by that time COVID-19 had arrived and the project would have to take a virtual form.

Over the course of the pandemic awareness of many issues has increased – particularly those dealing with discrimination and inequality. In Canada, many of us felt isolated from those issues – like they were a uniquely American thing, or that we were somehow better off. As Priscilla says, “a lot of Canadians aren’t aware that these issues exist in huge numbers within Canada”. So how could she and Nancy help to increase that awareness?

Their answer was Canada Confesses. A project that started out small but has since taken on a much larger audience and significance. The concept was simple. There’s a disconnect between what Nancy and Priscilla learned in their program, as well as their own lived experiences, and what fellow Canadians understood to be the situation. So they created a place where marginalized people could tell their stories anonymously, access resources to help them, and help other Canadians understand the reality of what’s happening in our country. It’s not the anonymous poster who is confessing, although they call the posts ‘confessions’ – it’s Canada itself that is confessing to the ongoing harms and structural marginalization of many communities. You can hear all about Canada Confesses on the CPA podcast Mind Full.

As the co-creator of Canada Confesses, Nancy has not yet submitted a ‘confession’ of her own – she’s very busy! In addition to running a suddenly successful online platform which continues to grow by leaps and bounds, she is also a fourth-year psychology major and biological sciences minor at the University of Alberta. She maintains a strong presence in the CPA, with two years as a Student Representative on the campus and a significant role on the CPA’s human rights and social justice committee as one of the leaders of the subgroup for ableism and disabilities.

“I was a little bit intimidated to [join the Human Rights and Social Justice committee]. Everybody who’s a part of it is either a grad student or a professor, and at first I felt a bit like the undergrad student tagging along. But it’s been really great! I got to learn a lot from Dr. Ada Sinacore and Dr. Laurie Ford, who’s also a part of our subcommittee.”

Nancy, undergrad or not, brings a lot of experience to the CPA board committee – and to her life, her studies, and her activities. Much of this stems from her family and her community, with whom she is very close. Her family on her father’s side is from the Bari tribe in South Sudan, a place Nancy has been able to visit only once. She keeps up contact and correspondence with her family who remain there, and also maintains strong ties to the South Sudanese community in Edmonton.

“The South Sudanese community in Edmonton is fairly large, I know a lot of people here – especially compared to when my family used to live in Halifax. I even see some of the community members in my classes, which is really cool. When I decided to go to university, I wanted to do something amazing in my community. In the South Sudanese community, psychology is very interesting to a lot of people.”

Her family, and her community, were some of the factors that shaped Nancy’s desire to go into psychology in the first place – and even had a guiding hand in deciding on some of the courses she took once she got there. Nancy’s family loves to talk about their dreams.  She says, “when I wake up I have to talk about my dreams. I talk about it to at least five people before I start my day! I have to analyze it just a little bit, I have to get someone else’s interpretation, and I absolutely love dream analysis.” Of course, she felt she just had to take that particular psychology course before she graduated, and now speaks excitedly about the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ levels of dream analysis.

It didn’t take long for Nancy to determine that psychology was the right program for her – or in which direction she wanted to go with it.

“I was inspired by my very first professor on my very first day. Her name is Dr. Peggy St-Jacques. She was pretty new to the university at the time, and she was doing research in memory. I said, I don’t know exactly what I want to research, but that is certainly what I want to do as a lifelong career.”

Nancy is now well on her way, working as a research assistant and planning for a future where research is part of her every day. She’s particularly drawn to developmental psychology, and hopes to work with pre-school children between the ages of three and five. It will be a long road, but Nancy has the determination, the ingenuity and the curiosity to make it a successful one. And when she does, it will be another in a long line of successes that started right there in Edmonton.

“When I started working on Canada Confesses, it was almost impossible to see where we would end up. I’ve had the chance to meet so many people working in the same field, and to interact with other projects online. Now, I have a best friend for life, an amazing team, and so many things to anticipate for the future.”

“French is a pretty binary language. It’s something you maybe don’t think about, but how do you become gender-neutral in a language that depends so heavily on a gender-binary?”

We hear a lot about ‘intersectionality’ these days, referring to the way social categorizations interplay with one another. An individual, or a group, can be connected to others based on their race, their sexuality, their gender, or their socio-economic status, among myriad further distinct, yet inextricable identities. As such, each person’s identity is unique, but each connects, intersects, and overlaps with others, leading to unique forms of oppression or stigmatization for some, privilege for others, or a mix of both for others still.

Such is the case for all of us, but few of us are as keenly self-aware of such intersectionality as is Kevin Prada – both personally and in his research. Kevin is a student in the psychology honours program at the University of Manitoba. A queer Franco-Manitoban, Kevin has long seen the gaps in the Manitoba mental health system for both the 2SLGBTQ+ community and the French-speaking community. This led him to collaborate on his first major research project[i], one that earned him the Ken Bowers Student Research Award from the CPA’s Clinical Psychology Section.

His research focused on both of those identities – 2SLGBTQ+ communities and official language minority communities in Manitoba. In the first study of its kind in Western Canada, Kevin and his colleagues launched an exploratory analysis into the needs of doubly-minoritized French-speaking 2SLGBTQ+ Manitobans. Initiated by the Collectif LGBTQ du Manitoba, whose first mandate was to collect data about the needs of this very specific community, this community-based project was conducted by researchers at Université de Saint-Boniface.

“Before we start doing anything for a community we’d better understand where they’re at, what their needs are, and what their experiences are in terms of discrimination and stigmatization. We know that minority Francophone populations in Manitoba have lower indicators of health than the general population. We know similar trends have been observed across the board with queer populations in Canada and abroad. When the two identities are put together, it stands to reason that those problems probably compound.”

This has always been planned as a multi-tiered research project. Kevin and his colleagues have completed Phase One, surveying 80 respondents over the age of 18. Phases Two and Three have already begun, focusing on school and family contexts, to determine both the needs of queer and questioning Francophone minors in school settings, and also to examine the transition to parenthood for queer families in an official language minority context. This has led to many opportunities for Kevin to speak at professional development days for Francophone and French-immersion schools and school districts, where he says,

“Many staff are ready and willing, and want to build proactively queer-friendly classrooms, but don’t always know where to start. Invaluable questions and discussions have ensued, which show me how important it is to discus these sometimes-complex issues with folks in an open and non-threatening way, especially with an eye toward the potential implications within school environments.”

When intersectionality is approached in the right way, there is often a ripple effect – sometimes one that is by design, sometimes an unintended one that comes as a surprise. For Kevin, these ripple effects have been overwhelmingly positive, affirming, and a reinforcement of the direction he wants his career to take.

“We now have folks in Alberta and elsewhere who are starting with our research project to create their own in their own province. So the impact has been even greater than we’d expected. And for myself, as a queer Franco-Manitoban student and researcher, to be able to have done this for my community was really life-giving. We also really put an emphasis on ensuring that this would be by the community, for the community, and from the community. Not only were community members involved at every step (myself included), but they were also the first to hear what we found. We conducted two community engagement meetings where only people from our community were invited. Following one of these, one participant emotionally shared that ‘this is what we’ve known and been saying for decades – now our experience is reflected in that data’. It was kind of a cathartic experience for a lot of people.”

Kevin’s big goal, overall, is to work with minority communities. To ‘hear the unheard and see the unseen’, as he puts it. This feels like a personal mantra to him, the kind of thing he says to himself before starting a project or taking the next step. The kind of thing that he will one day have embroidered and framed and placed on the wall across from his desk as a constant reminder of why he’s doing what he does.

“Using intersectionality as one of the major frameworks for this study was really important. Understanding that a French-speaking queer person cannot be understood by just looking at their Francophone identity, or just by looking at their sexual or gender diversity. It’s ‘both-and’. Those two identities AND their age, AND their socioeconomic status, AND their health, whether they are a visible minority, the list goes on. In fact, we found there was a fairly large group of respondents who felt welcome neither by the French-speaking community because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, OR by the 2SLGBTQ+ community in Manitoba because they’re French-speaking.”

Of course, there are many language minorities in Manitoba besides French. In a project completely unrelated to this research, Kevin and his colleagues Saeid Maghsoudi, Thilini Dissanayake, and Aman Mir started an initiative called ‘A Listening Ear’, where they set up booths around Winnipeg to converse with complete strangers in NINE different languages – enticing them to stop for a chat by displaying, for example, a Sri Lankan flag. The effort was a tremendous success, and you can hear more about it on the CPA’s podcast Mind Full.

This is the kind of outreach Kevin is making his brand. He felt first-hand, from a young age, how important reaching out could be and how lonely life could be when no one extends that hand. This is one of the reasons he chose psychology as a career path.

“I grew up in a home that had fairly significant psychological obstacles, especially with my mother. I saw a failure in the system when I was just this little boy who nobody bothered to ask ‘hey, how are you doing?’ In my household, there were multiple suicide attempts, manic episodes, and through it all nobody took a step back and said, ‘oh my God there’s an 8-year-old boy here – is HE okay?’ In retrospect, I saw all this and figured if I went through it I’m sure I’m not the only one. So my first desire to get into psychology was to kind of make sure that the collateral impact of mental health issues is top of mind, especially in families who might be struggling with issues of this nature.”

As he grew up, he saw more and more failures in that system – for 2SLGBTQ+ youth, for Francophone communities, and especially for those like him who lived at the intersection of the two.

“I never had a chance to speak to a queer person growing up, never mind a queer psychologist. The first time I ever met a queer counselor was a huge experience for me, and I only got to access this support when I was 27. So to be able to do something for a marginalized community, especially within the psych discipline which has historically not been super-friendly with queer folk, is exciting.”

Kevin’s ultimate goal is clinical work, where he can meet people, get to know them, and offer culturally competent clinical support. He does not know of any practicing French-speaking clinical psychologists in Manitoba, has not encountered any openly practicing queer clinical psychologists in his province, and highlights the extreme difficulties in the province just obtaining information on queer physical and sexual health in French. There is definitely a lack of representation and, as his research demonstrates, a need for more culturally competent services in Kevin’s immediate area. He wants to be one of the first to provide those services.

“With the right tools, mindset, and adequate understanding of trauma and minority stress, anyone can be a good clinical psychologist with a queer person. But it brings it to another level when you’re actually speaking from a place of personal experience.”

The French language, just by the nature of the language itself, makes some communication difficult for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. When even a table, or a propellor plane, or a block of cheese are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender, it can create a bigger hill to climb for those people who identify as neither. In English, we use ‘they’ as a pronoun that can be understood by everyone. In French, they’ve proposed brand new pronouns, with ‘iel / iels’ being the most commonly used. However, to this day those new words have still not been officially accepted by the Académie Française.

Understanding our unique identity through an intersectional lens can be an empowering or disenfranchising, oppressive or uplifting, confusing or clarifying journey. In many cases, it is all of these things. Navigating those waters is no easy task, especially for those whose intersecting identities are both marginalized and in conflict with one another. Kevin’s personal experience, his direct involvement in affected communities, and his mantra - ‘hear the unheard and see the unseen’ – make him well-suited, and well-equipped, to be on the vanguard of the change Manitoba so desperately needs.

[i] Living in a liminal space: Experiences of 2SLGBTQ + official language minority Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic

• DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2022.2160016

SWAP (Section for Women and Psychology)

The year is 1976. Martha Lear has just coined the term ‘second wave feminism’ in New York Magazine, and that movement is in full swing. In the United States, Title IX has just passed, prohibiting sex-based discrimination at any school that receives federal funding. In Sweden, Group 8 has just been founded, advocating for equal pay, kindergarten expansion, and a 6-hour work day. And in Canada, the CPA is hosting their annual convention at a hotel in Montreal.

There is a different hotel across the street from the CPA convention. While that hotel is unaffiliated with the one where the convention is taking place, the two are connected by an underground tunnel beneath the street. While the convention is in full swing, many women are stealing away, passing quietly through that tunnel to have a clandestine meeting of their own just across the street. These graduate students and untenured feminist researchers are there to present papers - to one another. These papers are on topics relevant to the psychology of women and girls, and they have one more thing in common. When they were submitted to the CPA for inclusion in the convention, they had all been summarily rejected.

This off-site, convention-adjacent meeting became known as the Underground Symposium. Not so much because it was clandestine – there was in fact a fair amount of media attention – but more likely because it was accessed through that underground tunnel between the two hotels. The event was a huge success, where ideas were flowing and the room was overflowing. It was that success that led, four years later, to the designation of an “interest group” known as “on Women And Psychology”. This later became the Section for Women and Psychology, or SWAP – and that is where we are today.

Members of SWAP need not identify themselves as feminist scholars, but many still do. Section chair Dr. Lorraine Radtke certainly maintains the tradition of that origin story. Dr. Radtke is a professor emerita in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, where she worked for close to 40 years. She says,

“I identify as a feminist psychologist. It’s because I put women and girls first, and I take a critical perspective when it comes to the status quo. I’m focused on social change and improving the lives of women and girls.”

Feminist psychology has changed over the years. One of the biggest ways it has changed is that research and clinical practice is now conducted in an intersectional framework. This means being open to both the commonalities and the differences among women and girls. It also means being attuned to how their social circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and socioeconomic situation affect their experiences. Dr. Charlene Senn is a professor at the University of Windsor affiliated with the Applied Social Psychology program, and she says her research, and that of her colleagues is always conscious of that intersectional framework. She also says that the study of women and psychology is a broader topic than many may think.

“I am a feminist social psychologist – the distinction I feel is important because psychology is seen as being individual, when in fact it’s also concerned with environmental, cultural, and social forces. I teach a graduate course on feminist psychology and the psychology of women and gender. We look at the tremendous work being done by feminist psychologists in so many different fields, where psychology is being transformed by the work that’s happening in those areas.”

SWAP was not limited from the beginning to feminist psychologists, and today has a membership that involves researchers across all fields, students from various departments across Canada, and clinical psychologists, some of whom work primarily with women and girls. Says Dr. Senn,

“Parallel to feminist work, or work related to women and girls, there is feminist research on a variety of topics - masculinities, for example, and a thread of research also looking at the status of women in psychology, looking at things like inequalities in the field. So there is a real variety.”

Dr. Radtke agrees, and says that this kind of wide variety of work from the lens of women and girls’ psychology forms a big part of SWAP’s history.

“In the early years, members of SWAP were very active in the CPA and other professional associations in Canada, pressing for gender equality and for women to be involved. They advocated for changes to ethical standards that would incorporate a sensitivity toward the concerns of women and girls. It has always had an activist side, and to this day SWAP has a Status Of Women Committee to ensure that all genders and all sexes have equality within the discipline and that those standards continue to be upheld.”

It’s because of the broad approach and diverse membership of both the SWAP section and the Status of Women Committee that they were able to collaborate with the Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology section, the Student section, and the Rural and Northern Psychology section to organize a virtual panel at the 2021 CPA Convention to address the findings of the final report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the implications for psychology in Canada. Says Dr. Radtke,

“It was a big collaboration, and very successful. It was decided that they would follow up that panel with a report not only on the panel itself but also with some recommendations. It’s quite an undertaking for a relatively small committee, and they’ll be focused on that in the coming year.” Editor note – as this will be published in February, check back to see if the report has been sent out by then, include an update if it has.

The panel discussion on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women was a central event at CPA 2021, no one had to sneak across the street to have their voices heard. Dr. Radtke points out that progress has been made both in the discipline and in the organization itself.

“Obviously CPA has become more egalitarian. We’ve seen more women presidents of CPA, we see more women serving on the Board of Directors than was historically the case. Although these problems are less significant in current times, there are still a few issues that require attention, for example, the nomination of more distinguished women for CPA awards.”

These issues will never disappear altogether, and there is a lot more work to do for the members of SWAP and psychologists who work in this space. During the pandemic, the jobs of husbands have taken precedence over the jobs of wives – even when the wife is an academic, even when she out-earns her husband – as childcare is still seen too often from a traditionally patriarchal lens. Instances of violence against women continue to rise as too many are trapped at home with their abuser. Dr. Senn’s specialty is campus sexual violence prevention, and she says that when campuses reopen the rates of sexual assault will likely go right back to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, they have not declined since the 1980s.

The field has come a long way since the Underground Symposium, but getting their work acknowledged remains a work in progress. Dr. Senn says, “we still have to push to have the knowledge we have from the incredible research being done by feminist psychologists incorporated more into the mainstream.” She pauses and exchanges a knowing glance with Dr. Radtke. “Including intro To Psych textbooks.”

Industrial Organizational Psychology

When I was in high school, I went for a job interview after responding to an ad I had seen in the newspaper. I was hired on the spot and immediately onboarded, working my first shift an hour later without fully understanding what the job entailed. The very first thing they had me do was stand in a circle with my new co-workers, arms around each others’ shoulders, while they turned off all the lights and played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in its entirety. Then, presumably adequately motivated, we were sent off – to sell Meat Of The Month subscriptions door-to-door. I learned that this was the process every single day. ‘Eye of the Tiger’. Every single day. I walked home midway through that first shift and never returned.

It was the 90s – you can tell, perhaps, because job ads still came in the newspaper, and people still thought ‘Eye of the Tiger’ was the ultimate pump-up song because Jurassic 5 had yet to release ‘Jayou’. It was also before Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psychology became more formalized in Canada. Dr. Joshua Bourdage is an associate professor at the University of Calgary, and the current chair of the Canadian Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (CSIOP), the CPA Section for Industrial/Organizational psychology. The discipline dates back many decades, the section was founded in the mid-70s, and Dr. Bourdage says the discipline really took hold in Canada in the early-90s.

“A lot of it traces back to the idea of scientific management and Frederick Taylor [an American mechanical engineer who was known for improving industrial efficiency around the turn of the 20^th century] and how we can optimize people and tasks to be done in the most efficient way possible. So a lot of our early work was around selection, assessment, sorting, and increasing productivity. Then we adapted, alongside the rest of psychology, with things like the human relations movement – the idea that people have feelings and emotions and internal states. We then started to think about things like whether happy workers are productive workers, or what are the things that actually motivate people beyond just carrot-and-stick – intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and that sort of thing. That’s where we branch more into the studies of leadership, and change, and politics and so on.”

Dr. Winny Shen is an I/O psychologist working at York University in the Schulich School of Business. She is the Past Chair of CSIOP, and her studies deal with diversity and inclusion, leadership, and worker well-being. She points to the first two World Wars (to date, the only two World Wars…) as the moment when I/O psychology was really created as a formal discipline.

“The desire to apply psychology to solve practical problems has been around from the very beginning. One of the catalysts for the growth of I/O psychology as a discipline was the two World Wars. The military and also the government realized they had a massive number of people with a ton of jobs that needed filling, and they didn’t actually know what was the best way to allocate people to the right job, to make sure we’re making the most of the people that are in these important military positions. That became the basis of a lot of I/O psychology – assessments, intelligence testing, personality assessment, and job analysis. After the wars, there was a recognition that a lot of these processes and skills could be applied to private organizations and industries, and there were all these people who had been trained in doing it as part of the war effort, so it grew from there.”

Put very simply, I/O psychology is the study of psychology in the workplace. Put a little less simply, it’s the application of psychological principles to study the world of work – workers in the context of teams, in the context of the organization as a whole. It’s a field interested in work at multiple levels and in multiple perspectives. This means that I/O has a vey broad range of perspectives and specialities. Dr. Shen explains,

“You can find us in a wide array of places. Some folks are academics like me and Josh. We do a lot of the research in terms of understanding workers’ experiences and organizational phenomena. You can also find I/O psychologists in a lot of applied settings. We’re typically trained as scientist-practitioners so we do both. We might work for an organization – for example, making sure their hiring processes are scientifically supported, or maybe helping with their training in terms of making sure their employees have the knowledge and skills required to succeed in their jobs. It could also involve issues of motivation, or climate – some of those softer-side things that make sure workers have positive experiences on the job and that they have a good relationship with their co-workers and the organization as a whole. We can also be coaches. We can work in analytics. Some work in very specific fields – for example, there are a large number of I/O psychologists working in health care right now. A lot of us work in collaboration with educational psychologists around issues like credentialling and licensure. Once you know where to look, you can find us in a ton of places!”

A previous Chair of CSIOP is one of the I/O psychologists contributing to understanding workplace issues in health care, where collaboration with many other psychological disciplines is very much a part of the job description. Dr. Bourdage explains a little more.

“One of our previous chairs, Dr. Tom O’Neill, does work with teams in a healthcare settings. Specifically, he works with resuscitation teams to maximize their performance. A human factors person, like an environmental psychologist, might look at the layout of the room and the equipment in it to see how it influences the work, whether some of it impedes people. Whereas Tom is looking more at communication, conflict, those sorts of things.”

When I first started working in radio, my job was as a producer for a show called Sentimental Journey on the local Oldies station. The host of the show would record his show on a reel-to-reel machine, then provide a list of the songs he had mentioned in the show. Some were on CD, some on the computer, and some on vinyl. I would have to make sure that there were 60 minutes of music and talk in any given hour – but the host was less concerned. Sometimes an ‘hour’ contained 35 minutes worth of music and talk, other times 85 minutes. I am likely the last person in radio – at least in Ottawa – who actually played music from a turntable on the air, and who had to splice reel-to-reel with a razor blade and scotch tape. I tried to teach the host how to use the computerized ‘voice tracking’ software, which involved booting up the program, then pressing the space bar to record and pressing it again to stop recording. I could really have used an I/O psychologist to help me convince him that pressing a space bar did not make one a ‘computer geek’, and that technology sometimes helps and makes things easier!

Technology, and its rapid advancement in the workplace, has been a big topic of discussion for I/O psychologists over the past ten plus years, but Dr. Bourdage says that it is just one small part of the work and research being done into workplace culture and enhancement.

“It’s extremely broad – the types of work that were presented even just last year at the CPA convention were very diverse. We had presentations about personnel selection – how do we enhance hiring and recruit the right people to apply for a job? How do personality and different situational elements like leadership impact employee attitudes and behaviours? We also covered more current and urgent topics like gender and diversity in the workplace, and the use of technology in the workplace. And there are a lot of people rising to the challenge of understanding how work and the practices we engage in are changing because of COVID. How do we still foster good team dynamics through the move to remote work? How do people cope with remote work productively? And of course we have a lot of people interested in mental health. We have members who work with healthcare workers to get a better understanding of burnout and stress, and their impact in the workplace. How can we intervene to help workers and organizations in that realm?”

When I was in college, I had my first taste of virtual work. I got hired by a promotional company, and after the first interview I never again saw a single one of my co-workers. I would get a phone call telling me where the ‘product’ was. (I always joked with the voice on the phone about the dangers of talking about ‘product’ on a cell phone, but I don’t think he ever understood what I was getting at.) I would then show up to the address provided, where there was a big truck. I’d get in, see what the ‘product’ was, and then spend the day offering free samples of the new Dempster’s bread at a local grocery store, or Dasani water at a gym, or Miller Genuine Draft at a bar. Okay, this is not ‘virtual work’ as such – just work without any co-workers!

There has got to be a study in motivation around a setup like this. There was absolutely no way to know for sure how well I had done my job – or, in many cases, whether I had done it at all! I also had no contact with co-workers, so I had no frame of reference to know whether they were doing their jobs to the absolute best of their abilities, or whether they were taking that extra case of Corn Nuts they hadn’t distributed home at the end of the day to share with a bunch of equally poor and starving college roommates. As with all virtual work, there is probably some good and some bad, as Dr. Shen maintains.

“This large-scale move to virtual work is complicated! There might be some good things, like a more objective evaluation of employees’ work as you see the work sort of divorced from the person doing it. But there are also negatives, like managers feeling like they don’t have control anymore because they can’t physically see people working. Additionally, the lines between what is work and what is private are issues that companies are trying to manage because it hasn’t really been as big of an issue in the past.”

Dr. Bourdage says that while this move to virtual work and the embrace of new technologies has been a major shift – both in the workforce and for psychologists – the expertise of I/O psychologists provided the groundwork for an easier transition to this new reality.

“We had already seen a move toward new technology, whether that’s machine learning or AI, in a decision-making capacity or hiring or moving toward more virtual work. In some ways COVID has just accelerated certain things, the same way it has accelerated or highlighted certain inequities – like who is more likely to be bearing the brunt of childcare responsibilities, for example. A lot of the work and research we’ve been doing for decades does inform some of these things – we’re lucky to have expertise on things like mental health and stigma in the workplace, workplace safety, selection, hiring, and recruitment. So we already have this expertise and it’s just sort of shifted to this new application, I’d say.”

When it comes to equity, diversity, and inclusion, one of Dr. Shen’s specialties, she says that the pandemic has been something of a double-edged sword when it comes to making workplaces more welcoming and comfortable.

“I think that on one hand this virtual working capacity has been something that disability advocates, for example, have pushed for a long time as it would make the workplace much more inclusive and serve as a kind of accommodation that would be helpful for a wide range of disabilities. But it’s one that many companies have felt like was not a “reasonable” accommodation for many of the jobs in their repertoire. But now the pandemic has highlighted how some of our assumptions about how work gets done or what kind of work can be done virtually – often quite effectively – have been too conservative. Companies and organizations might have previously been too reticent to try some of these things.

The other side of the coin is that we have to be a little careful in terms of the balance between what is an employee responsibility and an employer responsibility. That becomes a little more of a grey area. Things like if I need very expensive internet in order to do my job, who pays for that? Or you get injured at home doing something related to your work – is that a workplace injury? There’s a little bit of research that suggests we’re not as careful in our email communication as we would be saying things face-to-face, and that can contribute to feelings of being bullied.

There are a lot of issues we have to work through. There is definitely the opportunity to reshape work more equitably, but there are also a lot of potential issues that are more invisible in some ways. Sometimes people might not feel comfortable sharing some of those aspects of their virtual or personal space. Companies have to be really diligent in not assuming that all employees have the same kind of resources or the same kind of setup.”

Dr. Shen did a study with colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic into the experiences of Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians in the workplace, as xenophobic sentiment started to show itself. She is currently doing research that looks at the division of labour in households during the pandemic, and how that impacts workplace attitudes. In particular, women’s tendencies to feel like they have to downshift their careers in order to accommodate changes in household responsibilities. More generally, because of social movements like Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters, I/O psychologists have a renewed interest in studying the experiences of Black and Indigenous workers. Dr. Shen says it is very important that evidence-based practices remain at the fore when considering issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

“I’m involved in a big consortium where we’re trying to help employers develop toolkits for both employers and employees to try to help with disability disclosure conversations during the hiring process. There are a lot of employers who want to be involved, but don’t necessarily know how to proceed if an employee or an applicant discloses a disability. There is a wide range of issues that stem from the notion of ‘we want to create an inclusive atmosphere, what does that mean, and what does that look like?’

As we become more aware, there are a lot of people who want to make changes. But a lot of these things can be misinterpreted and lead to cascading effects. As an example, there’s a growing body of research that shows some of the policies around hiring and employment equity can be interpreted by people as ‘the standards are different’ or ‘they’re only here because of X’, and that can have pretty insidious and negative consequences for people who are perceived to have benefited from these policies in the workplace. It’s very important, but very complex.

There’s often a tendency to focus on representation rather than inclusion. That can create issues because the focus is on bringing people in, without realizing that the environment into which you’re bringing people is not very supportive. This can ultimately lead to retention issues where there’s this revolving door of under-represented groups.”

The importance of basing your policies and procedures on quality science is echoed by Dr. Bourdage.

“One of the things we espouse is evidence-based practice. I think there’s this notion that a lot of these things are common sense, but I think there’s a lot of knowledge and training and expertise that is required to understand not only equity, diversity, and inclusion but also organizational change, organizational culture, how reward systems impact people, or organizational politics. These are all areas that I/O psychologists dig into with different lenses to understand these things and inform evidence-based practice.

Basically everything from the time you decide to apply for a job, to what questions you’re getting asked in an interview, to how you get socialized and onboarded at the new office, your day-to-day interactions are all guided by and investigated by I/O psychologists. It will tangibly affect almost everyone, every single day, for a huge chunk of their lives.”

When I was in university, I answered a job ad looking for lifeguards to work at Ottawa apartment pools throughout the summer. By the time my job interview was over, I had been hired not only as a lifeguard but as middle management at a security company, working alarm dispatch and supervising security guards across the city. It was a company that took on every contract that it possibly could – I was also answering employee complaint lines for a variety of Canadian clothing stores and keeping records for building maintenance companies…among dozens of other things. Lifeguarding paid minimum wage, middle management in the control centre paid $0.15/hour more. The job ad at the time, 1999 or so, said only ‘lifeguard’ and included a phone number. Things are a little different now, says Dr. Shen.

“Every time you go online and look at a job ad, it has probably been created through some sort of job analysis that I/O psychologists do to understand what is at the heart of a job. The basis we use for how to match a person to a job is to first understand exactly what that job is and what it entails.

The annual performance appraisal that maybe you hate or maybe you love – there’s a lot of science there. Maybe your workplace has a 360-degree feedback where you rate your boss and your co-workers. A lot of I/O psychologists were involved in that, and in popularizing it.”

When I worked in radio, I had an annual performance review where a series of bosses would sit down with me to set goals for the following year and review my progress toward the previous year’s goals. It would invariably go something like this – ‘you have exceeded expectations on four of your five goals, and met the fifth. Great work! I’m going to give you 4/5 across the board’. Why was I getting 4/5 when I had exceeded the goal? And also when I had met the goal? It turns out there was a company policy that said if an employee got a 5/5 on the report turned in to head office, they had to be given a raise. Dr. Bourdage says, “I/O can provide the tools, but whether people use them well or not is kind of on them! The job of I/O psychologists is to work with organizations to help guide them in adopting these tools and best practices”

The Oldies radio station I worked at no longer exists, the security company no longer does security or lifeguarding, and the promotion company is defunct. I am not certain about the door-to-door meat subscription company, as I no longer remember their name. I am guessing they too no longer exist. I wonder though, were they still around, how they’d be doing. On the one hand, the pandemic might have created a demand that hadn’t existed previously for a meat-subscription service, but it also would have made the door-to-door sales model something of a non-starter. By now though, some of the work of I/O psychologists would likely have trickled down to them, and they would probably have a better work environment – if only replacing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ with ‘Turn Down For What’. Dr. Bourdage thinks most companies are moving in a better direction.

“As the current Chair of CSIOP, I look around at the work being done and I feel like our field is uniquely situated to help with the problems of the day.”

Social and Personality Psychology

Dr. Cheryl Harasymchuk is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Carleton University, where her research focus on relationships from a social-psychological perspective. She is the Chair of the CPA’s Social and Personality Section. Dr. Katherine Starzyk is an associate professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Manitoba, where she studies how people respond to social injustice. Dr. John Zelenski is a professor of psychology at Carleton University, where personality psychology is the longest-running of his many research areas.

If you are following along with our Psychology Month series, you might remember Dr. Zelenski as having also participated in our spotlight on Environmental Psychology. As with so many psychological disciplines today, there is a huge amount of crossover between social/personality psychology and other fields of study.

“My first work in environmental psychology was to try to measure this individual difference that we call ‘nature-relatedness’. It refers to the degree to which people feel connected to, and part of, nature and the environment. The way we think about it is almost like a social relationship, and so we borrow some techniques and measurements from social psychology. Since ‘nature-relatedness’ is related to good things, like happiness and sustainable behaviours, it would be nice to increase it.”

This mirrors something that’s going on in personality psychology more broadly. 20 years ago the field was trying to sort out which were the most important personality dimensions. There of course thousands of potential individual differences, so they were trying to make some sense of it. That work remains ongoing, but personality psychologists have come to at least a bit of a consensus in the past couple of decades. Now they can start to ask questions about how behaviours and traits change over time, or how to increase desirable traits and appeal to some kinds of people. Says Dr. Zelenski, “I feel like personality psychology is getting on to these more interesting questions of substance and change and stability, rather than just figuring out what we’re talking about.”

There is a difference between ‘personality psychology’ and ‘social psychology, and at one point the two were not very sympatico. Some say (like Dr. Zelenski) that it was akin to a sibling rivalry. Others say it was a battle of extremes. Either way, there has been a rapprochement over the years to the point where the two now form part of the same team and are in many ways inextricably linked. Like when Nas and Jay-Z finally stopped writing diss tracks to each other in their songs, and joined together to make beautiful music on the (in-aptly named) ‘I Declare War’ tour. Dr. Harasymchuk makes the distinction.

“Psychology is the study of why and how we behave as we do. Social psychologists study how people are shaped by the people around them and the larger environment. And personality psychologists study how to define and measure the important differences between people – ranging from genes to cultures.

In the beginning there were some extreme positions, where two camps were at odds. One said it was only the context, the other said it’s only how you were born that would shape your behaviour. Since that time there has been a lot of evidence that it isn’t one extreme or the other. As an example, I study relationships from a social-psychological perspective, which means I’m mainly interested in how a person’s partner, or best friend, shapes their behaviour. But in all my research, I also examine individual difference variables. Situations depend on that person’s personality, and how they might respond to their partner or best friend. If they have a history of responding very negatively to stressors, then in the context of a relationship where they’re having a fight, their behaviour might be more negative and exaggerated than it would be for someone better able to cope with their emotions.”

The integration of social and personality research has many tangible benefits. Dr. Starzyk has worked with collaborators and partners to increase government motivation to act in response to the First Nations clean water crisis. The group includes social/personality psychologists, sociologists, economists, legal scholars, soil scientists, and more, all thinking about ways they can apply pressure to alleviate the crisis, and all supporting the work of the advocate organizations who are the public face of the effort. It’s a multi-pronged approach, where the social and personality psychologists are the ones working on influencing public opinion.

“Some of our research is on understanding things like when, and why, people will start supporting better access to clean water for First Nations in Canada. Or at what point will people become concerned about racism, or the things that are necessary to move (re)conciliation forward. Even in this context, where we’re studying things that seem very group-based, this year we’re looking at how most of the individual personality variables predict each of these things together. So once again we’re dealing with a real integration of the social and the personality science. While we can set up frames that are more likely to make people act and be concerned about these things, we’re also interested in understanding who those frames will influence more, who can we move more easily, and maybe who requires a different approach. It’s taken a long time, but the intersection is finally here!” Integrating her work in psychometrics and intergroup relations, in February 2022, the Canadian Reconciliation Barometer has released their first report (https://reconciliationbarometer.ca).

Another big shift in the last couple of decades has been toward a different outlook on the way the science itself is conducted. Dr. Harasymchuk explains,

“One of the major changes that has impacted psychology in general, as well as social and personality psychology, is a greater emphasis on promoting practices in our research through transparency and replication. It’s more common in our field now to see researchers pre-register their study hypotheses. Meaning that before they start conducting the study and collecting data, they state publicly what they expect the study to find.

Related to that is the shift we’ve seen toward a more collaborative science. If you need to get enough participants to be more confident in your results, you need to pool across many labs and resources. We were always committed to doing good science, but in the last 20 years we’ve learned so much about the importance of replication and strong sample sizes.”

The work of social/personality psychology has not only undergone many changes in the last 20 years, but it has also contributed enormously to the changes we see around us in our everyday lives. Any ad you see online or on TV, any social media platform or interactive app, is built around the way people think. Dr. Starzyk says she sees this directly quite often, “Facebook and Google and ad companies explicitly recruit graduates from social and personality psychology – we see their booths at our conferences!”

While a lot of what surrounds us is informed by social and personality psychology, our own behaviours can be explained (or perhaps studied) by researchers in the field – every decision we make, every action we take, is probably of interest to a psychologist somewhere! Dr. Harasymchuk offers an example.

“There is a subdiscipline that concerns judgement and decision-making. It’s not about the objective things we experience in a situation, it’s about our perception of them. Our perception can shape whether we decide to drive an extra ten minutes to a gas station where we know we can save a few cents per litre rather than going to the station closest to us.”

The role of social and personality psychologists has come under a bit more scrutiny this past year, as they are at the forefront when it comes to finding ways to get people to adhere to public health measures. It is certainly not as simple as ‘craft your message this way and everyone will wear a mask and get vaccinated’. It’s more about what kind of messaging, imagery, and rhetoric will encourage the most people to take the necessary precautions. Dr. Zelenski says that this process is certainly a complicated one.

“In one of my graduate seminars just last week, we were considering these competing articles in a very high-profile journal, and one of them said ‘here are all the things social psychologists have learned, apply it to the pandemic!’ and the other one was from a group that contained mostly social and personality psychologists who said ‘wait a second there – we’ve done a ton of studies, but mostly on students. This science might not be game-day ready just yet.’ Then between those, you have politicians and policy-makers who have to make a decision right now who are demanding to know if this science is helpful or not. So even within the field, I think you have some debate. We’re certainly asking and addressing those questions, and while our advice is not as good as it might be five years from now, a lot of people would say that at least it’s good enough to be helpful in the moment.”

Dr. Starzyk says a big part of the difficulty is maintaining peoples’ trust in government in order to get them to trust the public health measures being advocated by that government.

“Governments don’t always translate research into policy, and they behave really inconsistently. We know a lot about what causes trust in government. When they say you can go mask free wherever you like, and then three days later have a different guideline, people start to question whether that policy is grounded in some good reasoning.

Even though we know the contact issue is not so important, and you don’t need to sanitize everything in your home anymore, one of the reasons governments were reluctant to repeal that kind of advice is because then people might trust them less. I feel that’s probably not so wise, you want to go with what’s the best science at the time and avoid having people spend money on things they don’t need.”

The science of personality and social psychology has come a long way, but remains a little misunderstood among the general public. Hopefully this will change going forward. Social and personality psychologists help us address racism, behave in more environmental ways, and try to convince us to wear masks and get vaccinated. To live better lives.

International and Cross-Cultural Psychology

When I was eight years old, I moved with my family to Winnipeg. It was a bit of a shock the first time schools were closed because of the cold – I was pretty used to snow days in Ottawa and the thought of having one without any snow was a little odd. But my friends seemed to think this was quite normal and I did agree that being outside at that time was unpleasant enough that I too would prefer not to be in school. But the day in the spring when school was closed – because of mosquitoes – was a lot more stunning. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my friends were treating this like it was normal. “Oh yeah, let’s hang out in the basement and pretend to play Corey Hart songs in our air band. It's a mosquito day!”

Even a move from a city like Ottawa to a very similar city like Winnipeg can, for some of us, produce a small amount of culture shock. Imagine how different Winnipeg must feel to Rohit Gupta, an elite cricket player from India who moved there to study psychology at the University of Manitoba. Cultural differences, and the psychology that comes along with them, can be vast or minute – and they are all around us.

Dr. Randal Tonks is a psychologist and an instructor at Camosun College in Victoria, BC where he does a lot of research into identity and adjustment. He is the Chair of the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA and says that while there is a lot of overlap, International and Cross-Cultural are really two different areas.

“International psychology is really an umbrella term that describes the fact that a lot of psychologists work internationally on global issues. Cross-cultural psychology examines the similarities and differences of peoples’ psychological abilities and traits and so on as can be seen across different cultures.”

It was an inter-Canadian cultural difference that started Dr. Tonks down the path of cross-cultural psychology, as he too moved across the country to experience a different part of our large nation.

“I grew up in Vancouver and went to UBC as an undergrad, but I always had a passion to go to Montreal, so I moved there after I graduated from UBC. Living in that Quebec culture in the mid-1980s, things were arguably a bit more polarized even than they are today. I suddenly became aware of the role of culture and the issues I was going through. I could pass as a local as long as I didn’t open my mouth. But as soon as I spoke, I was immediately identified as someone from ‘somewhere else’. I came to see all these prejudices and biases and expectations about who I was. From those experiences, when I then decided to apply for graduate school, I came to be very interested in the processes around acculturation when people move from one place to another, and our sense of identity in the way we think of ourselves in cultural terms.”

I once spent a few days in Dalhousie, New Brunswick, where I ended up being part of a softball game against the local city council. There were no bases, but rather beer kegs that appeared to be permanent fixtures of the softball diamond. It seemed to be well-known to everyone there that if you hit a home run, the opposing team had the chance to jump over the fence, chase down the ball, and return it to the infield. If they did so before you were able to drink a beer at every base and then cross home plate, you were out. There was a self-contained limiting factor to the drinking, which was that once you had rounded the beers once there was a marked increase in the chance you would strike out the following time up. I asked what they called this sport, and they looked at me as though that was a very strange question and said ‘baseball’ with a shrug.

Dr. Gira Bhatt teaches psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. She has spent almost 2 decades involved with the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA. Her research involves culture, identity, acculturation, and prejudice – she is currently doing applied community research with ethic minorities in Canada, exploring the dynamics that pan out around them. She says one of the things cultural and cross-cultural psychologists must keep top of mind is translation. It's one of the reasons that researchers who come from the community where the research is taking place is so important.

“I was involved in one research study where we were comparing individuals from China, India, and Canadians with European backgrounds. One test item was ‘what’s your profession’? A ton of the participants in India wrote ‘service’. My colleague in China said ‘wow, isn’t that humble, that they all say they’re doing service!’ and I said ‘no no no – it doesn’t mean that. It’s just that when you have a paid profession in some companies, they call it service. It’s a distinction between running a business and doing a paid job, and it’s just the expression they use.’ If the local researchers are not involved, it can lead to those kinds of miscommunications, poor translations, and misinterpretations.”

In the past two years, there has been a renewed media focus on cultural differences, especially in terms of the pandemic. What countries are handling it best? What communities are most likely to adhere to public health guidelines? Of course, it isn’t that simple as every country and every community is made up of individuals with their own ideas and their own value systems. Dr. Bhatt says these ideas have led to a huge amount of new cross-cultural research.

“Michele Gelfand has received a lot of media attention for her work on tight culture and loose culture, especially in the context of COVID. People in China seemed very compliant, they shut themselves inside their homes and didn’t leave for three weeks, whereas here we have an anti-vaxx movement, and all these protests happening. This difference has been studied very deeply now, as to how culture shapes us in terms of compliance where social norms are more important in terms of how people adhere to public health measures. Whereas here, we have the mindset of Western individuals that ‘I do exactly what I want to do’. That’s been very relevant for us to understand.”

In something that would be unthinkable in, say, South Korea, the last few weeks have seen protests all over Canada demanding ‘freedom’ from public health measures. Along with those protests has come an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. These are things that have been on the rise since COVID first became a global pandemic, with anti-Asian hate crimes and other racist incidents happening across the country. Dr. Bhatt and Dr. Tonks were involved with several others in preparing the fact sheet on racism for the CPA, describing the underlying psychological dynamics of prejudice, hate, and discrimination. Dr. Tonks says this is a big topic in cross-cultural psychology.

“I don’t actively research prejudice, although of course in my teaching that’s one of the really big topics I bring up. When teaching cultural or cross-cultural psychology, I bring up issues around prejudice and things like colonialist perspectives in psychology. In some of my courses now I’m working on decolonizing the curriculum to bring in more Indigenous perspectives that show respect to other ways of thinking and forms of knowing. This kind of thing can contribute to change in the greater academy and the large body of psychologists carry out research across different cultures.”

A lot has been made in recent years of the breadth of psychological science, and how the vast bulk of scholarship over the history of the profession has been from a Western lens. Some of the people trying to redress this deficit, and correct for it, are cross-cultural psychologists like Dr. Bhatt.

“For a very long time, psychology was very Euro-centric. Now we understand that different cultural practices pertaining to mental health contain so many variations. So if you want culturally competent counselling, which is now kind of a buzzword, how do you prepare those therapists to be culturally competent? We can’t have a list that says ‘if someone is from X background, this is what they will be like’, because they’re living here! Their adaptation to Canada changes from one individual to the next, and we can’t have one-size-fits-all. The work on this is ongoing in the counselling and clinical fields, and a ton of work has been done – but the potential for growth is enormous.

Sometimes there are accusations that Western psychologists are ‘creating’ a syndrome. You heard this for a long time with attention disorders, and now we know there is some biological basis for these. But you come up with these terms and people from other cultures never heard of it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that it may be labeled differently. And there are syndromes that exist in other parts of the world that Western psychologists don’t know about.”

This might be the crux of cultural psychology. When culture is a variable, it affects the diagnosis, the treatment, and even the onset of psychological syndromes. There are few diseases that affect only one group of people but not others, but this does happen in psychology. Depression has been shown to manifest differently across different cultures. People from more Western, North American, or European cultures complain more about the psychological components of depression – feeling down, low energy, that kind of thing. But depression has often been identified among many of the Asian and some of the Middle Eastern cultures as more of a somatisation [a maladaptive functioning of an organ system, without underlying tissue or organ damage]. It manifests more in terms of bodily complaints, and people don’t so much report their feelings but rather these conditions affecting their bodies. Dr. Tonks provides a few more examples.

“There’s something called TKS, or Taijin Kyofusho Scale, which is a Japanese condition that has to do with a type of anxiety, with maybe a little bit of depression mixed in. It’s a fear that one is offending others with one’s presence. They may develop delusions that, for example, they have a foul body odour and that this is offensive to other people around them. This is a condition that has been well recognized within the Japanese psychological circle, and maybe starting to be recognized a bit in a few other places. This is one of those conditions that doesn’t really show up in other cultures but very clearly exists in Japan.

On the flip side, something like anorexia nervosa might be a Western kind of disease that isn’t really seen across other cultures, and it might be in part due to the socialization and cultural factors that people in North America and Europe tend to live with. In recent years, we’re beginning to see a bit of a rise in this syndrome in some other places where they have become more Westernized, and exposed to more Western media and Western culture.”

I was visiting a farmer’s market in Bangkok many years ago when an elephant sidled up next to me and took a melon. The stall keeper looked up, unperturbed, and the elephant walked away with her melon, equally unperturbed. I figured this was probably quite normal in Thailand, and farmers are likely quite willing to give up some of their produce to the local fauna – it almost certainly beats the alternative of trying to fight them for it. What seemed a little less Thai was the graffiti. The elephant was spray-painted with tags. This seemed like a very American thing to me, something that started in New York subways in the 70s, but it had obviously made its way to Thailand. I’m not sure of the effectiveness, as I understand graffiti tags being a way to mark one’s territory – and an elephant is rather mobile. But there were few elephants wandering the downtown squares unvandalized. Dr. Bhatt says that as Western culture spreads around the world, so too do the good things – and the problems – that come with it.

“The world is coming closer and closer through technology, and because of the pandemic we’re doing Zoom all the time. We’re finding that the various parts of the world which were so far away are now really close. Teenagers in other parts of the world know exactly what American teenagers are doing, and they’re very aware of where trends are going. So a lot of issues are not limited to just one culture, they’re spreading all across the globe and everyone is impacted. We know that body image is changing across time and across cultures. What’s considered attractive keeps changing, and it’s really fascinating.

I’ve learned that women in Middle Eastern countries are now wearing all kinds of expensive Western makeup under their niqabs. There have also been some sad cases where someone in Europe lures a teenager in Canada to take their own life. These are alarming times for us now. Technology has given us lots of good things, but it’s also something to worry about, as the insularity of culture does not exist the way it once did.”

Although its roots and origins can be traced back much further, cross-cultural psychology really got going in Canada in the 60s, when pioneers like Dr. John Berry (one of the founders of the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA) started publishing their research. The push toward multiculturalism in the 60s and 70s led the field to grow and develop. We started to see a lot of studies on identity, and language – in particular French and English as a lot of the issues came from the politics of Canada. Dr. Bhatt and Dr. Tonks, along with Dr. John Berry, wrote a paper tracing this history, but stopped when they got to about 2000. Dr. Tonks says,

“All of a sudden, around that time, it seemed like everyone was talking about culture in one way or another. People who were not traditionally doing cross-cultural research now wanted to look at culture as a variable in their studies. Maybe the biggest change in this discipline is not the growth in the number of cross-cultural psychologists themselves, but that psychologists and other researchers outside the field are looking at facets of the way in which culture comes to play a role in, say, education or childcare or criminal justice.”

Some of those researchers outside the field of cross-cultural psychology are evolutionary psychologists, who are now looking at the role culture plays in human evolution. Others are neuroscientists, who are looking at differences in cognition between one culture and another. There have been countless examples making the news recently – when people were shown an optical illusion with two lines of identical length, African people knew right away that they were the same length, where North American people thought one was longer than the other. Another study showing people an aquarium screen saver showed that Americans saw three big colourful fish first, while Japanese people saw the water and the rocks first. Dr. Tonks says there are even a few brain studies that are starting to yield some results.

“Steve Heine from UBC in his book Cultural Psychology identified that if you do fMRI scans of Americans versus Chinese individuals and you get them to think about themselves, and then to think about their mothers, the Americans have two separate areas of their brain that are lit up – one for themselves and one for their mothers. Whereas for the Chinese participants they have the same areas of the brain lit up. It suggests that neurologically, they’re coding information about their sense of self as being connected to family in a single site, as opposed to North Americans encoding themselves separately within our brains. So some of these properties that we talk about – individualism and collectivism, for example, can arguably be seen in some neuropsychological evidence.”

We may have different brains as a result of our cultures, different syndromes and different experiences and a wide variety of mental health outcomes. But we do have a common goal – that of a collective humanity striving continuously to be better. Dr. Tonks says that cross-cultural psychology promotes “awareness of ourselves, and what our cultural biases are. Learning how other people operate culturally leads to greater sensitivity when interacting and communicating across different cultural lines. The goal a lot of cross-cultural psychologists strive toward is working in a cooperative way to build a better society.”

Preferably, a society with very few mosquitos.

Extremism and Terrorism

“I had a classmate in high school who was extremely intelligent. He wasn’t religious at that time – most Kurdish people are secular; they don’t believe much in the way of fundamental or extremist religion. When I was a Master’s student at university, I heard that he had joined Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At the time, I was wondering why some people wanted to join Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Especially when most of my friends and I were always against those groups in my province. About a year later, I heard the news that he had been killed in Afghanistan along with Abdullah Masood. I was shocked – why? Why did he join? What was the psychological root of this process?”

Dr. Yusef Karimi is Kurdish, and came here to Canada from Iran two years ago. He finished his Ph.D. in counselling psychology in Iran, where he was particularly interested in understanding what make people join groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. He went to villages at the border of Iran and Iraq for Friday prayers and then through the rest of the weekend, interviewing members of extremist groups over the course of about 4-5 years.

“I communicated with them, gathered lots of information about them, and interviewed 16 Salafi Jihadists. Unfortunately, after these interviews, three of them joined ISIS in Syria and were killed there. As a human being and as a psychologist, I had got to know these people for a while. I became depressed after they were killed. My main idea at that time was to find a way to convince people not to join these extremist groups in the first place. To this day, I’ve been still trying to find an answer for this question.”

The answer, says Dr. Karimi, is most definitely not what the West has been doing in terms of counter-terrorism, invading Afghanistan and Iraq with the goal of ‘nation-building’, drone strikes in Syria and Somalia, and all the other interventions that start with military aggression and occupation. He points to the recent events in Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban after the US withdrawal, as a good example of this flawed strategy.

“I think what has been done in the Middle East in terms of understanding and fighting extremism is doomed to failure because of the use of ineffective methods. The attempts for understanding and dissolving such extremist groups require phenomenological approaches that get to the roots of the problem. Politicians and decision-makers usually prefer to define and evaluate current extremist groups in the Middle East in terms of their existing organizational capacity rather than the actual threats posed by that group.

As a psychologist, as someone who has been in those countries in the Middle East and has been a part of that culture, what we have observed in recent months in Afghanistan is the failure of the ‘nation building’ efforts of the past 20 years. We can consider lots of factors that have led to this failure, but in my opinion, there is one factor we should consider most seriously. That is, a lack of knowledge of the psychological characteristics of the Afghan people. Psychology, in this circumstance, can provide us with a great amount of knowledge of the characteristics of an individual in a community. That can go a long way toward peace making and conflict resolution.”

The Taliban, now back in charge in Afghanistan, made headlines in recent weeks when they joined the rest of the world in calling for a peaceful resolution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This, in itself, caused a lot of reaction around the world ‘when the Taliban calls for peace, you know this is a terrible thing…’ that lacks a lot of nuances and understanding of the region.

Back in 1989, the Afghan mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union, driving them out of Afghanistan after a long and costly war. They then managed to topple the communist-backed Afghan government in place at the time, but soon fractured and, following a second civil war in Afghanistan, ceded power to the Taliban. The splintered mujahideen went off in all directions, one of which was that of Osama Bin Laden, who had been the most well-known backer of the mujahideen.

The Soviet, and now Russian, aggression is nothing new. Prior to their abhorrent invasion of Ukraine recently, Putin’s Russian military and bot farms had been engaging in cyber terrorism across the world, which could have been a signal to the rest of the world that they were building up to something more traditionally violent.

Dr. David Nussbaum is the Chair of the Extremism and Terrorism Section of the CPA. Dr. Nussbaum has a PhD in biological psychology, but says he really learned clinical psychology by driving a  cab a couple of nights a week for four years while finishing his PhD. Following his PhD, he did a postdoc in neuropsychology, where he got interested in forensic psychology. He joined the Criminal Justice section of the CPA, and headed it for 7 years. There he met Dr. Wagdy Loza, who was the chief psychologist at the Kingston Penitentiary at the time. Dr. Loza started the Extermism & Terrorism Section, and when he did Dr. Nussbaum was one of the signatories who got it initial status. This gave him an orientation in middle eastern terrorism, but he has been talking about the link between communism, extremism, and terrorism for many years.

“People are lured by this promise of a Communist utopia, the paradise of the working man. Except once they’re five years into a Marxist economy, they’re lucky to be eating. They might then say they’re experiencing buyer remorse and they want to get rid of this government. That’s when the totalitarian, draconian nature of the statist comes out. You have Russian gulags, and so on.”

The totalitarian, draconian nature of Putin the statist is currently on full display, as the world responds to the invasion of Ukraine with almost universal condemnation. It is, however, interesting to see the difference between the world’s reaction to this invasion when contrasted to the US invasion of Afghanistan, or the Saudi Arabian offensive against Yemen. War is war, whether it takes place in the Middle East or in Europe, and Dr. Nussbaum is clear that there is no one location where terrorism, or the ideologies that produce it, thrives.

“Terrorism is not limited to one geographic location, one specific ideology, there are terrorists around the world and there have been for millennia. Now, in the last 25-30 years it has become a major issue because of various ideologies that seek to take over the Globe (or huge parts of it). One of the things they do to influence governments and citizens is the use of terrorism to instill fear, so that people will comply with their dictates. It’s always done for a political end.”

Dr. Karimi points out that over the course of history, we have often had to recalibrate what we thought we knew, thanks to extremist violence that we had not previously considered.

“We had some experience with fascism and racism in Germany before World War II. In the 20^th century Hannah Arendt said with rising totalitarianism we were faced with a new phenomenon, and a new reality. The political thought had never faced this before, so she said we had to establish a new science of politics to explain and interpret totalitarianism. Like what Alexis de Tocqueville said in the 18^th century after the French Revolution. Today, psychology – and political psychology in particular – is faced with yet another new phenomenon, and a new reality. It raises many questions, like how can we understand the individual in a society like Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq, where social order is established mostly on a tribe structure? Trying to ‘build a new nation’ in Afghanistan was not at all in line with that culture.”

After 9/11, extremism started to become a serious problem in North America, with far-right groups springing up with an anti-Islamist foundation. Western efforts to suppress those groups and avoid giving them a platform worked only so long, and in the last few years that extremism has reached new heights as it has grown in power. We have seen tendrils of those extremists reaching into events like Charlottesville, the January 6^th attack on the US Capitol, and more recently the ‘freedom convoy’ that occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks this year.

For Dr. Karimi, the solution to this problem is similar to the solution to Middle Eastern terrorism – get to people before they become extremists. It will be a long process, and can’t happen overnight, but understanding the culture and embracing it will sow the seeds for a de-escalation of extremism in the future. He says of Canada, his home for the last year,

“Lots of immigrants come to Canada, which is good because they bring a lot of external knowledge with them. But we should have a plan to integrate these people and their culture. It’s all well and good to take in a lot of immigrants, and refugees, and so on – but there has to be a plan to integrate them into the Canadian society. To have them live together with other Canadians in an integrated way so they are not seen as ‘the other’ the way so many currently do. It’s good that we have a multicultural country, but we could be doing so much more to use this multiculturalism to improve Canada.”

Psychology in the Military

In the mid-1980s, “a real military exercise was taking place in Europe, involving countries from all over the world. The West Germans were put in charge of ‘psychological warfare’. Although it was a training exercise and everyone involved knew that it wasn’t a real war, they put a single pamphlet together that ground the entire exercise to a halt. They waited until about late in week two of this exercise. The soldiers who were ‘front line’ had been sleeping in mud, they were filthy, and they were tired. If they were sleeping at all, they were sleep deprived – basically feeling absolutely miserable. The pamphlet the West Germans dropped looked exactly like an advertisement from a nearby pizza parlour – offering to deliver free pizzas to the rear echelon folks - the medics, the supply people and those who weren’t on the fighting end. When the soldiers in the field saw that while they were living in filth and eating ration packs, their fellow soldiers were back there eating free pizzas, they said screw it and they quit. You wouldn’t do that in an actual wartime scenario, but in this peacetime scenario this huge discrepancy between how they were living and how they perceived others were living was enough for them to say they weren’t playing anymore.”

Dr. Allister MacIntyre spent 31 years in the Canadian Armed Forces as a Personnel Selection Officer. He has a PhD in social psychology, but his dissertation was more concerned with work behaviour – culture, climate, and leadership in the Canadian Air Force. When he was still in uniform, he spent time in West Germany completing their army’s psychological warfare course for NATO Officers, and now brings some of the principles he learned there into the influence and persuasion course he teaches at the military college.

When many of us think of ‘psychological warfare’ we think of the US military playing Van Halen at full blast for days on end to torture Manuel Noriega out of his fortress in Panama. (Playing Panama by Van Halen in this scenario was, in this writer’s humble opinion, cheesy and way too on-the-nose.) Recently the so-called “freedom convoy” that gridlocked Ottawa for three weeks was accused of ‘psychological warfare’ by politicians, judges, and law enforcement for constantly honking horns and blaring sirens that disrupted the sleep patterns and daily lives of residents in the area. Dr. MacIntyre says the general concept is a lot broader than that.

“’’Psychological warfare’ is not viewed as a discipline in psychology, it’s much more of a military discipline that uses psychological principles. It involves things like propaganda – to influence your enemies and also to gain support on the home front. People think psychological warfare is all about doing something to the enemy, but a lot of it is garnering support from your own nation to say ‘we’re really doing some legitimate work here’. Some of the things I learned on that course were really quite fascinating, in terms of getting to know the culture of the group you’re trying to influence so you know what triggers to use to get them to sway one way or the other.”

Dr. Damian O’Keefe has his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, studying human behaviour in the workplace. Like Dr. MacIntyre, he has 30 years military service, and he currently works as a civilian Defence Scientist in the personnel research and analysis division of the Department of National Defence where he conducts applied research to support personnel policy for the Canadian Armed Forces. He’s quick to point out that Canadian psychologists do not engage in psychological warfare.

“Almost all of us would have done our psychology degree in Canada, and so we all follow the CPA code of ethics. Do No Harm is the fundamental principle by which we guide ourselves.”

The most common job for a uniformed psychologist in the Canadian military is as a Personnel Selection Officer. Psychology has been part of the Canadian military since the Second World War, when psychologists helped the army come up with an efficient way to choose volunteers who would be taking up a number of different positions within the military. Ever since then, psychologists have been involved in selecting military personnel. You can learn more about the origins of psychology in the military, and the associated jobs psychologists currently do, in a chapter of the Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science, co-authored by Dr. O’Keefe, Samantha Urban, and Dr. Wendy Darr.

Dr. Wendy Darr is also involved in selection and assessment, and she recently took over (from Dr. O’Keefe) as the Chair of the CPA’s Psychology in the Military Section. She is also a civilian Defence Scientist who conducts personnel research and analysis for the military. Dr. Darr’s research involves developing new selection tools to screen and recruit people who want to become soldiers, sailors, and aviators. She describes the criteria for being accepted into the military in Canada.

“We are largely looking for what 100 years of research shows is the best predictor of job performance, which is general cognitive ability. The Canadian Armed Forces trains everyone, and a lot of that training is expensive. So we want to make sure we’re investing in someone who has the aptitude and the capacity to succeed, especially in some of the more technical jobs. So at the very basic level we’re looking to see if you’re of sound mind and have the ability to learn. The second thing is personality. Do you fit in with the demands of the military environment? We are looking for those who espouse military values. Does someone have the innate ability to succeed in a rules-based environment, to be organized and structured, and to lead when necessary? We’re also looking for people who have what it takes to perform in this adverse environment. Are you emotionally stable? Military training can be tough, so we want to make sure they have what it takes to handle the pressures of training.”

The military relies on disciplines across psychology. They have industrial, organizational, and social psychologists as well as clinical psychologists to help military members who struggle with mental health issues These psychologists work in military health care clinics and certain specialized units. The vast majority of psychologists work in the 31 military health care clinics located across Canada, which include seven Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centres (OTSSCs) and provide mental health services very similar to what is delivered in hospitals. (Also taken from the Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science.)

Dr. Susan Dowler is the Chief Clinical Psychologist at the Directorate of Mental Health within Canadian Forces Health Services. She is the senior practice leader for psychology, which means she is involved in establishing the practice guidelines and compliance, doing investigations if there are problems, and setting up educational training. Unlike personnel selection officers, clinical psychologists are always civilians.

“As far as  clinical psychologists are concerned, they’re not military members, they’re not in uniform. They’re either public service employees or they’re contracted resources. Some other countries have clinical psychologists embedded in units – the US for example does this – but this is generally not done in Canada.”

In January of 1994, Romeo Dallaire sent a now-famous ‘genocide fax’ to the headquarters of the UN, warning that a genocide was being planned in Rwanda. A few months later, the genocide began as between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis were killed over a period of about 100 days. Dallaire, feeling abandoned and ignored by the UN and having witnessed months of unimaginable horrors, suffered greatly from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after Rwanda. He pushed to create specialized mental health services for individuals suffering from operational stress injuries.  Dr. Dowler says the first OTSSC was created in 1999.

Clinical psychologists have become more and more involved with the military over the years, and play an essential role when problems present themselves. The stigma associated with seeking mental health help has always been prevalent in society, but especially in the military where, as Dr. MacIntyre says, “people are expected to be strong”. He and Dr. O’Keefe both did tours in Australia, working with the Australian army. They noted many years ago that every single soldier who had been deployed for any reason had to visit a psychologist upon their return to Australia. It was just for a screening, but it eliminated some of the stigma of going to talk to someone because everyone had to do it. Dr. Dowler says there is a similar practice in the Canadian military as well.

“We have had mandatory post-deployment screens for a very long time. Within 3-6 months after deployment, soldiers fill out some questionnaires and have an interview with a clinical social worker. If any information is flagged as potentially problematic, they are referred to mental health services.  To see a psychologist you have to be referred from the medical personnel.”

The post-deployment screenings are just part of a process for soldiers after experiencing combat. Psychologists have added another step to make returning to Canada and home life a little easier and more successful. Dr. O’Keefe explains,

“When soldiers come back from overseas deployment, they go through ‘third location decompression’. That’s a two or three day period in which they come out of theatre which has been potentially very bad. They go to a very calm, mostly warm location where they get briefings from people like Susan (clinical psychologists) and other professionals who  tell them ‘if you’re experiencing this symptom, here’s what you need to do’. You can’t put soldiers on an airplane and send them straight home from Afghanistan. They need to have time to decompress and to process what happened. And, of course, to get professional help if they need it.”

Psychologists are involved in the military process from the moment someone enlists right up to all the years after they complete their last tour. Helping them train, perform, and heal so that they will be as healthy, adjusted, and emotionally stable as possible when they head out to that pizza party.

History and Philosophy of Psychology

“Think about zombie movies and zombie shows – zombies are literally subhuman. You can kill a zombie, you can mistreat it completely, they don’t have any rights. In fact, you have a duty to kill a zombie because they’ll take our way of life away.”

Dr. Thomas Teo is a faculty member in the Historical Theoretical and Critical Studies of Psychology program at York University. He has been active in the advancement of theoretical, critical, and historical psychology throughout his professional career. He started out with an interest in the history of racism, worked on the relationship between psychology and racism, and on the question of the degree to which scientific psychology can be a form of violence – which Dr. Teo refers to as ‘epistemological violence’ (epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge). Recently, he has been studying the re-emergence of ‘fascist subjectivity’, based on subhumanism and racism, and the idea of cultural supremacy that we can find in the West.

“Whereas racism can be based to a certain degree on science, for instance using numbers and graphs, the notion of people being subhuman can’t be. Subhumanism - think about zombies - is strictly a visual ontology [the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of being]. You just “see” and know what a zombie is and you don’t need a scientific explanation for that. And it is like this for some people when they see, say, migrants coming to the border. They run, the “caravan”, they walk on foot with suitcases through snow to the border, to a place where they can’t gain “regular” access. It appears to be  “abnormal” behaviour, deviant from how ‘regular’ Americans or Canadians behave,. It shows visually that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’, that that are a class of subhumans. You can mistreat them, separate them from their families, throw them into cages.”

Dr. Teo suggests that, in fact, throwing them into those cages is a way to make them appear even more ‘subhuman’ to the general public. This stems from a long tradition of dehumanizing other people by portraying them as filthy, parasitic, dishevelled and desperate. Which is exactly how migrants will look after being kept in cages at the border without showers or soap or decent food, for weeks or months on end. He goes on,

“I’m basing this argument on two sources, one of whom is an American writer [Lothrop Stoddard] who wrote about the ‘underman’ which included ‘inferior races’, poor people, communists and Bolsheviks. The second source is an education manual by the SS in Nazi Germany that published a booklet with the actual title ‘Subhuman’. There was very little text; they just used pictures that contrasted human with subhumans: German versus Soviet soldiers; proper German versus Jewish mother; German versus degenerate art. It’s all visual, we can see that the ‘subhuman’ doesn’t have the characteristics of a full human being. They look to be in shambles, dirty, disorganized. It also means that anyone can become a subhuman. Not just Blacks and Jews but anyone who is an enemy of Germany – Churchill and Roosevelt were included. The concept of the ‘subhuman’ is a very malleable concept.  This concept of the ‘subhuman’ does not just mean that you’re less than others, it also means there is an imperative to do something about you. If you are a parasite, a cockroach, a rat, “I” have to exterminate you or remove you.”

Dr. Teo speaks a lot about ‘subjectivity’, suggesting the field of psychology needs to focus in this area a little more in order to make sense of the enormous amount of information we have gleaned from empirical studies over the decades. For example,

“We divided subjectivity into thinking, feeling, and willing. Then we divided thinking into attention, perception, cognition and memory. Memory can be divided into short-term, long-term, episodic memory. Then you look at how one small aspect in a subdivision of a subdivision relates to another small aspect. And it’s very difficult to relate this back to the whole, to a first-person perspective (subjectivity)”

Looking at the big picture is a mantra of those who work in the area of history, theory, and philosophy of psychology. Dr. Jim Cresswell is a professor at Ambrose University, and the Chair of the CPA’s History and Philosophy Section. In addition to his work in history and theory, his areas of expertise are social and cultural psychology, and immigration and adjustment in the context of community-based research. He too talks about the necessity of looking at the bigger picture.

“Psychology as a discipline is having to grapple with post-colonialism, which means talking about subtle but ubiquitous systemic biases against marginalized people of all sorts. We don’t exactly have the cleanest track record in psychology, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don’t have a lot of training in thinking about what our theories mean in terms of big picture issues like systematic discrimination. We’re often focused on supporting the individual and doing empirical work in the present moment, but psychologists find themselves in a kind of cultural milieu where a focus ‘just on what the science or data say’ about the individual is not cutting it like it used to. We need to grapple with how and why our empirical efforts worked really well for certain populations, but quite badly for others.”

Although these interviews were conducted several months ago, a lot of what Dr. Cresswell and Dr. Teo said at the time resonates particularly loudly today, especially for those ‘other’ populations who are having a pretty bad time with the recent abhorrent invasion of the Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, and the fascist-style propaganda and disinformation campaigns that have accompanied it. Dr. Teo describes ‘fascist subjectivity’ this way:

“You can have fascist politics with authoritarianism and disinformation and propaganda, and so on. Fascist subjectivity is an individual dimension. If I believe that wealth should not be shared with ‘the other’, and I provide racist or sub-human arguments or feelings for that, then I am entering fascist subjectivity. It is based on the idea that wealth should exclude ‘the other’ or that wealth can be extracted from ‘the other’. In classic fascist subjectivity I can go into other countries and extract wealth from ‘these people’ because they are inferior, they are sub-human, they are parasites. They even can be exterminated if they become a burden”

The global pandemic of the past two years is another example of society’s attitude toward human life. Dr. Teo makes a distinction between those who are dehumanized to the point where extermination is no big deal, and those who are dehumanized to the point where their deaths are no big deal – though the two are clearly two sides of the same coin.

“We have ideas about ‘kill-ability’ and ‘die-ability’. In classical Nazism, Jews are killable, so are Gypsys and homosexuals and enemies, and so forth. Because they are inferior races, or sub-human, they don’t have the same status that we have and there’s no problem with killing them. Die-ability is a more interesting concept, because it moves us from a more classical fascist subjectivity to its re-emergence in our time, where it applies also to liberal democracies. We have debates in this culture, especially during the pandemic, where people say the elderly might be die-able, people with pre-existing medical conditions might be die-able, people in prison and precarious workers are die-able. People have provided economic arguments for the die-ability of many of their fellow citizens: ‘If you want to maintain your way of life, and our economy, then we have to accept that certain people will die.’

In Canada, we have seen that for a long time. Indigenous people were considered killable, and an argument could be made that in many parts of the States Black people are still understood as killable, without consequences. Currently, in liberal democracies we really need to discuss the problem and reality of die-ability, the softer version of kill-ability in a fascist subjectivity.”

That subjectivity – based on a philosophy of big-picture thinking and overarching theories that attempt to connect a variety of schools of thought to one another – is not new. Dr. Cresswell says that psychology in its early years started out with a keen focus on subjectivity, but has drifted over the past century away from this kind of big-picture thinking. Only recently has a concerted effort been made to meaningfully bring this philosophy back into psychology.

“Early psychologists, James, Hall, and Piaget – to name a few – were about 100 years ahead of their time in terms of thinking about topics such as subjectivity, research, and pluralism. Behaviourism and cognitivism that came later moved away from some of that early thinking, which was broader and more systematic. When you go back and look at some of these early writers, you find a lot that’s pertinent to the discipline of psychology’s current context.

Psychologists in the 20^th century largely focused on empirical work and shifted away from the theory that underlies that empirical work. The cultural turn started in the 90s brought about a conversation concerning the possibility that our work could be ethnocentric. The result is a recent shift where we’re now starting to pay attention to the theory that informs our research and what we think our observations mean.”

Although not ‘philosophers’ by the strictest definition, both Dr. Teo and Dr. Cresswell certainly speak more philosophically than do most psychologists. As students of history, they are also students of the evolving philosophy that informs the discipline today. As with big-picture thinking, Dr. Cresswell says that philosophical thinking in the realm of psychology started more than a century ago.

“It’s probably more accurate to look at figures such as Sigmund Freud, or William James, as theorists who outlined presuppositions about how to examine the world. In contrast, consider how first- and second-year textbooks will talk about them as researchers who have been disproven in the progress of science. We tell students that they can move on past them without raising questions about what counts as science according to whom it counts. This message is a bit of a problematic stance to take. If you take cognitive theory and examine behaviourism or psychoanalysis from your cognitive paradigm, behaviourism or psychoanalysis will always be ‘disproven’. If you look at cognitive theory through a lens of behaviourism or psychoanalysis, cognitive theory will always fail. My point is that we have to teach students to deal with background paradigms that set the conditions for our empirical work. So when a textbook says we’ve moved on past this or that, they’re actually missing the fact that psychology doesn’t have a clear progressive development as a unified discipline. We actually have multiple disciplines within it and we have to recognize there are different paradigms, which means training students on how to think about history and theory.”

There has been an uptick in interest of late to go back to some of the periods where these ideas rose to prominence – particularly, the turn of the 20^th century, the 1960s, and the 1990s. I know, thinking of the 1990s in terms of ‘history’ might be a little disconcerting for some. Like, Alanis Morisette released Jagged Little Pill just a few months ago, right? (It was in fact 26 years ago today that she won a Grammy for that album. She is now 47.) Dr. Cresswell says that yes, indeed the 1990s are part of history.

“Consider Wilhelm Wundt, who’s credited with structuralism and the creation of the first psychological laboratory. Half of his work was about völkerpsychologie, which is basically the ‘psychology of the community and people’. There is value in going back to such cultural theory. Another body of literature that we see in history and philosophy today is the continental critiques and philosophy. People like Foucault and  the phenomenologists who partly enabled a birth of post-colonial thinking that largely happened worked outside the discipline of psychology, but there is value in understanding such theory in a milieu where we have to grapple with systematic injustice.”

The field of psychology is remembering, and learning from, its own history. Something we as a society should probably be doing a lot more as well. I’m reminded of another historic moment in pop culture, also from the 1990s – 1994, to be precise. A protest song released in memory of Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry, two men who were killed in the Warrington bombings carried out by the IRA the previous year.

“But you see, it's not me
It's not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head they are crying”

• The Cranberries, Zombie

Rural and Northern Psychology

“Cops probably have it really easy in a small town.

Cop: ‘can you describe who mugged you?’

Victim: ‘yeah, he was about 5’10”…’

Cop: ‘uh-huh’

Victim: ‘he was wearing a brown coat…’

Cop: ‘uh-huh’

Victim: ‘and he was…Jim.’”

I’m paraphrasing a comedy sketch I once heard by a Canadian comedian on Just For Laughs. Who it was and when the routine took place have proven to be un-Googleable! I remember thinking at the time, yeah – but it must be pretty tough on the cop too. The victim knows Jim, because he knows everyone in the town, but it must be the same for the police officer, who also knows Jim. So it is with psychologists who work in rural and northern settings

Dr. Veronica Hutchings is a Psychologist at Counselling and Psychological Services at the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University on the West Coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. She is also an Associate Professor cross-appointed to the faculties of medicine and psychology. Dr. Hutchings is currently the Chair of the Rural and Northern Psychology Section of the CPA.

“Burnout is a big thing in rural areas, when you look at the dual relationships and the boundary challenges you’re faced with in small communities. Imagine your waitlist is getting long, and you’re in a small place where people know you’re the only psychologist or maybe one of a handful. You end up with a lot of pressure – ‘can you take this person on, they’re really struggling, can you squeeze in one more?’ Dealing with that can take a toll on you. I do all my work here on the Grenfell campus, and half the stores I go to the workers are my students. I was in Halifax ten years, and in that time I think I ran into a client only twice!”

There are other challenges to providing service in rural and remote communities, one of which – especially now during the pandemic – is internet access. Ms. Charlene Bradford is a registered psychologist – registered in Alberta, operating at a private practice in Yukon. Ms. Bradford is the President of the Psychological Society of the Yukon.

“In the Yukon we definitely have internet issues, it’s a common complaint. We have really expensive internet, and in the communities more north of us it’s very spotty. You really wouldn’t want to do a lot of forms of therapy virtually because there’s going to be a lot of lag time, or the screen is going to freeze and you’ll lose someone at the wrong time. When the pandemic hit and we started to do things virtually, I was doing some training on how to provide therapy virtually and I thought – sure, that’s going to work here in Whitehorse where the internet connections can handle that, but there’s no way in the rural communities that I would trust the internet to be reliable.

We’re lucky in Yukon that we have a really amazing airline that hits quite a few of our northern communities regularly, so there’s a lot of fly-ins happening. This helps, but you also have to have clinicians who are able to travel.”

Dr. Hutchings says that some communities in Labrador have the same internet issues. Both in Newfoundland and the Yukon, some small communities closed their doors entirely so there could be no fly-in psychological services. Ms. Bradford saw small communities get hit really hard with the virus which she describes as ‘devastating’. The pandemic had already created a massive demand and very long wait times, and communities getting hit really hard by COVID only increased the need for psychological help.

The pandemic, and the small size of the communities where psychologists work in rural and northern settings, are just two of the ways psychologists operate differently than they do in urban areas. Dr. Reagan Gale is the Director of Psychology for the Government of Yukon. She is registered to practice in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Ontario, and is currently the vice-president of the Psychological Society of the Yukon.

“I grew up in Ontario, and one thing I’ll say since coming to the north is that I’ve noticed the necessary emphasis on cultural safety and ways of knowing and ways of understanding for Indigenous people becomes even more crucial as you move north, and as you work in some of the smaller communities in other provinces where we see a greater proportion of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis people.

I do think there’s a different skill set, a different way of being flexible in helping the people we see. I’m just traveling back through Ontario from a week doing assessments in a community where food security is a profound issue, where children are consistently hungry. While I’m sure that’s the case for many in urban settings, in a small community we’re talking about a cultural norm of hunger. It’s not aberrant or an outlier, it’s the community norm that children are hungry. It calls on us as clinicians to approach practice differently.”

You may have noticed that both Ms. Bradford and Dr. Gale are ‘registered to practice in Alberta’, even though they both operate in Yukon. This is because Yukon is the only province or territory in Canada where psychologists have yet to have any kind of regulation. Says Dr. Gale,

“The Yukon is the last Canadian jurisdiction where anything goes with respect to professional psychological practice, in the absence of regulation.”

If a psychologist in the Yukon wants to be regulated (and many do) they must do so with a provincial body outside their jurisdiction. Ms. Bradford says that while this is a partial solution, it doesn’t address some fundamental issues associated with Yukon’s lack of regulation.

“We do not have a regulation college of any form in the Yukon, so many of us who are practicing as psychologists have taken it upon ourselves to regulate in another jurisdiction. It’s great, because we’re going through the regulation process, but it’s also problematic because there isn’t any regulation in the Yukon which means a few things. One, the colleges we’re regulated with have a limited ability to enforce anything outside their jurisdiction – which the Yukon is. And the other problem is that we do have people who are practicing as psychologists who are not actually regulated anywhere in Canada, and they can do that because it’s not a restricted title here.”

There are a lot of things that might happen when folks who aren’t needing to adhere to particular standards of practice can call themselves psychologists. Maybe they haven’t met the criteria to enter the profession in another territory. There are sensitive and important functions a psychologist performs, like diagnostic assessments. It’s hard to think about what process might look like for clients, many of whom are quite vulnerable, when those are performed by someone without the proper qualifications. Dr. Gale sees this often in her job.

“In my role as the Director of Psychology for the Yukon government, I’ve had people call me and ask about practice opportunities in Yukon. This is often because they’ve failed the entrance requirements to enter the profession in another jurisdiction. Maybe they’ve written the EPPP (Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology) the maximum number of allotted times and have not been able to pass, so they can’t access regulation in the jurisdiction in which they reside. I have also been approached by clinicians who have been disciplined by their regulator, and who might lose their right to practice as a ‘psychologist’ altogether. Yukon is the only spot where there is no prohibition whatsoever on that type of practice.”

So how can this be fixed? And why is the Yukon the last jurisdiction in Canada to adopt regulation? Ms. Bradford says the other two territories have a system they would like to replicate in Yukon.

“The Northwest Territories and Nunavut have an agreement with the College of Alberta Psychologists who do the regulation piece for them. We would like something like that in Yukon, and there are a lot of great reasons for it. One of the big ones being that we’re a small jurisdiction. Regulation really protects people. If things aren’t going well with your psychologist, or something seems dodgy, there’s a complaints process. With a small community you want to know that when you’re making those complaints you want to know they’re not going to your friend, your neighbour, someone you see at the grocery store [like Jim]. With a larger college it offers that protection for people in smaller jurisdictions like ours. This is the model we’re trying to go with.”

The Psychological Society of Yukon is very small, in that it consists of only twelve members – psychologists who have formed a group to collaborate and advocate for the things that are important to them. Says Dr. Gale,

“The society is committed to advocating for evidence-informed high-quality psychological services to be available to Yukoners, many of whom live in remote northern communities. I mean, Whitehorse is northern and rural for much of Canada, but we’re talking about much smaller communities than Whitehorse. The other goal is to advocate for regulation. I don’t want to speak for all twelve members of the society, but we are open to whatever path is going to be most sustainable for our Department of Community Services, which is the government branch that holds the responsibility. Speaking personally, I think we’re too small a group to self-regulate. My personal preference would be to enter into an agreement with a southern jurisdiction. But however the government can make it happen, we want to partner with them to do it.”

Ms. Bradford recalls a memorable moment in the Yukon House – yes, there are debates in the Yukon legislature that, though not well-known to the rest of Canada, can be memorable!

“The leader of the opposition was interviewing the person who’s kind of supposed to be regulating psychologists. He said ‘my understanding is that in the absence of regulation I can put up my own shingle that says Currie’s psychological services, is that correct?’ The minister in charge said ‘yes, that’s my understanding’.”

The issue of regulation is twofold. Psychologists are regulated because it creates a standard of practice, which ensures that psychologists who are providing services to people in rural and northern communities are doing so in an evidence-based way. That they will be guided by professional standards that, at the very least, try not to harm the people with whom they are working. The second benefit of regulation is that it creates a complaints mechanism, so that people who are harmed by the services provided have a recourse, and a process to follow. Regulation can’t prevent all harm, but it does provide a set of rules that minimize the potential harm. Ms. Bradford says it should be a pretty easy problem to solve.

“From our perspective, there isn’t a lot of reason why this shouldn’t go forward. Reagan did some consultation with legal representatives about what is the easiest way to move this along, and it really can be as simple as a memorandum of understanding with the College of Alberta Psychologists. Our understanding is this is simply an order in council from the government.”

And yet, it has not yet happened. Dr. Gale explains a little more.

“The barriers are the normal barriers to the government making law. It’s a small government in a small jurisdiction. The members of our society are grateful for the licensing work the government already does. This is not to criticize the important regulatory efforts that are already under way – it’s just that in such a small area, the human resource capacity to add in another profession is an ask. We think it isn’t a big ask, but any time you expand what a government is offering, it’s a political decision. We had some success lobbying during the territorial election in the spring of 2021, and all three parties made commitments toward psychological regulation, but it was the party that had the vaguest level of commitment that ended up forming the government. But we are fortunate in that both other parties are interested, and the topic of regulation is coming up in the house.”

One of the additional downstream benefits of regulation is stability. Ms. Bradford has been in the Yukon for 19 years (not all as a registered psychologist), and in that time she has seen a real change in the mental health landscape of the territory.

“People who are operating as psychologists in Yukon, who are regulated, have been here for a while. We’re invested in the community, there’s that continuity of services, and a relationship of trust that has a chance to build up over the years as people see the same person. In the past there was quite a bit of turnover, when you had people operating in some of these mental health positions who perhaps didn’t have the same level of education or knowledge in terms of being able to cope with what’s happening. They maybe didn’t have the same kind of emphasis that psychology has on self-care and avoiding burnout. So I’ve really noticed that shift as there are now more psychologists, and people are staying, turnover is reduced and services are getting stronger.”

This kind of shift to better practices, evidence-based treatment, and stability has occurred in other jurisdictions as well. Dr. Hutchings is the first psychologist ever to work in Counselling and Psychological Services at Grenfell Campus.

“Seven years ago when I came here, there was a push for my predecessor to be replaced by a psychologist because they recognized the importance of psychology. Ten years ago at this campus, there was no intake form, there was no consent process. The clinicians working there were not regulated by an official body. Now what you’re seeing is a process, an informed consent procedure, and a more structured service operating in a regulated framework.”

People in remote communities have different needs than those in small communities, although there are a lot of overlaps. For example, communities that have to have supplies flown in might struggle more with access to food, and that has a significant mental health impact. This means that for psychologists working in these areas, there is definitely no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Statisticians have argued for years of what constitutes ‘rural’ communities, and Dr. Hutchings tries to define what ‘rural’ actually means for psychologists.

“Anything that’s northern is rural, but not everything that’s rural is northern. And there are different levels of rurality of course. For example, Cornerbrook (population roughly 20,000), where I am, is kind of a central hub on the West Coast of Newfoundland. But for any major medical procedure you still have to drive eight hours to St. John’s. It’s kind of subjective, but I define rurality primarily by the size of the community, then also by how far away you are from a more ‘urbanish’ centre.”

Or, maybe put more simply – the more rural you are, the more likely you are to know Jim.

Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology

“A fish is the last to discover water.”

Dr. Stryker Calvez is Michif Métis from the Red River Territory, currently living in Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatoon. He was the Manager of Indigenous Education Initiatives at the University of Saskatchewan and is now the Sr. Manager EDI Strategy and Enablement at Nutrien. Dr. Calvez is also Chair of the CPA’s Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology Section and a longstanding member of CPA/PFC Knowledge Sharing Group/Standing Committee on Reconciliation with Dr. David Danto.

Dr. David Danto is a clinical psychologist by training, and the Head of Psychology at the University of Guelph-Humber. He has been involved in a number of efforts toward Indigenizing and decolonizing psychology, institutions and universities. He is the Past Chair of the Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology section.

Eric Bollman is the Communications Specialist with the Canadian Psychological Association.

This conversation took place November 24^th, 2021. Since then, 93 unmarked graves were discovered at a former residential school in Williams Lake, BC. 12 were found in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, and 42 were found in Fort Perry, Saskatchewan.

Eric: I understand there’s some talk around changing the name of the Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology section to better reflect the collaborative nature of the work – to focus more on working with Indigenous people rather than making it exclusively about Indigenous people. What sparked this discussion?

Dr. Calvez: As a group, when the new executive came together about a year ago, we realized we had a community of people who were mostly non-Indigenous. As a community of people who are interested in supporting Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we might have to change how we operate. This meant we really had to think about the mechanisms within the section. The section was originally developed to support the Indigenous psychologists in Canada, to give them a safe space and a platform to have a voice. While that is still our mandate, we also wanted to recognize that there was this growing group of people who wanted to be of service and to provide support. So in that sense we thought the name should really be reflective of this. Rather than being a section of Indigenous people, what we needed to do was work with Indigenous people, and to bring as many people as were willing to do that work together and to create a safe environment where they have everything they need, and can have courageous conversations about what has happened to them and how do you move past those places. So the name change is supposed to be a reflection of the development of a community who want to work with and for Indigenous people. And I think we’re doing that in a good way. We’ve got lots of allies – like David.

Dr. Danto: A few years ago I worked with Stryker on a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report on behalf of the Canadian Psychological Association and Strong Minds Strong Kids (at the time known as the Psychology Foundation of Canada). What was clear from the attendees and participants in that process was that psychology has not been a great friend overall to Indigenous people historically, and even to this day in many cases. A lot of that is as a result of bringing an external Western perspective and approach to psychopathology, health, concept of the family or personality, that kind of thing, to Indigenous communities. And that’s harmful. It’s a way psychology has harmed people. It has happened in the context of education, research, and applied practice. To try to apply our ethical principles in a way that is equal to all people in this land, we have a responsibility to change those harmful practices and to use approaches that are suitable. We have to ask the question – ‘how can psychology be a good friend to Indigenous people in Canada? How can we be supportive?’ In many cases, I think the answer to that is that we can respect and acknowledge that there are already ways of healing, there’s already wisdom and knowledge that is helpful, that promote resilience and strength and well-being within the communities already. As a person who tries to be supportive in this way, I ask myself what I can do within my profession to encourage that profession to have greater respect for, and greater humility when it comes to Indigenous ways of knowing and healing. It’s not that psychology can’t or shouldn’t be involved, but we need to decentralize the approaches we use, and let the local community guide and lead what needs to be done.

Dr. Calvez: There are 1.7 million Indigenous people in Canada, and 38 million Canadians. (Re)conciliation isn’t necessarily all about Indigenous people. Although the impact of colonization has been borne primarily by Indigenous people, Murray Sinclair say that it has also harmed non-Indigenous people too. So if you think about this movement we have in psychology now, where we’re trying to get to a place where we can support the needs of Indigenous communities across Canada, there are not enough Indigenous psychologists, and not enough people with the right training to support them. So we really do need to work with allies – people who are willing to invest time getting to know and understand the needs of Indigenous communities to operate in a way that’s reflective of their expectations.

Eric: David, you mentioned ‘humility’. Is that the number one thing an ally must have when entering into this space?

Dr. Danto: Everything we learn in psychology is about ways of thinking. We talk about ‘empirical’ evidence – and the word ‘empirical’ has its root in the word ‘empeirikós’ which means known by experience. But so much of the methodology within psychology has evolved in a way to focus on what is objective and what is quantifiable objectively. That’s not a bad thing, but when we’re talking about human experience, it is an abstraction from experience. ‘Empirical’ has come to mean ‘quantitative’, and it’s not the same thing. Empirical really means within experience, and when we quantify things we’re really taking it a step away from that description of experience. That’s a very Western way of doing things. We have a respect for certain kinds of research in psychology that may not be a good fit with cultural understandings and experiences of history. So sometimes those Western approaches to knowledge get us stuck in a rut, I think, that makes us think these are the only ways of knowing that are worthwhile, testable, verifiable, and conclusive. And that means that we have lost our humility when it comes to other ways of knowing that seem to be a lower standard of knowledge. That sets us up for wanting to do only certain kinds of research within contexts where that doesn’t fit so well. When we go into communities and make use of these methods that don’t fit so well, we lose the connection with the participants in that research. Then we take our information and make use of it in our esteemed academic way, and it never comes back to the community, the community never has a chance to provide feedback because it’s not in their language. It’s not participatory or collaborative, it’s top down. And you end up with exactly the situation we have. Communities that don’t trust academics and researchers in their community, because they’re taking one more thing from the community. You know, we’ve taken land, we’ve taken rights, and now we’re taking knowledge and for who? For the sake of the university, and the researcher, not for the well-being of the community. I think humility is so important to have the approach that there’s lots of ways knowing things, and if you can take a back seat and acknowledge that your training really limits the possibilities that can be seen, rather than illuminate those possibilities – which is what those methods are supposed to be doing!

Dr. Calvez: The other element of cultural humility is that Western education and knowledge comes from a dominant position. The whole hierarchical structure of the Western world is structured in a way that one dominates another based on their education levels, or their cultural group. And that’s embedded within our paradigm of seeing the world. Cultural humility is a process through which we start to recognize that and counteract it. We need to unpack this as part of decolonization, and cultural humility gives us the tools to do that.

What might be more important than humility is commitment. This process of (re)conciliation is going to take an enormous amount of effort and it’s going to create tensions. Unless you have commitment to see things through to the conclusion of what we’re trying to do, to create a healing for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and to the field of psychology, we can’t do that unless people are committed to go through with those intentions.

Eric: Do you ever try to recruit more people to participate in this (re)conciliation, to become allies, or are you more focused on creating a space where those allies can learn and grow alongside Indigenous people?

Dr. Calvez: An important thing about (re)conciliation is that people need to find it within themselves. The starting point isn’t knowing the issues and how to deal with them, the starting point is knowing yourself. And knowing yourself in relation to Indigenous people and the history that’s been here for thousands and thousands of years. That’s something people need to find on their own terms. Rather than promotion [reaching out to people to recruit them to become allies] it should be about attraction [creating a space where people want to become allies and reach out to you]. What we want to show people is that what we’re doing isn’t necessarily an imperative right, something that has to happen – although I do believe that’s true. What we want to show them is that this is something that’s going to benefit everybody, including our profession. There’s a good way to do this so we all learn from it, we all benefit from it. I think that’s done not by telling people you have to do it but by showing them why they might want to do it. When we get people coming on board because of their own choices, we get people who are much more capable of having the commitment I spoke to earlier, and the cultural humility.

Dr. Danto: Within the post-secondary context, I think the focus needs to be on creating the kind of post-secondary institution that’s welcoming and culturally safe and facilitates an appropriate, reflective and critical education for both non-Indigenous and Indigenous students. Rather than recruitment of Indigenous students. If you focus on asking the right questions and on being self-critical in terms of the processes that are in place, and creating that culturally welcoming safe environment, more people will be inclined to participate in what you’re doing. Indigenous people have had really negative experiences in class in the context of taking psychology courses. There are myths about genetic predispositions, assumptions and prejudices and biases because of the long history of colonization. I always use the expression ‘a fish is the last to discover water’. We are so embedded in this context of colonization, whether it’s psychology or health care or education that even with good intentions it’s very difficult for us to see. We need to do a careful examination of those spaces into which we’re inviting Indigenous people, because they may well be places where they’re exposed to re-traumatizing kinds of experiences as they’re confronted with incorrect, outdated, or unfair kinds of comments. We have a responsibility to be protective.

Dr. Calvez: When your focus is just on recruiting people in because you want more Indigenous people in your program, that’s self-serving. It’s not about Indigenous people, their needs, or what they want. If that’s your approach to supporting Indigenous people it will fail every time. We need to change the environment so Indigenous people see it as an attractive and desirable place to land. Let’s be clear – Indigenous communities have just as much need for people who are professionals in mental health as the rest of society does. We have to put the work in now, without knowing for certain that we’re going to attract those people in – just because it’s the right thing to do as a community and as a profession. I think we are moving in that direction. We’ve seen a lot of change in the last few years. That’s going to have to continue and accelerate in order to increase peoples’ interest in this work. Once they are interested, they’re going to realize that we’re not hampering anything that already exists within the profession – if anything, we’re expanding the possibilities and creating a bigger and more open space for more people to find what they’re looking for in the profession.

Eric: There have been some horrific discoveries in the past two years of mass graves at the sites of former residential schools. I think this has come as much more of a shock to white Canadians than it has to Indigenous communities who have been telling us for years that these existed. Is that true, and has it changed how you go about striving for (re)conciliation?

Dr. Calvez: I think it’s really important to recognize that when these events happen they’re really re-traumatizing to Indigenous Peoples. We’re highly affected because this is a confirmation of what we’ve been advocating for a long time. That Canadian society has not treated us right, and that they’ve actually gone to the point of harming and killing children to prove it true. That is the most horrific experience you can have as a person who comes from these communities, to know that even your children aren’t safe. I have friends who are survivors, and when this happens it sucks the wind out of you, and it takes a long time to come back to feeling like you could be okay. That’s happened multiple times this last summer alone. We knew it was bad, but I don’t thinks we knew the magnitude of it all. I very much appreciate that non-Indigenous people are having a reaction to something they didn’t know about. Having that reaction is the right thing – you probably should. But when you impose that reaction on Indigenous people to help them cope with it, that’s not necessarily the right thing to happen. We need other people to be standing up and speaking out so that we don’t necessarily have to be front and centre while we try to heal. This is where we’re moving as a profession. We should be able to advocate while recognizing you don’t go to the people who have been harmed to get support for your reaction. It’s an emerging process, and we’re new to all of this. That’s what (re)conciliation is, it’s a new idea that we’ve never seen before or had before. We’re going to have to discover it and build it from our experiences and our understanding. I think the outrage you’ve seen from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities shows us that we’re moving in the right direction because now there’s an awareness and an appropriate response where people are extremely upset. We’re moving in the right direction in that we’re now trying to support each other in those processes. I think this is a strong time for us as a community and as a society. There are a lot of tensions we’re going to have to navigate as more revelations come forward and we experience this more and more. Most important are the conversations we’re going to have around these and other issues – and they’re going to get difficult. We need to be prepared to have those conversations both as a profession and as an individual.

Dr. Danto: My personal view is that a genocide has happened against Indigenous people in this country. Not a ‘cultural genocide’. A genocide. We are finding bodies at the sites of these residential schools, and there’s little doubt that many more remains will be found, and that no matter how many are found many more will not. As a person who is not Indigenous, recognizing that this occurred in this country – that the killing of Indigenous people in large numbers because of who they are occurred in this country. If we don’t want to admit that, we have to ask ourselves why we don’t want to. To me it is clear that is what has happened. In order to move forward, that’s part of truth. There’s a responsibility when you name something, to act on it.

Eric: Why is it that people use the term ‘cultural genocide’ when it seems quite obvious that what has happened is an actual genocide? Is it a way of minimizing the damage done, or of using a term that doesn’t require as much soul-searching of themselves, or is it something else?

Dr. Danto: The story of the residential school system in Canada was always about ‘saving’ the child while destroying the Indigenous aspect of them. Severing the cultural ties to their community and family. While that may have been the stated objective of the residential school system, and of forced adoption initiatives, much more than that was done. Many people lost their lives within that system, and within those federal government funded (and in many cases church-run) institutions, many children lost their lives. There’s no doubt about who bears responsibility for that. Calling it merely a ’cultural genocide’ is choosing to define the harms that were done in terms of their intention, rather than the outcome. We wouldn’t do that in a court of law. If your intention was to harass but not kill, and you ended up killing, you wouldn’t just get the harassment charge.

Dr. Calvez: We have to recognize that Canada as a society is just now coming to terms with what it’s done. As a stepping stone, ‘cultural genocide’ was the thing they did. They were still in this belief that residential schools could have possibly been a benefit to Indigenous children. I think that now that we’re seeing how untrue that was, people are going to come to terms with the fact that it was more than just a ‘cultural’ genocide, that it was purely genocidal. That said, I don’t dismiss the malevolence of cultural genocide itself. I am who I am because of my ancestry, my beliefs, my identity, because everything I’ve ever been is tied to the land. So to take away my world views, beliefs, and everything else, is to leave me with nothing. Although I’d physically be there I would be a stranger in my own body. It was a significant step forward to use the term cultural genocide, but we’ve now become more articulate. We’ve understood the truths that surround it, and we can call it what it really was, which is a genocide.

Eric: You’ve said that there is progress being made and that we’re moving in the right direction. Can you give me a concrete example of something that is happening now that demonstrates this?

Dr. Calvez: A large group with David and I came up with Psychology’s response to the Truth and Reconciliation Report. Since then, it has not collected dust. What has happened is that we’re seeing this invigorating conversation starting to emerge in different spots in the field of psychology. You’re seeing a change to the ethics standards. The standards are going to change, we’re increasing it and adding a value as well as a practice that will support the Indigenization of psychology and support for (re)conciliation. We’re also seeing CPAP (the Council of Professional Associations of Psychologists) and ACPRO (Association of Canadian Psychology Regulatory Organizations) step up and change the way they want regulatory boards to start addressing these issues. And David will be giving a workshop for the CCPPP (Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Programs) with Ed Sackaney on ‘Allyship, Reconciliation and the Profession of Psychology’. So even within our profession, we are now starting to see an enormous amount of change. It has just begun and the ripples are beginning to be felt across the profession.

Environmental Psychology

“When I say I’m not judging you, I think I really mean ‘not more than other people’.”

I’m a little nervous that, during this Zoom meeting, Dr. Lindsay McCunn and Dr. John Zelenski might be judging my decidedly cluttered Zoom background. All my kitchen appliances are on a shelf behind me, giving the (accurate, it turns out) impression that my home office space is a cramped corner by the kitchen. Dr. McCunn and Dr. Zelenski are environmental psychologists, experts on the spaces we occupy and how we interact with them. Dr. Zelenski is being quite nice, and honest - we as human beings do pick up on these subtle clues based on each others’ spaces, but that is probably not unique to environmental psychologists. We all judge Zoom backgrounds, if only a little bit.

Dr. Lindsay McCunn is a Professor of psychology at Vancouver Island University. She is the Chair of the Environmental Psychology Section of the CPA and the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. She says examining peoples’ Zoom backgrounds, or the way they lay out their gardens or living spaces, is a curiosity for all of us.

“The way people express themselves and set up their homes and place meaningful things around is really interesting. Sam Gosling wrote a book called Snoopology, it’s a study of how you can sort of deduce peoples’ personality and thought processes based on how they arrange their trinkets and belongings in their homes and offices.”

Dr. McCunn specializes in Environmental Psychology, and describes it this way.

“Environmental psychology is the study of the transactions between people and place. I mean a lot of different types of places – a coffee shop, an office, a school, a park, an ocean, a mountain. We study the different ways in which people interact with their settings. Much like the way a social psychologist might study and understand relationships and interactions between people and other people, environmental psychologists study and understand the relationships between people and places. In my research, I look at how people interact in communities and work environments, especially hospitals, schools, and offices. In that capacity, I look at staff, mostly, and people who use the environments in different ways than you might expect like students and patients, teachers, and so on.”

Dr. John Zelenski is a Professor at Carleton University in the department of Psychology. He is also an environmental psychologist, but he specializes in a much different area than does Dr. McCunn. One might say they represent the two major branches of environmental psychology – the architectural (Dr. McCunn) and the conservationist (Dr. Zelenski).

“In addition to being an environmental psychologist, I also think of myself as a bit of a personality psychologist and a positive psychologist. I’ve been very interested in what we call nature-relatedness, or what others call ‘connectedness to nature’. It deals with peoples’ subjective impressions – are they a part of nature, or is nature separate from them and something that has little to do with their sense of self? I’ve also been interested broadly in what I call a ‘happy path to sustainability’. That’s the idea that we know that nature is good at putting people in a good mood. Nature is associated with happiness both over long periods of time and also right there in that moment. We know that people who spend a lot of time in nature and feel very connected to it behave in more pro-environmental and sustainable ways. In the last couple of years, we’ve started thinking that maybe the reverse is true as well. That if you could get people to do a couple of nice things for nature, by engaging in some sustainable behaviours, there could be ways to use that to make them feel more connected to nature and also feel happier about these activities. The idea is that doing nice things for the environment doesn’t have to be onerous, that we might be able to link it to positive emotions.”

What ‘spending time in nature’ means to each person is subjective. Maybe it’s taking a weekend to go hiking in the hills, or spending a day ice fishing, or just going into your backyard and tending to your radish garden. For Dr. McCunn, it has meant a big shift since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is speaking to us via Zoom from what appears to be a cabin in the woods. She and her family lived in the downtown core of Nanaimo BC for a few years, living across the street from the ambulance service, the police service, and the fire station. Sirens increased significantly when the pandemic began, their sleep patterns began to be affected, and they decided to rent a place in the country.

“It was kind of a good case study in environmental psychology, in that we could realize what was stimulating us in our home environment, and then decide how best to alter that for our mental health. So we thought about moving to a larger natural setting where we can have a little bit more control over the things that stimulate us. We were very lucky to be able to rent something in the country. It was interesting, because I was quite attached to the house that we owned. One of the things we study as environmental psychologists is the ‘sense of place’, or a sense of place attachment/identity/dependence. At the start of the pandemic, I was hearing a lot of questions about how people could address the feelings of loss they had now that they were working from home. Not just feelings of loss in terms of social elements, but also a loss of the habitual ways in which they got to those places. Maybe they took the same bus every day, or stopped at the same coffee shop on their way to class or work. Even physicality of the office environment or the classroom itself – they were missing the setting. So I really wondered how I would react when I moved away from this familiar home environment to which I had become so attached. I didn’t want to put myself in a position of place-loss, but I quickly formed a strong attachment to this place, and the natural features around it. It has been a nice journey to explore environmental psychology from the inside out in this circumstance.”

Feeling close to nature can be as simple as being able to go outside and touch a tree, or look out your window at a mountain or a variety of bird species. So how does this translate into more pro-environmental beahaviours, when climate change has become the most pressing issue of our time? Dr. Zelenski gives an example.

“What we have is a lot of good circumstantial evidence and lab studies and we’re trying to assemble it. There have been a few programs that have been promising! My former student/friend/collaborator Lisa Nisbet has collaborated with the David Suzuki Foundation to do something called the 30 By 30 Challenge. They get people to spend 30 minutes in nature every day for 30 days. The people they get signing up for this tend to be pretty pro-environmental, and pretty connected to nature already. But over the course of this month that connectedness does seem to grow. It’s not a randomized control trial, but it seems like spending that time in nature for these folks does make them feel more connected, and along with that comes more commitment to sustainable behaviours.”

Conservation is a (relatively) new branch of environmental psychology, and has certainly become much bigger in the past twenty years, when climate change has quickly become a top-of-mind subject for so many of us. Dr. Zelenski is not alone in having moved in this direction.

“Just the attention and the amount of notice and importance the conservation side of environmental psychology is receiving seems to have really amped up in the past ten or fifteen years. I came to environmental psychology after my PhD just out of personal interest, and I feel like I’m one of a million people who are jumping on this bandwagon! It’s for a few reasons. People seem to be increasingly exhibiting symptoms of depression, anxiety, and so on – and nature seems to be a nice respite from that. Also the awareness of climate change just keeps growing and growing as we’re seeing the effects more and more. And policy-makers are interested in knowing what social science can contribute to try to solve those problems.”

The conservation branch of the discipline has naturally evolved out of the traditional architectural branch, which has been around since the 60s. Dr. McCunn says that there are a few formalized graduate programs in ‘environmental psychology’ in Canada, but there are more in England and the States, the Netherlands and South America. So when she tells people she’s an ‘environmental psychologist’, they often know what she means.

“Some people – and rightly so – split the field into the architectural psychology side and the conservation psychology side. I do that too if I’m going to clarify with people what it is I study, because I’m more on the architectural side. I work with engineers and facility managers and city planners, whereas other colleagues of mine, like John, work particularly on nature-relatedness and with people who study pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. This idea of conservation has become very popular for the field of environmental psychology – not that it’s taken over the architectural side that deals with building infrastructure and so on. Really, environmental psychology started in this architectural realm but has very much branched out into this line of inquiry that includes asking people questions about eco-consciousness and how they relate to nature.”

The two branches do go hand-in-hand. Think of the push toward ‘green’ buildings, with energy-efficient heating, solar panels, maybe a garden on the roof. Says Dr. McCunn,

“When engineers ask me ‘should we be designing this building with sustainability in mind,’ they want to know – are people going to notice it? Care about it? And make changes in their behaviours inside (and outside) of the building because of it? I can help them study the ways in which people behave and work and function in buildings that are more (or less) sustainable. I did a study in grad school that showed that just because an office building is ‘green’ or sustainable, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will predict strong productivity or satisfaction. It’s important to be quite critical about what you expect from sustainable design and what you don’t.”

Think of some spaces you’ve been in where you felt instantly comfortable with the people around you – and others where you didn’t. It’s possible that one of the reasons wasn’t the people who were there, but the design of the space that made interaction more awkward, or made that room or building or train car feel more comfortable. Dr. McCunn explains further.

“If you want a certain space to feel homey and comfortable, you might design it for a particular number of people to be there to sit at certain distances. I’m thinking of a coffee shop design or a restaurant or even a classroom where you want people to sit in a certain way and get along in a certain way.

I think it’s important to make use of different methods, much like other psychologists do. We’re good at integrating a variety of mixed methods into our work. We use naturalistic observation to watch, and see how people are moving and behaving in a space in order to make design decisions from there. We do a lot of surveys and interviews and from these we can help architects and designers make the most humane buildings possible. If the point of clinical work, and other types of psychology, is to help people feel well, then environmental psychology is very much aligned with that. We want buildings to be designed in ways that can help people feel as healthy, motivated, enthusiastic and well as possible.”

Dr. Zelenski bridges the two sides of environmental psychology as well, in a number of different ways. Collaborations with groups who are already doing some environmental work makes it easier for him to collect data, and the analysis of that data allows those groups to be more efficient and effective in the way they operate.

“I’ve collaborated with an architect, bridging these two parts of environmental psychology. He was very interested in making buildings that make people want to behave in environmental ways. Also, maybe it’s not just the inside of the building, but what kinds of natural spaces close to the building might encourage that. This is asking a more nuanced question about what kinds of nearby nature might make people feel better, be happier, be more productive.

There’s a small non-profit that provides water testing kits. They distribute them to people and those people go out and test the nearby water quality, then they upload their data to this kind of crowd-sourced database where you can see if the lake or river near you is in good shape or bad shape, and how is it changing over time. It would be hard for me to put together an experiment where I handed out a bunch of water testing kits, but I can try to follow up with the people who are already doing this to see if it’s changing their sense of connection to nature, is it making them happy, and is it making them want to do other nice things for the environment other than just test the water?”

Since the advent of lockdowns as a result of the pandemic, we’re hearing a lot of people saying they’re appreciating nature more. It’s a safe way to get out of the house – if you can’t go to a crowded mall or a concert, you can still go to a park and walk around. People are seeing nature as a source of well-being and coping, and there have been some studies that indicate nature is one of the more positive things people have experienced during these past two years of physical distancing. But this connectedness to nature, along with the awareness of the grave threat posed by climate change, are creating new problems in some ways. Dr. Zelenski says,

“Lots of people are talking about eco-anxiety, where to the extent that people are becoming more aware of climate change it could be a double-edged sword. So it could be motivating – which is a positive outcome, people wanting to behave in a more environmental way – but for some people it might upset or worry them so much that it creates new forms of stress and concern that for some people can be maladaptive.”

One way to combat eco-anxiety, a big new buzzword on the conservation side, is an increased awareness of environmental psychologists and the seeking of their advice. This increased awareness is being felt on the architectural side of things as well, as the contributions of these experts are now seen by many as invaluable. Dr. McCunn says she’s seen this shift first-hand.

“When I come across engineers and architects and facilities planners, they’re more aware of environmental psych and are very willing to work with us. When I was doing my Master’s, I found that very few people in those positions wanted to work with a social scientist. Many said that they did that kind of research off the side of their desk, and that they ‘already knew how to study people’. Now they’re seeking me out, wanting that professional element in their business or in their processes.

Spatial cognition, for example, is very traditional topic in environmental psychology. I think it’s worth noting because the population is aging. Environmental psychologists often consult with designers about how to help people living with dementia navigate a care home, for example. We can observe them and help them with signs and symbols and ways of integrating their psychology into design to make their lives better.”

Have you ever been in a store where there is a very simple pattern on the floor that changes a little as you approach the bathroom, and a little more near the cash? Maybe there are brightly coloured hand rails along the walls, and the toilet seat is a noticeably different colour than the rest of the toilet. It’s brightly lit but not overwhelming because there are few reflective surfaces and no mirrors. A store that looks like this has probably been designed to be accessible to people with dementia, assisted by environmental psychologists.

People with Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia of different types usually work with a team of people that can include a neuroscientist (see the profile of Clinical Neuropsychology from earlier this month). Increasingly, environmental psychologists are working on larger interdisciplinary teams, and neuroscience itself is becoming a larger part of the discipline. Dr. McCunn says she is seeing this thanks to articles submitted to the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

“I see a lot of articles coming up that merge neuroscience with environmental psych. This is something I’m also doing in my own work—I’m almost finished a second Master’s in applied neuroscience just to get my research more involved in the realm of environmental neuroscience. I like trying to understand things like ‘what is happening in the brain when we feel place attachment? Is that different from when we feel attachment to a person? What’s happening in the brain when we encounter different settings?” These are important questions that I think are becoming very popular.”

As environmental psychology is becoming a discipline that is more and more in demand, the expertise of those in the field is being applied to a larger and wider variety of subjects. Dr. McCunn hopes this continues, so that the full skillset of her colleagues can be used to help solve significant problems.

“I want environmental psychology to be a part of lots of different teams. Of course architects and urban planners, but also clinicians, doctors, neuroscience teams, and so on. I think that we’re good team players and we can add facets to research questions that can complete an answer and make it more comprehensive. It’s very difficult to draw conclusions from only a few variables. Getting some big data and modeling going in environmental psych can help us help others get more reliable answers to larger questions in society about what makes people act and think in particular ways. I’d like to see environmental psychology at more tables more often.”

But rest assured – if an environmental psychologists ends up at your table, they are not going to be judging the layout of your silverware or the positioning of the gravy boat next to the jar of Nutella. At least, not more than anyone else would.

Educational and School Psychology

“It’s like teaching children how to swim way before they have a chance to fall into deep water.”

Dr. Maria Kokai is a school psychologist who spent 30 years at the Toronto Catholic District School Board, the last 14 as the board’s Chief Psychologist. Now retired, she is now the chair-elect of the CPA’s Educational and School Psychology Section. Over the course of her career, she has seen a shift in the field of school psychology, as it has been moving away from a focus on assessments and dealing with children in crisis toward more of a prevention model, however this move is happening too slowly.

“COVID has really drawn attention to the importance of mental health and addressing it on a regular and consistent basis. It has also shone a light on the inequities that resulted from all the school closures and other consequences. One lesson for us and for schools I think is to make sure that mental health is addressed in a preventative way on a regular and intentional basis – as we did with anti-bullying – so that children learn coping skills, relationship skills, problem-solving. They can then apply these skills in challenging situations (which COVID has been) so they can adapt more easily with less stress.

School psychology across Canada is very different in different places. In some places we have the full range of services school psychologists are capable of providing, and in others there’s a very narrow focus on assessments and problems. What we would like to see in the profession is consistently across the board being able to provide equitable and accessible services to all students regardless of where they live, which province, a city or rural. Everybody should have access to services in an equitable way in the future. We’re not there yet.”

This focus on prevention is something school psychologists are advocating to see across all school boards across Canada. There has been significant progress in this direction over the past decade or so, but there is still a lot of work to do. Dr. Maria Rogers is a professor in the school of psychology at the University of Ottawa. She is the current Chair of the Educational and School Psychology Section at the CPA. She says,

“This really points to larger systemic issues within the field. There are not enough school psychologists, and not enough are coming out of graduate programs in Canada. There aren’t enough resources allocated toward mental health in schools. We really want to move toward a preventative mental health student success approach. There are some boards and districts that are better able (better resourced) to take a preventative approach. But many larger school districts are working under a wait-to-fail approach, which is really unfortunate. There are parallels with our health care system, where we often wait for someone to be really sick instead of taking preventative measures ahead of time.”

Some of the delays in implementing preventative programs stem from a fundamental misunderstanding in the public about what it is school psychologists do. In the minds of many, school psychology is all about testing and psychoeducational assessment. This turns out to be a rather narrow and inaccurate description of school psychology, and of what school psychologists are trained to contribute to the educational system. This idea originates from a much earlier model of school psychology work, one which arose around the mid-20th century. At that time, many schools categorized students based on their abilities and their disabilities, and they required school psychologists to participate in this classification by testing students for their eligibility for various programs. But school psychologists have a much wider range of skills and expertise. And misunderstanding or underutilizing that expertise can deprive students of a wide range of services they could otherwise be receiving. Dr. Kokai explains further.

“A lot of the public still thinks school psychologists deal primarily with students who are having problems. That’s one reason people talk a lot about assessment waitlists which are endless and a constant problem. If school psychologists had the opportunity to focus on preventative measures – mental health prevention, promotion, and early identification and intervention of potential learning and mental health problems – then those severe problems could often be prevented and there would be less need for assessments for severe problems. We advocate for a full range of school psychology services and it is for this reason – shifting the focus from strictly problems to a more preventative approach means we don’t wait for those problems to become more severe.”

Some regions have moved faster than others in focusing on student well-being, and Dr. Kokai points to one place where it is working.

“A good example is an organization called School Mental Health Ontario, which has an advisory role to the ministry of education and a resource to school boards. About a decade ago, the ministry of education in Ontario added student well-being to their goals in addition to student achievement. This meant that schools are now required to focus on student wellness and mental health and also address issues related to mental health. During that decade, a lot of progress has been made in general, and some progress in terms of using the skills of school psychologists to support the prevention and early intervention areas.”

The biggest change in school psychology in the past, say, 30 years is the narrowing of the research-to-practice gap. There has been a larger systematic effort to translate knowledge from researchers to practitioners, to make sure those psychologists and other education professionals who work with children can access research findings and apply this knowledge in evidence-based practices with kids in schools. Dr. Rogers wears both hats, as both a researcher and a practitioner.

“I do research in educational psychology as well as being a practitioner. I think that overall, the research has led us to a deeper understanding of the intersections between children’s mental health and children’s learning. At one time the two constructs would have been considered separate elements. The research has brought those disciplines together to understand how those are inseparable domains of a child’s life. What I’m seeing as well is more of a focus on researchers from around the world working together and learning from one another. We’re pooling data and resources from regions around the world to allow for larger-scale and bigger-picture investigations.”

The difference between ‘educational psychologists’ and ‘school psychologists’ is not quite as simple as the idea that ‘educational’ refers to researchers and ‘school’ refers to practitioners. Some regions in Canada and elsewhere in the world use the terms interchangeably. For the CPA’s Educational and School Psychology Section though, ‘educational – research’ and ‘school – practice’ has become a useful shorthand and is understood well by those in the field. Researchers create the science, practitioners apply it. Dr. Kokai explains,

“School psychology is applying the science of psychology in school settings. School psychologists apply knowledge and expertise in the areas of learning, mental health, behaviour and child development to help all students thrive and become the best they can be. They also connect with and support those who are most important in the children’s lives – parents, teachers, communities. It’s a very collaborative type of work in the interest of our children and youth.”

That collaboration has borne a lot of fruit over the past few decades, as practices change and focuses shift in the goal of best helping students to maintain well-being and thrive in a school setting. Dr. Rogers gives an example.

“Starting in the early 2000s, researchers started to really look at the concept of self-regulation or emotion-regulation. Some researchers started to look at it in a classroom context, and how self-regulation impacts learning. A number of researchers, and more practice-focused people like Stuart Shanker, built curriculums and supports for teachers around understanding self-regulation and how it impacts behaviour. That allowed for an improved understanding for educators.”

Psychologists and researchers have also been involved collaboratively in new methods for teaching children how to read. One of the places where a lot of this work has been done is at Sick Kids in Toronto. When Dr. Kokai was the Chief Psychologist of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, they were one of Sick Kids’ experimental sites. It was a direct link between educational practitioners and researchers. Dr. Rogers was doing her internship at Sick Kids about fifteen years ago when this new program began. She says,

“There has been a tremendous amount of attention in recent years around how we should be teaching children to read. A lot of researchers in Canada, primarily out of Sick Kids, did years of research on phonological processing and reading comprehension. They developed a program called ‘Empower’ which is an extremely rigorous and evidence-based reading remediation program. When I was doing my internship at Sick Kids about fifteen years ago, Empower was just starting to be implemented in schools in Toronto, and now it’s being used in schools across the country and teachers are being trained in the program.”

The influence of science on school psychology is just one part of this large collaborative system. Psychologists of all kinds collaborate and learn from one another. The skills imparted by a school psychologist can be useful for more than just the student. Dr. Kokai recalls assisting families in the context of helping a child.

“If you are a parent, you would use similar communication and behaviour management practices that we would maybe recommend with teachers. How to communicate, how to establish positive relationships with children, to help them become more independent and deal with peer pressure or bullies. Many of these skills very much apply to adults as well. Your relationships in your workplace, your community, and so on.”

Dr. Rogers, who works as a clinical psychologist in addition to her work at the University of Ottawa, sees the influence this kind of collaborative mindset has had on all parts of the discipline.

“One of the things clinical psychology may have learned a little bit from school psychology is this holistic viewpoint of the child within their system. When we’re working with a child in a school psychology setting, we’re working with them in the context of the school environment, or their families, or the educational system as a whole – often all three. Traditionally, clinical psychology tends to be more individual-focused, and there have been some great lessons that have come from schools.”

You have probably seen parents complaining online about the “new math”. The way math is being taught in many schools is changing and many parents, particularly millennial parents, are finding it hard to grasp – what do you mean you’re not carrying the one any more? That’s how I learned and consarn it, it worked for me! (We’re of course referring to millennials who talk like 19^th-century prospectors.) There really isn’t a ‘new math’. Math remains the same. 2+2=4. n! is equal to n x (n-1)…1. What has changed is the method in which it is delivered, which puts a greater focus on understanding the concepts than it does on arriving at the correct answer. But the resulting process is different enough that parents and children now have something of a disconnect when trying to work together on math homework. Dr. Kokai says that while researchers have been studying this for a while, as far as she knows psychologists were minimally or not at all involved in the implementation of these new programs.

“This seems to be an example of ‘silos’, that we sometimes talk about in education. In this math silo, psychologists were not involved. What we are trying to do as school psychologists is trying to support students with learning disabilities to help them acquire math skills. But I know that there are  researchers here in Ontario and likely elsewhere who are focusing now on math and the basic skills in math. We will have to listen to these scientists and researchers and build a math curriculum that takes those findings into account.”

There are many good reasons to get psychologists involved – in all areas of education, of course, but specifically in math. Dr. Rogers says that “unlike other most other subject areas, there’s a cognitive-psychological aspect to math where you either feel like you’re good at math or you’re not. And that self-perception seems to start very young.” Helping kids through that from a very young age goes right to the heart of the prevention argument – the earlier you can intervene, the better the outcome for the student both emotionally and academically. And the more likely they will be able to swim once the deep water arrives.

Quantitative Electrophysiology

No lies detected

There’s a scene in a Seinfeld episode where Jerry is interrogated using a lie detector by a police sergeant who doesn’t believe him when he says he’s never watched an episode of Melrose Place. Thanks to some advice from George (“it’s not a lie if you believe it to be true!”) he does fairly well until anxiety gets the better of him and he cracks under the pressure, admitting to being very much into Melrose Place. For an examination of the ‘femmephobia’ present in this scene, see the spotlight on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity earlier in Psychology Month!

We’ve all seen similar scenes on TV and in movies, where people have electrodes attached to their fingers and hands, and where the machine quantifies their response to the questions being posed. I think most of us know by now that the machine is not actually measuring truthfulness, but rather anxiety. And while it is not very useful in its purported purpose – the detection of lies – this technology is actually very useful in the detection of anxiety! This is the realm of quantitative electrophysiology.

Dr. Mari Swingle is a practicing clinician, a researcher, an author and a presenter. She has a PhD in psychology and an MA in education, and she is certified in neuroelectrophysiology. She is the treasurer of the CPA’s Quantitative Electrophysiology section. She describes the discipline this way:

“We read the electrical activity from the brain, which tells us so many things. We can read from the upper levels of the cortex and get lots of information, and we can also go very deep into structures and circuitry within the brain. You need extremely sophisticated equipment to do this, and you need extremely sophisticated clinicians to read all of it.”

Another of those extremely sophisticated clinicians is Dr. Elizabeth Hartney, the Chair of the Quantitative Electrophysiology Section. Dr. Hartney is a registered psychologist in BC, and is board certified in neurofeedback and biofeedback (two predominant forms of quantitative electrophysiology).

“We’re certified by the BCIA, which stands for the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance. They provide biofeedback certification across the world. Biofeedback includes a few subdisciplines. The one Mari and I most closely work in is EEG (electroencephalogram) neurofeedback – but we also have peripheral biofeedback, which picks up electrical activity from the nervous system through the rest of the body. So we could be applying electrodes to your fingertips, to the palms of your hand, to read your heartrate variability or skin conductance. It’s basically all the stuff you see in the lie detector test on TV – which isn’t really great at detecting lies, but is really good for detecting anxiety. Anxiety is one of the things we work with a lot.”

Biofeedback is about becoming more aware of, and gaining greater control over, the functions of one’s own body. It can be used to help people experiencing anything from irritable bowel syndrome to side effects from chemotherapy. Dr. Hartney continues,

“We work with people to get feedback on their breathing, their heart rate, their blood pressure, all kinds of conditions that can be psychosomatic and involve both the mind and the body. There are specializations that others do in this space around urinary incontinence. The whole approach is about empowering the individual to gain control over their own body and their own brain – and in some cases their own bladder!”

In case the words ‘quantitative electrophysiology’, ‘neurofeedback’ and ‘biofeedback’ weren’t daunting enough, the clinicians who work in this discipline tend to add a few more. Like physiology, which also describes their work! There’s neurophysiology, which deals with the signals from the brain. There’s also general physiology, which deals with the full body, including the brain. Depending on the circumstance, quantitative electrophysiologists might be talking about only the body, or only the brain, or both in tandem. Dr. Swingle talks about two different ways this might look.

“There are huge volumes of research on what we call ‘brain mapping’. So, how do we read the electricity and what does it tell us? We work to either clinical or normative baselines. Normative baselines are measurements taken from brains of individuals who don’t have any overt symptoms or diagnoses. They don’t have ADHD, depression, psychosis, and so on. We look at what the brain looks like in that case, and we can then treat people who are suffering from ADHD, depression, or psychosis and we help them get to normative (or typical). What Elizabeth and I primarily do is the other branch, working from clinical databases. This means we have electrical readings from the brains of individuals who do suffer from anxiety, insomnia, scholastic difficulties, you name it. We then train the brain away from that measurement.”

This mostly involves taking existing processes in certain areas of the brain and either enhancing or diminishing their strength. This can be an effective way to treat depression, anxiety, ADHD and other conditions. When it comes to situations that involve actual damage to the brain itself, the treatment looks much different. Says Dr. Swingle,

“When we’re dealing with very severe strokes, or structural brain differences, then we’re looking for different pathways [what is often referred to as neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to overcome damaged parts by learning how to use other parts to perform the same functions]. The majority of the work we’re doing is working toward making existing pathways more efficient. Some are underpowered and some are overpowered. A good example is the foundational work of Davidson. He looked at the balance of the frontal lobes, left vs right. He found that if the cortical electricity was more than 15% higher on one lobe than on the other, that was almost always indicative of emotional deregulation.”

Showing the brain an easier way

The field of quantitative electrophysiology has changed a great deal in the last twenty years, most notably because of the advent of the personal computer and greater technological power. For a discipline that relies enormously on technology, this has been a boon – but has also made disorders, and the treatment of them, much more complex. Dr. Hartney reflects on this change.

“It has actually become easier – but also much more complicated – with the rise of personal computers. They’ve made the process of getting and giving feedback from and to the brain much more entertaining. Therein lies a problem. Before we had computers, psychologists like us used lights and sounds that would light up or ding when our brain was doing what we were training it to do. That would be the ‘feedback’ part of the ‘neurofeedback’ or ‘biofeedback’. That actually worked really well! What we have now is fancy computer games and puzzles and videos that go on and off according to what your brain is doing and we have fantastic arrays that we can observe that show the frequencies of peoples’ brainwaves in several different sites at once.”

Dr Swingle provides a specific example of the kind of work she and Dr. Hartney might do for a client.

“We might want to augment a brainwave at one location on the brain for a specific purpose. For example, we want to augment theta [a type of brainwave] at the back of the brain because when theta is higher at the back of the brain you have greater stress tolerance. We can use that to help with insomnia, anxiety, addictions, all these types of ailments that would benefit from the brain being quieter. We attach an electrode to a very specific site, and ask an individual to interact with a computer. A really simple way of doing this is when the theta moves in minutia, a cricket jumps on the screen. Let’s say we have a young person who is having trouble with extreme anxiety and they need help with calming. All we do is ask them to make the cricket jump. Little ones don’t ask how do you do that, why do you do that – they just say okay. So it’s really easy to work with munchkins! We’re behind the scenes watching the pure wave forms and the amplitudes and ratios so we can see the frequency of theta come up, and manipulating thresholds to make it easier or harder to make the cricket jump. What we’re doing is giving that child the control to augment the theta wave on their own. When we show the brain an easier way to do something, it will take it.”

Boing boing boing boring

As I’m writing this spotlight right now, there is a TV on mute in the background. Team Canada is playing for the gold medal against the United States in the Olympics on the screen. My phone sits next to me and is constantly issuing notifications – Dr. Jonathan Stea just liked my tweet, CTV Ottawa has started a live video on Instagram from the protests in downtown Ottawa. I haven’t played Words With Friends in three weeks, and they want me to know they miss me. I have to stop typing every now and then because email notifications obstruct the screen, and I’ve received 14 since I started writing. Dr. Swingle has written a book called i-Minds: How Cell Phones, Computers, Gaming, and Social Media are Changing our Brains, our Behavior, and the Evolution of our Species about just this sort of thing. She says,

“An issue in our discipline is that things have become so fancy that they’re not as efficient. A cricket jumping for five minutes is fun. A cricket jumping for forty minutes is boring! And the kids go back to these incredibly involved amazing-looking video games. So what happens is we’ll get really good data in session, but the brain doesn’t change on any permanent level. When working with children, especially those with attention difficulties, screens have to be a little bit boring to work. That’s become something of an inner conflict within our discipline.”

So how has that changed in the past decades? Do kids find the cricket boring today because they are used to a much higher level of interactive screen time with more stimulation? If they had been exposed to this in 1988, would they have found the cricket to be entertaining for a longer time? Dr. Swingle says yes – and no.

“You could sustain the attention longer with lesser stimuli 20 years ago, but it was still boring! It’s a larger problem now because a lot of interactions with technology are affecting the development of childrens’ brains. A lot of children don’t know how to ‘sustain the mundane’ because everything in their lives is going at such a high pace. If you do one hour of neurotherapy a week, but 20 hours of gaming a week, the gaming is likely to win. And it does the exact opposite of neurotherapy, it trains the brain to respond only to excitement.”

If you hop on a treadmill or a rowing machine for 30 minutes a day, that’s likely very good for you – but if you spend the rest of your day eating nothing but poutine and peanut butter cups, the effects of that rowing machine will likely be greatly diminished, and you are unlikely to see the results you desire.

At the same time, if you go to the gym every day for three months, working with a personal trainer to figure out an ideal workout regimen, you might be able to maintain the fitness level you desire afterward by going only once a week. This is the goal of electrophysiology – that the changes you make in your brain become part of you, and they stay after the process. Says Dr. Hartney,

“The ultimate goal is that you want your client to learn how to change state without the help of the feedback. One of the things we’re dealing with is that young people in particular see this as a form of entertainment, and don’t necessarily understand that it’s an educational process. We’re trying to teach them to change state, but because they’re overloaded with the bells and whistles and animations it’s much harder for them to generalize what they’ve learned in a session outside that environment.”

On the value of boredom

Every Friday night, my family does a Games Night with friends over Zoom. We play a game using our phones as we all share a screen. The rapid advancement of technology over the last several years has made such incredible things possible, and it’s great that we’re able to connect this way, especially during a pandemic where other methods of connection might not be available to us. But I notice the kids approach it a little differently than the adults. While we’re waiting for a game to load, they’re playing a different game on their phone. Or, while it’s not their turn they’re dealing out cards on the table here in the house so there’s another game to play during the 90 second gaps in action. Dr. Hartney explains why this is becoming more common.

“We’re of an age where being bored was a normal part of childhood. If you went to your parents and complained about being bored they’d give you a chore, or suggest you figure it out on your own. We grew up expecting things to be a bit boring and seeking out our own entertainment. This generation just don’t have that same kind of baseline.”

Like Dr. Hartney, Dr. Swingle is also a big fan of boredom!

“All creativity and all innovation comes from boredom. If you don’t have boredom, you don’t have curiosity. You don’t have time to assimilate things and see patterns, and so on. We’re going far beyond our work in quantitative electrophysiology to the bigger picture now, but they are intrinsically linked.”

Before we go too far beyond quantitative electrophysiology, we’ll leave it here.

Stay bored, folks!

Family Psychology

“No healthy person is totally independent.”

At the end of The Godfather Part III, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) dies alone in a courtyard, having apparently cut all ties with his family and the family business. On closer examination however, he can never have fully cut ties with his family – they made him who he is, and they shaped the path of his entire life. In fact, even the courtyard where he is sitting as he slumps over and dies is in the villa belonging to Corleone family friend Don Tommasino.

In our culture we tend to think about people as individuals much of the time. In this way, we think of a good health individual separately from their family, and rarely think about them in that larger context. Family psychologists, on the other hand, think about that context all the time. Dr. Jen Theule is an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba in the school and clinical psychology programs, and the Chair of the Family Psychology Section of the CPA. She says many things we experience in our daily lives come about as a result of family psychology.

“Rooming in at the hospital instead of the baby going to a nursery as they once did – that’s a family psychology thing. Inviting family members into medical appointments and discussions. Parent-teacher meetings. Anything where we involve your family context, and involve more people in the discussion, those are the kinds of things family psychologists push for.”

When Amerigo Bonasera comes to visit Don Corleone on the day of his daughter’s wedding to ask for a favour, it is not just him and the Godfather in the room. There are others, among them the family consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). These decisions are not made by the Godfather alone – he values input from those closest to him.

There are the discoveries brought about by science and the study of families, and then there are the applications of those innovations in dealing with family dynamics, often but not always in a therapy scenario. Says Dr. Theule,

“I think of family psychology as two things. One, it’s the study of ‘the family’ – parent-child relationships, romantic relationships, multigenerational families, close friendship groups, that kind of thing. Learning about how families operate, both the larger family units and all the subsystems within them. And two, it’s the application of that research to interventions. Family therapy, couples counselling, those kinds of things.”

Dr. Cathy Costigan is a Professor in the psychology department at the University of Victoria.

“I teach about what we call ‘developmental psychopathology’, or the mental health challenges of children and youth. I teach that from a strong family lens, all about how we understand childrens’ normal and abnormal development. I also teach family therapy to graduate students, which involves ways to intervene at a ‘systems level’. We see problems not as ‘there’s something broken within a child that we need to fix’ but rather by looking at the relationships among the different family members and their communication patterns. It is these broader ‘systems’ issues that might be creating or maintaining some stresses in a family where the child might be the one expressing the stress in the family by say, acting out in school or having meltdowns at home.”

Both Dr. Theule and Dr. Costigan speak a lot about ‘systems’. It’s a way to be a little more broad and inclusive when speaking about families. It’s not just a nuclear family of two moms and two kids – it could also refer to the extended family of grandparents and cousins, or a close-knit friend group, or a large hippie commune in California that has been running continuously since the 70s. Dr. Theule explains,

“Everyone’s impacted by various systems. Whether that’s who you work with, or who you live with, or are related to, or your friend group. All of those things operate quite similarly to families. Most people would consider a foster family to be a family unit of a sort, but the larger world might struggle with things like ‘is my roommate my family?’ By and large, society still considers ‘family’ to be a nuclear family – a mom and a dad and 1-4 children. But in some communities families are more broadly defined, and are larger. So when I use the term ‘system’ people might be more okay with the idea that the family can include Auntie or Grandma – or even roommates.”

How big, exactly, is the Corleone ‘family’ in the Godfather movies? Is it limited to just the immediate family members – Vito, Michael, Fredo, Sonny, and Connie? Does it extend to spouses? Children? Is Tom Hagen, informally adopted by the Corleones at a young age, truly a family member? What about all the ‘made’ guys – is that official induction into the organization, or into the family itself? In fact, where does the ‘family’ end and the ‘criminal enterprise’ begin?

Every community, and every culture, defines ‘family’ a little bit differently. For Dr. Costigan, it is these definitions of family, and the cultural differences in what constitutes a healthy family, that interests her.

“These days my research is predominantly focused on immigrant and refugee families. Looking at ways in which families under stress and cultural adjustment harness the resources and strengths within them as they go through changes from one country to another, along with the various traumas that might have accompanied that journey to come to Canada. How do they maintain strong family ties against this backdrop of many cultural differences, where each individual family member might be adjusting to Canadian culture in different ways and at different rates that might create tensions within the family?”

One of the ways these tensions manifest themselves might be for parents who are here in Canada, but whose own parents and extended families are still living back home. With today’s global technology, they are more connected to those remote family members than they could ever have been before. Sometimes that connection puts parents in a tough situation. The expectations of their own parents as to the proper way to raise children might now contrast greatly with the expectations of their own children who are growing up in Canada. It’s this kind of tension Dr. Costigan deals with often within the families with whom she works.

Family Psychology, as a discipline, has been moving this way for some time. An increased emphasis has been placed on cultural variation in families. It’s moving away from an implicit assumption that the Canadian context (the white family with Western values) is the way a family should function. Instead, the focus is more on what good and effective parenting looks like, or good communication within a family. This, of course, varies greatly by culture. Healthy family functioning doesn’t look the same for everyone, and acknowledging this has been a big step forward for family psychology over the past few decades. Dr. Costigan gives an example:

“In White Western culture, we have the primacy of the marital relationship between partners, whether that’s same-sex or opposite-sex. The partners play a leadership role in the family and there should be good boundaries around the decision-making in the family, where kids aren’t really a part of that. We might consider it problematic if kids are too privy to adult issues or too involved in adult decision-making. In some cultures, however, the primary relationship is parent-child. It can be desirable for children to contribute to the family at a much higher level than we expect in Canadian culture. Fulfilling those family obligations is really a strength, and it’s part of a healthy adaptation for that child from that cultural lens.”

For psychologists who specialize in working with families, their work can involve every moment of the lifespan, from dealing with a newborn arrival into the family to planning for end-of-life care for a parent or grandparent. Dr. Costigan says that in all those situations, although the approach might be vastly different, the fundamental principles remain the same.

“The core family functioning systems principles around communication and problem-solving have relevance at every phase of the lifespan. How do you get families to share what they’re thinking in respectful and helpful ways, how do you get them to solve problems in ways where everyone feels heard? Adult children can live their own lives fairly independently. Then when their parents start to decline they have to interact with one another and deal with each other much more, in a really emotional context. Some of those old wounds of childhood interaction can really rear their heads and disrupt that process. That’s an example of a prime time when psychologists might want to get involved, to help a family navigate that difficult phase of the lifespan.”

Or, maybe, psychologists might want to get involved right after the death of a family patriarch. This could potentially avoid future disagreements and betrayals, and ensure that Fredo never sealed his fate by taking sides against the family. I mean, maybe. The Godfather had some pretty difficult family dynamics and precious few psychologists.

Over the past two years, a new test has been placed on families and, by extension, the family psychologists who help them. Not only has the pandemic increased mental health difficulties, it has made it harder to reach out for the supports that could once have alleviated some of those issues. Says Dr. Theule,

“I think the last two years have put a lot of pressure on families who live together. The pandemic has taken away a lot of the larger system, and the supports that come with it like grandparents. We have a lot of great technological innovations, but those innovations aren’t going to come over and take care of your kids when they’re sick, or change a diaper for you. They don’t solve instrumental needs. In my estimation, a lot of research in the last two years has opened a lot of eyes outside the field of family psychology. Psychologists all sort of anticipated this, but to see the stress that children, people with disabilities, and older individuals – people who rely on the family system a little bit more – how impacted those individuals were by stresses to caregivers. It made people realize that maybe focusing on the adults who help those who need the extra care is one of the best ways to help those people who need extra care. For anyone who’s relying on others, a caregiver is really important and I think that may have been a shift in the larger community.”

Again, Dr. Theule is talking about systems. The future of family psychology is an integration of what the experts know now into a much larger, and more complex system that we can call a ‘family’.

“Family psychology is just starting to scratch the surface of the whole system. We’re really good at examining the parts of the system – what happens between a couple, what are the dynamics between one parent and one child, and so on – but a family isn’t just all these little parts added together, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. So how do you look at, and measure, something as complex as a family system? They vary in size, in culture, in dynamics in every single family. That’s where we’re trying to go – to look at the larger systems. Some research is being done now into triad dynamics, like one parent and two children, or two parents and one child. But the amount of complexity it adds to go from two people to three is so large that this is a huge shift already.”

Picture a diagram that you draw on a piece of paper. If you have two people (two dots on the diagram), there is only one line that can be drawn between them. Add a third person (third dot), and there are now three lines that can be drawn between individuals. One more person – three times as complex. Add a fourth, and there are now five possible lines. And so on – so you can imagine how difficult it must be when you’re dealing with a whole family system, where there can be upward of nine, ten, or even thirty people involved. Making sense of those systems might be the monumental task facing family psychology over the next several years.

Dr. Theule and Dr. Costigan will be a part of that – making sense of the incredible complexity of family systems, and coming up with more effective interventions and treatments as a result. There may, however, be one question they will not be able to answer. What, exactly, convinced Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino that making that third Godfather movie was a good idea?

Clinical Psychology

Early in his career, Sigmund Freud specialized in hypnosis. He would hypnotize patients in order to get them to open up about their symptoms, which would then presumably reduce their severity. He was quite new to it, and not very skilled, so he needed his patients to be as relaxed as possible – so he had them lie on a couch while he smoked his cigar and told them they were getting very sleepy.

Eventually, he discovered that simply having patients talk about their symptoms in a relaxed atmosphere might be even more effective. He ditched the hypnosis, but kept the couch (and the cigar). Other psychoanalysts who followed in Freud’s footsteps adopted the couch themselves – to the point where the Imperial Leather Furniture Company in New York City became a very wealthy corporation thanks to the sales of ‘analytic couches’ in the 1940s. The psychoanalyst with the cigar and the austere couch became a ‘meme’ of sorts more than seventy years ago. One that persists to this day.

Where would the New Yorker cartoons be without the psychologist couch? Bob Mankoff, himself a former experimental psychologist, is the cartoon editor of the New Yorker. He says the analysis couch in cartoons is a useful shorthand, one that immediately conveys a power dynamic. In The Sopranos, when Tony sees his therapist, he sits in a regular comfortable armchair – but the couch is there in the background, lest we forget what kind of office this is.

Of course, the field of psychoanalysis has progressed a great deal since the heyday of the Imperial Leather Furniture Company, and sitting behind a patient’s head while they talk on your couch is a thing of the past. But powerful images, engrained in popular culture, can hold a certain amount of sway long past their expiry date. As the image of the cigar-couch-psychologist fades, so too does the stigma around seeking help for one’s mental health.

Dr. Nicholas Carleton is a Professor of psychology at the University of Regina, a registered clinical psychologist in Saskatchewan, and is currently the scientific director of the Canadian Institute for Public Safety Research and Treatment. He is encouraged by the progress of the field in debunking and breaking down stigma in seeking help for mental health concerns.

“I think we’re watching stigma fall, and I think it’s largely because psychologists are increasingly out in the community. The notion that it will look like a Mad Men episode when you walk into a psychologist’s office, with a big old leather couch and someone smoking a cigar, all of which could feel very ominous, I imagine is pretty much gone from what actually happens. I also think we’ve started to diffuse that now mythical notion of what happens a little bit.”

Dr. Brigitte Sabourin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba in the clinical health psychology department, and a practicing clinical psychologist in Winnipeg. She is the Chair of the Clinical Psychology Section at the CPA, and says the field has come a long way but the core goals remain the same.

“We can define ourselves as a field of practice where we deal with human functioning. Clinical Psychology runs the gamut from identifying human problems and solutions to promoting general physical, social, and mental wellbeing. This involves assessment, treatment, consultation, program development, program evaluation, research, mentoring, teaching…”

Dr. Sabourin specializes in clinical health psychology, at the intersection between health psychology and clinical psychology. She does her work in a tertiary care clinic dealing with people who have chronic pain. This means looking at the biopsychosocial aspects of living with a chronic health condition, and applying clinical psychology skills and behavioural health principles to try to support them. Most clinical psychologists have a specialization like this, whether it’s in a hospital setting or in dealing with specific mood disorders. This is not the only way the field has changed over the past few decades. Says Dr. Sabourin,

“I think for one thing, the field has become more diverse. Historically it was dominated by white men, and that continues to change. Our commitment to evidence-based practice is continuing to evolve in bringing together all our knowledge in terms of what we know about anything from mental disorders to human flourishing. We’re now using that knowledge a lot more in terms of improving our services and being accountable to the people we serve. I think also the settings in which we practice have evolved. You see clinical psychologists in settings anywhere from primary care to very specialized services, which means the settings and the populations we deal with are much more diverse than they used to be. I also think the acknowledgement of how helpful it can be to access services has progressed. It’s not about there being something wrong with you, or that you’re crazy – that stigma has started to go away and people are realizing that we can help anyone from an elite athlete to someone who’s really having trouble with basic day-to-day tasks.”

Bringing together that knowledge and using it in clinical practice is something both Dr. Sabourin and Dr. Carleton know well. Both are researchers in addition to clinicians. Dr. Carleton sees, and treats, a lot of first responders in Regina – particularly RCMP, as the academy is there in the city. He also does a lot of research with the RCMP and other public safety personnel (PSP). Recently he and his team created an anonymous online tool where PSP could assess their own mental health and then reach out for support should they need it. He says,

“I think we’re seeing a better integration of science and practice. We’re doing a better job of connecting with one another, and having reflexive relationships between those psychologists who are doing research and those who are doing practice. We’re seeing how science informs practice and vice versa in a more dynamic way. For example, there have been significant changes when it comes to PTSD. Thanks to clinical practice interacting very closely with research, there are now four symptom clusters instead of only three. PTSD diagnoses can now happen without having a singular event, considering the aggregate of compounding events. Certainly for our first responders and other public safety personnel, those were two huge steps forward. Public safety personnel were having difficulty specifying which event was causing them the most trouble because they would have experienced hundreds or maybe thousands of them within a single calendar year. Previously, they would go to see a psychologist and say ‘I’m in trouble’, and the psychologist might have said ‘so am I because I’m struggling to diagnose you unless you pick one event’. We’ve fixed those things, and we’re making sequential improvements and important advancements.”

Another advancement, one with which we’re all familiar by now, is technological. I am conducting this interview with Dr. Sabourin and Dr. Carleton via Zoom, and there are dozens of other virtual platforms available for meetings – and even therapy sessions. Dr. Sabourin says,

“I think something else that’s really taken off, especially since the pandemic, is the role of technology and innovation in terms of accessing psychological services. The idea that you have to go into a psychologist’s office for even a fifteen-minute session somewhere in a forbidding building is no longer how we think about clinical psychology. Now we can access video conferencing platforms, phone apps, and so on. For example, we’re doing a lot of our group-based programming where participants can be in the comfort of their own home, and not have to drive to the hospital and pay for parking, and figure out where they’re going and all that. Decreasing the barriers to care and increasing the flexibility of how we do things is an exciting development. It has been moving that way for a while, but in the last two years with the pandemic has really taken off.”

Doing virtual therapy was a pretty fringe notion two years ago before the pandemic hit, but over the course of the last two years a lot has changed. Psychologists who were wary of holding sessions on virtual platforms have learned to do so effectively, and the prevalence of this kind of technology has eliminated some barriers to care, made more psychological help available, and gone a long way toward the continued erosion of the stigma surrounding the seeking of mental health support. Dr. Carleton says it has also helped in other ways.

“At the risk of speaking heresy, I actually think that being required to work remotely – while it may have stymied conferences – has actually increased collaboration in many ways. I can meet with someone in Australia at the end of my day and beginning of theirs, and for half an hour we can swap notes. We’re not locked into a mindset that requires one of us to fly somewhere for 16 hours.”

Dr. Sabourin agrees. Not only are collaborations easier, but getting more psychological care to more people is as well.

“We’re looking at how to increase resources and our reach. Part of this is adapting the ‘stepped care’ model that’s rolling across the country. It’s a little bit of psychology for a lot of people, and then as the needs increase and get more complex you get to a more intense model. We were reading an article in a research journal about this model in Ottawa, and the director of my clinic was saying ‘I wish we could just fly to Ottawa and sit down and talk to this person!’ And I said ‘I’ll set up a Zoom meeting for Tuesday’. It can just happen so fast and we’re so used to the platforms that it almost feels like we are face to face when we talk this way.”

I do this food order thing, where I get food delivered from local farms in my area. The food gets delivered by Miles [not his real name], a big burly man with a beard down to his belt buckle who drives the enormous freezer truck. A little while ago we were talking about this new job I had just started with the Canadian Psychological Association, and Miles told me about a co-worker he was worried about who was becoming more withdrawn. He was worried about his friend’s mental health. Should I reach out to him? Should I leave it alone? As a non-psychologist, I couldn’t give great advice about exactly what to do, but I thought that gently reaching out could never hurt. The next few times I saw Miles he would give me updates about how his friend was doing. One day last summer when I was working out of my garage, Miles and this co-worker were both in the truck and came in to sit for a few minutes. Now every time they make a delivery to my house, we sit for fifteen minutes or so to talk a little bit about our own mental health. How we’re holding up with this pandemic, what the struggles have been for ourselves and our families. Dr. Carleton says this kind of thing is happening more and more often.

“We’ve seen huge improvements in the discussion of mental health. Instead of it being something that’s kept in the dark, people are having frank conversations. The fact that we’re at a stage where we’re trying to mobilize knowledge about mental health to help transition toward substantial change – that’s a monumental shift even in the last two decades. We may not be exactly sure what we’re going to do next, but at least now we’re no longer denying that we have important opportunities for the population with mental health. I think a lot of that’s come about as a result of the advocacy of clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals.”

We’re not all the way there yet – some stigma remains and hangs on, like that image of the cigar and the couch. But mental health professionals continue to work at eradicating it, and clinical psychologists are no exception. Dr. Sabourin sums up the message very well.

“It’s okay if you’re struggling – you’re human. Being a human being on this planet is not easy! We’re all trying to live our life but we didn’t choose who our parents were, we didn’t choose our genes, we didn’t choose the fact that our brains are probably still programmed to help us survive 20,000 years ago and our environment has changed substantially since then. It’s about normalizing that it’s okay when there are times in your life that are harder than other times. We see these amazing human beings who have flourished – like Clara Hughes, the Olympic athlete who recognizes she’s had trouble. We have really famous actors and politicians who are becoming open with their difficulties and that something can be done about it. We’re recognizing as a society that it’s not the case that you’re either well or you’re sick. You can find tweaks. You can find ways of having a bit of an easier go, becoming more comfortable in your skin, being more present in engaging with your kids. Many of us struggle, and the fact that you’re seeing a clinical psychologist doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, we’re just all human beings trying to do the best that we can in this not-easy world.”