Psychology Profiles

Psychology Careers and Professionals

In June of 2014, ISIS invaded Kurdish-held territory in Northern Iraq, capturing Samarra, Mosul, and Tikrit in quick succession. Dr. Shahnaz Winer was a young single working female teaching psychology at a Middle Eastern university in the region, the place where she was born, and her family insisted she get out. She was quickly on a plane back to Canada as Kurdistan descended into turmoil and violent bedlam.

Dr. Winer reminisces fondly about her time teaching in Iraq, and says it was one of the best times she’s had in her career. She is obviously very sad about the fact that this chapter had to end, and especially sad about how it ended, but she didn’t stay down for long. She began a string of jobs dedicated to the one thing that has driven her throughout her career - the application of psychological science and knowledge to enhancing the everyday lives of…well…everybody! Through a series of jobs, in and out of academia, she ended up starting her own business. And it was as the owner of that business that she presented to students at last year’s CPA Career Fair.

Some of the most well-attended and highly-anticipated events at the CPA are the Career Fairs we have held the last few years. At these events, students have an opportunity to learn about various career paths and positions for psychology graduates outside of the health services delivery and academic settings. They  were able to meet with individuals in those positions to explore the vast job possibilities available to someone with a psychology degree.

People like Sophie Kenny, who works with eye capture technology at VPixx Technologies. Or Anne-Marie Côté who coordinates virtual field trips for students in remote northern Indigenous communities with TakingITGlobal. Or even our own Deputy CEO Lisa Votta-Bleeker, whose work at the CPA certainly falls outside the realms of academia and clinical practice.

These events allow students, professionals, and other interested individuals to network with one another in a setting designed to expand the options available to psychology graduates and, indeed, to all those interested in a less conventional career path. But what if those like-minded people could network with one another year-round, instead of a few times a year at these one-off events? That was the thinking behind the creation of the new Psychology Careers and Professionals Section at the CPA.

Dr. Winer has partnered with Dr. Votta-Bleeker to launch this section. Dr. Winer has a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Waterloo and is one of the people in psychology who took that non-traditional career path. The business she created, Vibrant Minds, is an online education platform where Dr. Winer takes principles of psychology and combines them with other interests. She creates digital products that help people plan, set, and achieve their career and life goals.

“The one thing that I love is that I’m able to reach an international audience of students with this. I can connect to so many different people, and to help them apply what psychology teaches us and what academic research has discovered.”

Dr. Winer did spend some time in a traditional academic role, as a professor. She says that when she taught, she noticed the students gravitated much more toward one particular type of lesson.

“The sections students were really excited about were the ones where they could apply what they were learning to their own lives. For example, if we were learning about memory, we would do an entire section about applying the knowledge so they could study better and remember things for tests more effectively. So it was that application that got me really excited, and I felt like that was something that was largely missing between traditional psychology and all the other professions and fields. That bridge between the academic side and then reaching everyone else with that information.”

When this new Careers and Professionals Section starts filling out its membership, most of those members will be people who bridge that gap. They are the people who take psychological science and principles and apply them to every conceivable industry across Canada. They’re the ones making air travel safer, workplaces more inclusive, and creating high-performance buildings that minimize environmental impact. Having this new place to collaborate will bring all those diverse people together.

“This section was really inspired by the need to provide a home for those of us who, like me, have psychology backgrounds but didn’t follow a traditional path. I became a member of the CPA when I was a student, but when I left academia, I left the CPA because I thought there was nothing there for me any more. And it was actually very lonely! It had been wonderful to have that kind of community, the support, and the resources that the CPA offers. So when I was approached with this idea of a new section geared specifically toward those interested in fields outside the typical psychology fields, it sparked my interest right away!”

The Psychology Careers and Professionals Section is at the stage right now where the section has been approved, and their next task is to recruit the founding members. With 90 new members in only the first few weeks of registration, the section is off to a sprightly start. Dr. Winer has a vision for who she hopes those initial members might be, including a diverse mix of established professionals, those early in their careers, as well as students.

“We want to create a welcoming space for students who are exploring their options. This is such an important group to me because I feel like I was very privileged. When I was in grad school completing my PhD, for the first year or so all the information provided to me, all the workshops and seminars and career fairs, were all geared toward the steps to take to get into academia, or the steps to get into clinical practice. I wasn’t sure at that time what I wanted to do, but I wanted to know what options there were.

My supervisor, Dr. Myra Fernandes, really thought we should explore all the options available to us. So within our own lab, she created a seminar series where she would bring in different speakers. For example, someone with a psychology background who was working for the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly came to speak with us. The exposure to these other options inspired me and gave me a lot more knowledge, but my friends who were in grad school at the time weren’t being exposed to this or given this other information.”

Some of the other people who have expressed interest in the section are professionals interested in networking with each other, those keen to mentor students, along with those who have gone the academic or clinical route but who have other interests. Others are doing something many psychology grads do, like research, but they’re doing it in a hospital, government, private sector, or start-up setting instead of a university and, as such, don’t feel as connected to the traditional academic side of things. Says Dr. Winer,

“There are many individuals who fall into the in-between, and that’s the great thing about this wide spectrum. We’re welcoming anyone from anywhere who wants to join and connect with this group of people who have a variety of interests.”

Dr. Winer felt lucky and grateful to have had those experiences in grad school, and to have taken a non-traditional career path as a result. In addition to serving as Dean of Social Sciences and a variety of teaching jobs and her current business, she spent some time as a curriculum developer and educator, the principal of a coding school for youth, as well as a facilitator and coordinator for the Memory and Aging Program at a group of senior homes across Ontario.

It's experiences like these that Dr. Winer wants to share with the other members of the new section – with the like-minded individuals who have chosen a different career path, and with the students who could benefit greatly from being exposed to these options they might not otherwise see. The idea is one big, long, ever-evolving and ever-growing career fair. One that creates a home for psychology graduates who might otherwise feel like they are on an island, and one that runs, collaborates and networks not just for 48 hours at a time, but 365 days a year.

Counselling Psychology

Syd Barrett created Pink Floyd in 1964, and was the driving force behind their seminal 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He lasted for only one more album, A Saucerful of Secrets, before drug use and mental illness led to his departure from the band. He then hid from public life, obsessively guarding his secrecy for 35 years until his death in 2006.

Counselling Psychology might well be the Pink Floyd of CPA sections, in that they insist on having five members on stage at all times. A collaborative and inclusive discipline, it makes sense that when I asked to interview the CPA’s counselling section, a full five-person panel showed up.

Dr. Marvin McDonald is a professor at Trinity Western University in BC. He’s the Syd Barrett of the group (in that he was there from the start – he has lasted far longer than two albums), the Past Chair who helped get this section to where it is today. Dr. McDonald has a little more experience than the others, and has certainly seen the evolution of the discipline. He says,

“When I went through my doctoral studies in the US in the 80s, the ethics course was an option! It was not a required course - just to give you a very concrete example of how things are different today. The good thing about this transition over the years is that the professional standards have corresponded with empirical evidence. When I started my early psych pathology course, the data from community-level surveys for mental health needs had not yet been pulled together. There was still an active question in the literature about gender differences in mental health needs. It wasn’t until the late 80s and early 90s that the data demonstrated clearly that more women than men sought help, and that men had higher rates of substance use and addiction. These are the kind of understandings that have advanced counselling psychology in recent decades, and they affect practice greatly, not just on the research side.”

Dr. Tanya Mudry, professor of psychology at the University of Calgary and a counselling psychologist with a few clients in private practice, is the new Section Chair. She is the David Gilmour of the group, in that she replaced Dr. McDonald – and in the sense that she keeps the group moving forward with a definite sense of purpose. She describes Counselling Psychology as

“A pretty diverse group. We tend to work in communities with families, children, and couples. We often work with people who might be struggling with life transitions – maybe having family problems or marital problems – and with people who have mental health issues or substance use disorders. We tend to take a diverse perspective – many psychologists will lean toward a particular method of doing therapy, whereas counselling psychologists are more all over the map. Some like to think about your past, and how you grew up. Some like to think about your social context or what’s happening inside your brain, and still others are focused on social justice issues and advocacy.”

Dr. Janet Miller is the Richard Wright of this Zoom call (Wright was the keyboardist for Pink Floyd, known for his skill with a variety of instruments and for the syncopated jazz rhythms and melodies he brought to the music). Dr. Miller works at Mount Royal University in Calgary, but not as an instructor. She’s a full professor in Student Counselling, and also has a private practice in the city. She brings an improvisational jazz style to the conversation, when asked how counselling psychology might affect the everyday life of someone who is not, themselves, in counselling.

“Maybe you’re walking up to the till at the grocery store, and you are unaware that the clerk had just come from a counselling session where they had processed their social anxiety so they could have that job and be front-facing and manage public interactions! They learned how to be in their body, they were able to be centred, and they were able to put anxiety to the side for a little while so they could experience people. Maybe they had some coping mechanisms that they employed so that when you arrived to pay for your groceries you had a smooth interaction. You were able to enjoy the process of buying groceries, and they were able to enjoy their work and go home with some energy to their beautiful family.”

Nick Mason is the only member of Pink Floyd to appear on every one of the band’s albums. The percussionist, he is emblematic of the Floyd sound throughout the band’s history and wrote some of their greatest songs. The Nick Mason of this group is Dr. Houyuan (Hy) Luo, the classic definition of a counselling psychologist. He has a private practice in Toronto and is the Chair-Elect of the Counselling Psychology Section. Dr. Luo says that while the pandemic has made providing counselling more challenging in certain ways, many of his clients are embracing the new delivery method.

“I have been providing 100% virtual counselling since March of 2020. I work in downtown Toronto, in among the skyscrapers, and a lot of people were not yet back at their offices. They actually preferred online counselling because it was easy, and convenient for them. Now that more people are vaccinated, they are slowly returning to the office and the expectation is that we will gradually start offering in person counselling too.”

Dr. Luo is interested in expanding the field of counselling psychology to include more people of colour, as there is a real shortage of psychologists who can share lived experience with their clients who may come from different backgrounds.

“In Toronto where I work, it’s a city with so much diversity. When clients want to work with a psychologist who shares the same ethnic background, they struggle to find one, even in Toronto. We really need to help BIPOC undergrad students, as soon as they get into University, to make sure they’re being supported along the way.”

Also very interested in social change, also an advocate for social justice, is Dr. Jessica Van Vliet, the Roger Waters of the group. Roger Waters, the bassist and primary songwriter for Pink Floyd, is the member who moved the group in a more explicitly socially conscious direction (think The Wall).  Dr Van Vliet, a professor at the University of Alberta in Counselling Psychology, says the biggest shift recently in counselling psychology is toward social justice.

“Social justice has always been important in counselling psychology, but now more than ever. It’s now really in the forefront of what we do. We’ve always had a focus on diversity, but now more than ever I think our discipline is taking a leadership role in the area of working across cultures and with diverse peoples, issues and methodologies. I also think leadership and advocacy are becoming more highly valued and more in focus in our field.”

For the time being, the biggest issue in Counselling Psychology – and in virtually every other industry, profession, and psychological discipline in the world – is COVID. It has increased the demand for counsellors who can help people with burnout, depression, hopelessness, and all the other mental health issues that have arisen as a result of the pandemic. We recorded this Zoom call in October of 2021, and Dr. Mudry’s thoughts at that time seem prescient.

“One of the areas where counselling psychologists are going to be instrumental is in the recovery from COVID. I’ve recently been involved in some work around burnout among critical care workers, and I think that’s going to be huge. In Alberta in particular and across Canada, our health practitioners are super burnt out. Also families and individuals struggling with having to work from home, a lack of social interaction, our kiddos are struggling with going into and then out of school. Counselling psychologists are going to be super busy in the next couple of years.”

How will Counselling Psychology, specifically, help with burnout and all these other issues? Dr. Van Vliet sums it up thusly,

“Part of what we do is we change the dialogue in peoples’ minds. We help shift that dialogue from ‘what’s wrong with me?’ to ‘what’s right with me?’ That strength focus, that positive piece of counselling psychology is a huge strength of our field. I think it has had a major contribution to how people regard themselves, other people, and their world.”

Very few, if any, people know what Syd Barrett did for the final 35 years of his life. In the late 70s, Roger Waters saw him in the department store Harrod’s in London. Barrett noticed Waters, dropped his bags, and ran out of the store. It was the last time any member of Pink Floyd saw their founder. We know that he became an avid gardener, and dedicated himself to painting, but that’s about it. One hopes he was mostly okay for those final years, and that he was able to work through some of his turmoil with a professional who could help make things a little better. A professional like, for example, a counselling psychologist?

Traumatic Stress

“In the 80s and early 90s, there was nothing known about the victims of child sexual abuse. Now, there are volumes of research on the subject.”

Dr. Rachel Langevin is an assistant professor of counselling psychology at McGill University, as well as a clinical psychologist who does a bit of private practice. She is currently the Chair-Elect of the CPA’s Traumatic Stress Section. She says her PhD advisor was one of the pioneers in researching the sexual abuse of children in Quebec and Canada. At the time she decided to work on this, it was a reality that many people didn’t even recognize existed. The first step had to be acknowledging, socially, that the sexual abuse of children DID exist, and that often it happened within families. It may seem difficult to imagine now, but it took a very long time for this kind of abuse to be recognized as real in the public at large.

“In the early 80s, some researchers in the States, like David Finkelhor, started trying to really understand child sexual abuse and the specific impact it had related to other traumatic experiences. One of the first to start working on it here in Quebec was Martine Hébert, who was my PhD advisor. Her advisor had been a specialist looking at perpetrators of sexual abuse, but not victims – and Dr. Hébert was the only one looking at that side. She did her research with a lot of autonomy, because no one else had that expertise!”

Today, child sexual abuse is one of the most-studied types of child maltreatment. Research into traumatic stress has come a long way in a short time. Dr. Jenna Boyd is a psychologist at an anxiety treatment and research clinic at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience at McMaster University. She is the current Chair of the CPA’s Traumatic Stress Section, and specializes in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is my main area of practice. A little more than 20 to 30 years ago, the main therapies that we’re using now were just emerging. From the perspective of treating PTSD, there was almost a thought that we couldn’t really treat it, but we could kind of help people cope with it. Today, we do have some really effective treatments.

Potentially traumatic experiences are pretty common. Over the course of their lives, most of us will be exposed to a traumatic event. It could be the death of someone close to us, a serious injury, sexual or intimate partner violence, or a frightening near-death experience. For some of us, it’s part of our jobs – a first responder or someone in the military could be exposed to a traumatic event more than once in a day. ‘Traumatic stress’ is what comes about as a reaction to that trauma.

It’s quite normal to have a stress-based reaction to a traumatic event or series of events. Most people who are exposed to one will have some kind of stress-response as a result. Many people will recover over time through a process of natural recovery, but others may go on to develop PTSD. This is where the symptoms related to the trauma persist over a longer period of time. Dr. Langevin says those symptoms can be multiple, complex, and varied.

“We encounter many different symptoms in this line of work. Re-experiencing symptoms, like nightmares, intrusive memories. Someone might be doing something and suddenly an image pops into their head causing distress. Every time they’re exposed to something that might resemble the trauma they endured, or something that makes them think about it, they will have a stress reaction, and anxiety will rise up. That might lead them to the second category of symptoms, which is avoidance. People start avoiding things that remind them of the trauma because it’s too stressful and uncomfortable.

The third big category of symptoms is a change in cognition, mood, and self-image. This includes things like self-blame, taking an overly large share of responsibility over what happened, feeling disconnected from others, or feeling no emotion whatsoever. And finally, there are arousal and reactivity symptoms. This is a more physiological response, and includes things like always being on your guard and looking over your shoulder, being very easily startled, difficulty sleeping, irritability, and possibly self-harm behaviours.”

When a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma sees someone who presents with a cluster of these symptoms, that persists for a month or longer after the traumatic event, and those symptoms are affecting that person’s life, that’s when they start talking about something like PTSD. At that point, it is no longer a normal reaction, and it requires attention. As Dr. Boyd says, there are now many ways that attention can be delivered.

“We now have Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to name just a few. These treatments have had a lot of research supports behind them over the past 20 or 25 years. We now know they’re really effective for many people, and we have tools where we can say ‘let’s try this and see if we can get you to a place where you’re functioning better’. Many people can return to some of the things in their lives that have been taken away from them.”

Treatments are always improving, clinical psychologists are always innovating, and researchers are continually expanding our understanding of trauma, stress, and the interaction of the two. Dr. Langevin’s current research is looking into the intergenerational continuity of family violence, including child maltreatment and intimate partner violence.

“We know that a parent who was maltreated in their childhood is at increased risk of having a child that will also experience trauma and maltreatment – whether or not it’s at their own hands. Sometimes the mistreated parent becomes a perpetrator of abuse, and other times that doesn’t happen but the child still ends up being mistreated by someone else in the environment. There’s this continuity that we see in the data and in clinical practice, but the mechanisms that are responsible for this – the protective factors, the risk factors that are involved – are still trying to be understood. What makes one parent end up in a cycle where there is repetition of their own maltreatment history with their child, versus parents who are able to break those cycles? We’re looking to help parents who have been in this situation end the cycle, and foster resilience and positive adaptation in their children and themselves.”

Dr. Langevin is quick to point out that treating traumatic stress, and the problems that come along with it, go far beyond PTSD. She says,

“Everything can be associated with trauma, including behaviour problems, emotion regulation, depression, anxiety, bullying, difficulties with attachment and relationship. There are a host of different areas where we can see the consequences of traumatic events. PTSD is just one part of it, there’s a lot more. And we’ve come a long way in learning about it!”

Addiction Psychology

“I’ve never had a client when I ask them what brought them in here today say ‘I wanted to become addicted, so here I am’. That has never happened.”

Dr. Andrew Hyounsoo Kim is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Ryerson University and the Chair of the Addiction Psychology Section at the CPA. A clinical psychologist (Interim autonomous practice), Dr. Kim completed a residency at Royal Ottawa Substance Use and Concurrent Disorders unit. He points out that no one starts out using substances or engaging in a behaviour with the goal of doing it to the degree that it’s going to interfere with their functioning.

Almost everyone has tried alcohol and other drugs. There are few Canadians who have not placed a bet or played an online video game. Some folks end up doing these things in an excessive sort of way, or engage in them more often and for longer periods of time than do others. But very few people develop an addiction. We all make the choice to try some of these things and might make the choice to continue doing them to some degree – but no one chooses to become addicted.

Addiction is one of the most highly stigmatized mental health conditions. In an effort to move away from that, and to create a greater understanding among the public, there has been a real shift over the past decade to move away from stigmatizing language. Researchers and clinicians in this field no longer use the words ‘dependence’ or ‘abuse’ but rather refer to ‘substance use’. Dr. Kim says,

“We no longer use the word ‘addict’. Instead we say, ‘a person experiencing an addiction’. We don’t use the word ‘junkie’, and even ‘clean’ is no longer in our vocabulary because those words are laden with negative meaning.”

The word ‘addiction’, in and of itself, is widely used – and widely misused – in society in general. We tend to use it to describe anything that people will engage with for a long period of time.

“Think of all the ads you’ve seen that say something like ‘this TV show is really addictive’ or ‘I’m addicted to this game’. People use the term a lot, without really knowing what it means. Addiction has a very specific meaning that is far more nuanced than just an activity someone engages in for long periods of time. It encompasses not just the biological (the brain) but also behaviour, emotions, thoughts, and the consequences that come about as a result of it.”

In addition to misuse of the word, there remain a lot of misconceptions about addiction itself – that it is a moral failure, or a personal choice, and that becoming addicted is an indication of a lack of character. Dr. Kim continues,

“At the very beginning when you’re starting to engage in an addictive behaviour there is of course a personal choice. But over time, it becomes a lot more complex than just lack of free will. There are changes that occur in the brain and to a person’s emotional and psychosocial context and it really moves away from being something a choice to a compulsion – that they engage in it even if it is no longer pleasurable. If all it took to stop was for us to say ‘stop using’, clinical psychologists who specialize in addictions wouldn’t have a clinical practice. Addictions are much more complex than just stopping.”

Dr. Nassim Tabri is an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton University. His research is focused on addiction and mental health, particularly the transdiagnostic factors that are present across a range of problematic behaviours such as gambling and disordered eating.. He says,

“In thinking about what constitutes an addiction, and how one can potentially develop an addiction, think of it this way. You try alcohol for the first time, or you pick up a video game and start playing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a person who tries these things that have high addiction qualities will end up developing an addiction. Addiction happens when they persist in these behaviours, even though the fun has been taken out of it. Now it’s about doing it because you need to do it to function more so than because you’re enjoying it, and because not doing it makes you miserable.”

Addiction psychology is a vast science, touching on virtually every aspect of our connected lives. Ads, games, phones, and more are designed using principles derived from that science. But there is a definite threshold to behaviours that constitute addiction – it’s not an exactly defined threshold, in that it might be a little different for each individual experiencing addiction, but it is a pretty high bar in terms of the activity, or substance use, or behaviour affecting that person’s life. Dr. Tabri says,

“’Addiction’ is a term that should be reserved for an extreme condition. When you see ads, or gamble, in a way they’re nudging you to engage in a certain behaviour. Whether someone develops an addiction or not really depends on their risk profile (biopsychosocial risk factors). Milder engagement in these activities, even though you’re being influenced, doesn’t merit the term ‘addiction’.”

I haven’t touched my phone in about two hours. I pick it up and scroll through the notifications – CBS Sports wants me to know that the Denver Broncos have hired Green Bay’s offensive co-ordinator Nathaniel Hackett as their new coach. The Flipp app would like me to see the new deals available this week at Loblaws. My little mobile game wants me to know my lives have been refilled, Shoppers Drug Mart is very worried that I might miss out on my chance to get 10,000 Optimum points by spending $40 in their store, and Twitter has sent me eight notifications about eight new followers I’ve picked up today.

While not necessarily the work of psychologists who specialize in addiction, all these notifications are informed by addiction psychology. All are designed to provoke a response from me, to get me to interact with the app, the store, or the content in a way that maximizes my time on my phone and (by extension) minimizes my time doing other, presumably more productive but less immediately engaging, things. While these things are created and informed by addiction psychology, the fact that they influence me does not mean that I am “addicted” – there is a certain threshold for the use of that term, and until I forego sleep, skip meals, and leave work four hours early to play Words With Friends, I have likely not crossed that threshold.

Dr. Kim says,

“There are principles being used that increase the likelihood of addictive type behaviours on your smart phone. Things that increase the time on the device. Making it more engaging, sending notifications. With video games in particular, things like leader boards, or ‘here’s a special offer today – for only $1.99 you can get extra lives’. Gambling is another example - psychological knowledge and principles have been used to develop slot machines, to make it more likely that people will stay on the device for longer periods of time.”

While the psychological principles of addiction can, and have, been used to create addictive behaviours that sometimes result in an addiction, psychologists who specialize in this field tend to work on the other side of things. They’re focused on prevention and treatment. They’ve created the low-risk drinking guidelines, low-risk gambling and cannabis guidelines, the theories behind Smart Serve certification, and harm-reduction initiatives like safe injection sites. It’s here where psychological knowledge is applied directly to reduce the harms that some of these substances or behaviours may have. Says Dr. Kim,

“Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and behaviour. So Addiction Psychology in that sense is using psychological scientifically sound methods to better understand why some people may use substances to the point of addiction, why some people may become ‘addicted’, if we use that word. It’s also trying to better understand the effects of substances and other addictive behaviours on the brain, and for me – what I find most interesting – is how we develop interventions, treatments, and preventions so we can reduce the harms and suffering for people who are living or have lived with addictions.”

When we hear the word ‘addiction’, we tend to think of addiction more in relation to substances than to behaviours. Cigarettes, alcohol, the opioid crisis are all top of mind when it comes to addiction – but are those type of addictive behaviours the same as, say, gambling or video gaming? Dr. Tabri says…not necessarily.

“One thing we focus on is the brain. I have a whole lecture talking about the dopamine reward system. I think there is an understanding in the general public that addictive behaviours have similar influences on the brain in terms of hijacking the dopamine reward system. The idea is that you’re no longer engaging in other activities that are meaningful and make you feel good, instead you’re doing this one thing that makes you feel really good at the expense of all the other things in your life.

But are all addictions one and the same in the brain? Not necessarily. The lay theory was once that it’s all dopamine, and that underpins everything. That started with research with rats in the 50s, and the story took hold because it was an attractive one. It grew into the idea that dopamine can explain all kinds of addictive behaviours. But when you look at the literature, what it says is that dopamine is really good at explaining something like alcohol, for example, or nicotine to some extent. But other addictive behaviours like cannabis, not so much. There’s more nuance and complexity going on than just dopamine. It may play a role, but it’s not the end-all and be-all in the brain.”

The science of addiction, and the psychology behind it, is ever evolving as we learn new things and approach them in a different way. Just as we have evolved in the terminology we use around mental health, substance use, and people experiencing addiction, we have instituted many programs, campaigns and initiatives to reduce harms and reduce stigma. Through it all, many things remain true – the most important being:

No one chooses addiction.

Psychologists and Retirement

Many psychologists get into the profession with a goal of advocacy – advocacy for their clients, for the advancement of psychological science, for knowledge mobilization and for ending the stigmas surrounding mental health. Whether this advocacy is explicit or implicit, it is a universal impetus for people who dedicate their lives to helping others.

That motivation to be of service to others does not end when a career ends. Retirement from the profession of psychology does not necessarily mean retirement from advancing good causes. In fact, it might provide more time to tackle those challenges, or even illuminate new causes to champion.

Such is the case for Juanita Mureika and Dawn Hanson, Co-Chairs of the Psychologists and Retirement Section of the CPA. Juanita retired as a school psychologist in 2011, but remains active in the New Brunswick political arena. She spent much of 2021 pushing against Bill-35, which included a decision by the New Brunswick government to take student assessments out of the hands of school psychologists and allow teachers to perform those assessments instead.

Dawn recently retired as the Chair of the Manitoba Association of School Psychologists, but stays active and involved with the recently proposed Bill-64. The bill would do away with all school boards, to have more of a central authority in government in Winnipeg. She says,

“We, as an organization [the Manitoba Association of School Psychologists], are always tracking anything that could impact psychological services in Manitoba, particularly as it pertains to school children and families. I can’t imagine – retired or not – not being involved in these burning questions and issues. We’ve been very involved in trying to shape a new College of Psychologists in Manitoba. Our school psychologists have not been part of the regulatory body before now. So now with the opportunity of a new college coming in, we’ve been working for many years trying to create representation within that college.”

For Juanita, Dawn, and the Psychologists and Retirement Section as a whole, advocacy does not end with retirement. And retirement itself actually creates further areas where advocacy can be very important. Retired psychologists across Canada are very concerned about regulations in their respective provinces for how long files are to be kept. In one province the rule is that files must be kept secure for fifteen years – but if your client is a school-aged child, then those files must be kept secure for fifteen years after the year when that child reaches the age of majority. Dawn says,

“This is very onerous for psychologists who have to somehow find a way to store and maintain these files securely, sometimes for decades! For Juanita and I, most of our practice has been within a school setting, so when we retire from our job, it’s not our problem any more. The school must keep those files safe and secure in line with what is required either by the regulatory body or the province.”

Neither Dawn nor Juanita are affected by this issue, but here they are championing the cause nonetheless. The Psychologists and Retirement Section has sent out a survey to all other regulatory bodies across Canada, including the Territories, to determine what the issues were regarding confidentiality, file retention, informed consent, and more. As of the writing of this article, the responses from those groups are still coming in – slowly. So far, the one thing that is clear is that the regulations, policies, and practices governing file retention vary wildly from one province to another.

Imagine you’re closing your psychology practice and retiring. In addition to a massive number of electronic files, you also have reams of physical paper files that you must keep secure for a further fifteen years. It is likely impractical, not very secure, and possibly illegal for you to keep them in your basement. Are you going to pay for 15 years at a storage locker, on what is now a fixed retirement income? What are your options and how can you go about doing this? And who, depending on where those files are stored, will insure them?

Dawn and Juanita are on the case. It may take a while to procure answers, as every step along the way there is another wrinkle thrown in. Says Juanita,

“Another thing we now have to consider is that many provinces require a professional will if you’re going to retire. So those files will become someone else’s problem if you retire, or if you die. But not all provinces require that. There’s always something new. But if you think about medical or dental records, those are kept for a very long time and so should psychological records be kept a long time. It’s just a little overwhelming for people who think ‘how long will this go on?’”

Juanita, Dawn, and the Psychologists and Retirement Section may be retired as psychologists, but are increasingly involved in advocacy. Within school boards, provincial policies, and the section itself there are multiple opportunities to shape systems for the better. They are going to keep pushing forward on the issues that are important – for retirees, for school psychologists, and for everyone else.

Brain and Cognitive Science

“With so much drama in the LBC
It's kinda hard bein' Snoop D-O-double-G.”

You’re in the audience for the Super Bowl halftime show. Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar are performing, and you’re grooving to the music. On the big screen you can see Snoop rapping and the music hits your ears. The crowd around you is roaring and cheering. You are lost in the moment so you’re not really thinking – how do I know? How do I know that it’s Snoop Dogg’s voice that I’m hearing? How am I certain that the crowd noise around me is being made by my fellow fans? You don’t have to answer that because your brain is putting it together for you. Snoop’s lips are moving on the big screen, and they seem to match the lyrics you’re hearing. The crowd noise is coming from behind, in front, and all around you and your brain sorts that out for you so you know it’s thousands of people shouting thousands of different ways, and you need not pay attention to any one voice in the crowd.

How your brain performs these tasks is the realm of cognitive science, studied by researchers like Dr. Jonathan Wilbiks, an associate professor in psychology at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. Dr. Wilbiks is the Chair of the Brain and Cognitive Science Section at the CPA, and studies audio-visual integration and multisensory processing – how our brain takes various sensory inputs and makes an implicit decision as to whether those things came from the same source. (Your lips are moving, and I hear singing – it is likely your voice I hear.)

Recently, some of Dr. Wilbiks’ work has been around perception and musical abilities. His lab found that musicians perform much better than non-musicians at tasks when audio and visual are congruent – that is to say the image matches, and happens at the same time, as the sound. But musicians perform worse than non-musicians when audio and visual are not congruent. People who have been trained in music, more than those who have not, use auditory information to help them make sense of something they see.

When Angela Hewitt sits down at a piano and places the sheet music for the Goldberg Variations in front of her, it all makes perfect sense. Each note on the paper indicates a note she must play on the piano, and the two things are congruent – this is something she has done her entire life and it’s easier for her than it is for…well, everyone else in the world. But if, instead of sheet music, she was presented with a cuneiform tablet that represented a musical notation, she might be completely lost – in fact, someone with no ability to read music at all might be able to perform the task better than she could. (The first musical notations ever discovered were from about 1400 BC on a cuneiform tablet in what is now Iraq.)

In the years following the Second World War, the big trend in psychology was behaviourism. You put a rat in a box and expose it to a stimulus, then you measure how it reacts and how those reactions change over time with repeated exposure to that same stimulus. We didn’t really pay a lot of attention to what was actually happening in the brain. Dr. Wilbiks says this was because science is all about observable fact, and there was no way to observe what was happening in the brain at the time. Where this began to change was in the late 60s, when German-American psychologist Ulric Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which suggested that a person’s mental processes could, in fact, be measured and analyzed. Dr. Wilbiks says,

“The cognitive researchers who showed up in the 60s said ‘there’s a whole lot happening in the brain’. Sure, we don’t know exactly what’s happening there – but something is, so to ignore it completely is a mistake. So they would try to hypothesize about what might be happening, and to try to measure using secondary observations. A simple example would be something like a reaction time task. I give you a button and tell you to push it every time a light flashes on the screen in front of you. People are generally pretty fast at that – maybe 200 milliseconds. But if I give you two buttons and tell you to press the left one when a green light flashes and the right one when a red light flashes, it will take longer. Maybe 400 milliseconds. You can’t see what’s happening in the brain, but you can surmise that if task one takes 200 milliseconds, and task two takes 400 milliseconds, that tells us very basically that processing information in the brain takes time.”

Over time, of course, things moved way past red-light-green-light as experiments became more sophisticated and technology allowed us to actually see what is happening inside our heads. We can see the electrical voltage created by neural impulses in the brain. fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machines allows scientists to observe and measure changes in the oxygenation of blood which indicates differing levels of brain activity. We can now tell which areas of the brain are active, when they’re active, and then correlate that with the behavioural information we see.

The field of the brain and cognitive sciences is vast, and has effects that can be seen in our everyday lives in a myriad of ways. Right now, there is a ton of stuff going on where you are. You might be sitting down on a chair. There is other furniture in the room, maybe decorations on the wall. There is traffic going by outside, maybe the dishwasher is going in the background and someone is watching TV in another room, all while you’re reading this article. You can’t possibly pay attention to all of it at once, so your brain filters all of those external stimuli before you even perceive them, so you aren’t overloaded.

Your brain decides, for you, what is consequential. That traffic you hear outside? It can be ignored because it doesn’t present a threat. As Dr. Wilbiks says, cars rarely crash into houses so, while sitting in your house you are free to be unconcerned about the sound of cars. But when you’re walking down the street, the sound of cars is very important to you – if you hear the sound of a car accelerating as you enter a crosswalk, you should certainly turn your head toward that sound to see what’s happening, because now there is a real possibility of danger.

The brain creates these shortcuts to get maximum efficiency with minimum effort, something called “cognitive economy”. Because we use these shortcuts, and we process only the most pertinent information and take the most important cues, we are susceptible to “nudges”. These are little things cognitive science has created to make us behave a certain way. One example is being a safer driver. Dr Wilbiks gives an example:

“You’re on the road in your car, and you know you’re driving on a small residential street. You know the speed limit is 40 km/h, so you’re driving rather slow, and you’re paying attention. Looking for kids running out into the street, a dog running loose, a basketball rolling toward the road. If you’re driving on the highway, you’re paying attention to many other things, but you’re not looking for an errant basketball. Where we can use cognitive understanding and nudges is in a situation where, for example, people tend to be driving too fast on a residential street. We can do things to slow them down. You’ll sometimes see little islands, with a tree on them or something, that make the road a tiny bit narrower. It doesn’t get in the way of traffic, but the average person wouldn’t feel comfortable driving through that narrow gap at a speed greater than 40 km/h.”

The one thing that my brain focuses on, whether I’m in my car or working on my computer, is music. Anywhere it’s playing, in the background or from my neighbour’s garage way down the street, I can’t ignore it. Dr. Wilbiks says one of his favourite classes to teach is The Psychology Of Music, because it encompasses so many aspects of psychology in general, not just of cognitive science. He says,

“I usually scare students in the first few lectures because we start out with physics. The physics of sound, and sound waves, and how that works. Then it’s about how the vibrations get into your ear, how that translates up into your brain and how you perceive it. Then we get into developmental psychology – how do we develop our musical ability, the close parallels between musical development and linguistic development. We talk about treatment – there’s some really cool work being done using music (Melodic Intonation Therapy) to help people who have experienced a stroke recover some linguistic ability.”

We all have two hemispheres in our brain, and there is a part in the right hemisphere where we process music. There is a part in the left hemisphere that mirrors the music part almost exactly, and that’s where we process language. When people who have had a stroke sing the words they are trying to speak they can, over time, train the other hemisphere of their brains to process language again. Eventually they might regain up to 70-80% of their speaking ability as a result. People living with dementia are often able to connect with music in a way they can’t with language, as music can trigger memories that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Perhaps you’ve seen the meme going around that says, ‘my ability to remember song lyrics from the 80s far exceeds my ability to remember why I walked into the kitchen’. This might actually be true, as music from our youth remains a powerful trigger for memories which is why dementia support groups often sing songs together from their youth – Beatles and Beach Boys and traditional folk songs from the country where they were raised. In a few years, things might be a little different – in 2054, those support groups might be singing ‘Gin and Juice’ by Snoop Dogg. Will rap songs produce the same kind of memories and enhance language abilities in the same way? Only time will tell – but when we do have the answer to that question, it will be provided by cognitive psychologists and others in the field.

Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine

“We know that vaccine uptake varies depending on the vaccine. Even before COVID-19, certain vaccines like MMR [Measles Mumps Rubella] had higher uptake rates than the flu vaccine. There is also a difference between childhood and adolescent vaccines. You could see that with HPV [human papillomavirus] which was administered in schools to adolescents.”

Health Psychologists and Behavioural Scientists have expertise that spans a very wide variety of specialties and disciplines. Many are also clinical psychologists, licensed to provide psychological services and therapies. Clinical Health Psychologists help people through medical issues, diseases, and chronic conditions. Behavioural Scientists study all of this, especially when it comes to preventative behaviours and behaviours that can affect the progression of a medical diagnosis. What helps a person with a heart condition maintain a strict diet? What affects the consistency with which a diabetic takes their insulin? And – very importantly of late, what factors influence a person’s acceptance and willingness to be vaccinated?

Imagine you have just been diagnosed with cancer. You probably have hundreds of questions and even more fears suddenly thrust upon you. There may be other factors that compound that stress, like the possibility of infertility, the loss of income, or the need to arrange childcare while receiving treatment. You might also now have a whole bunch of new doctors and specialists you never had before – oncologists, oncology nurses, patient navigators, genetic consultants. It’s a lot to handle, on top of trying to come to grips with the diagnosis itself.

One of the people who might help you through this difficult time is a psychologist, like Dr. Gilla Shapiro at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. Dr. Shapiro is a clinical and health psychologist, a behavioural scientist, and a psycho-oncologist (a specialist in cancer). She works with people who have received a diagnosis, with those who are undergoing treatment, and also with people receiving end-of-life care.

“There are many people who experience elevated distress [related to cancer and its treatment] so having a specialized treatment team to support them and their loved ones is really important.”

Some of this takes the form of supportive therapies, and some of it has to do with decision-making. If a person experiencing cancer must make a decision as to whether to begin a chemotherapy regimen, given the devastating toll that takes on the body and a certain percentage chance of it working, talking that through can be very helpful in the process. Trying to decide whether to join a clinical trial can be an overwhelming choice a person with cancer has to make. A psychologist like Dr. Shapiro approaches this in a few ways  ̶

“People need support in different ways and have different concerns that could be social, practical, psychological, or emotional. Some may wonder, how am I going to approach cancer with my children? Others may require support with symptoms like pain, insomnia, anxiety, or depression. There are some types of cancer for which there is a genetic predisposition. So if genetically tested, some people wonder who should I tell, and how do I tell them?”

A team at Princess Margaret is working on developing evidence-based interventions to reduce distress and improve patients’ cancer experience. For example, an intervention called CALM (Managing Cancer And Living Meaningfully) is designed to help patients adjust to living with advanced cancer. It draws from a number of theories in psychology and mental health – relational, attachment, and existential theories – the goal being to address a number of different domains in an individualized way. Symptom management, changes in a patient’s relationship with themselves as well as their loved ones, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, and hopes and concerns relating to the future are all factors that are considered in CALM therapy and are all experienced differently by every person who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis.

One of the reasons Dr. Shapiro chose to come to Princess Margaret was that her supervisor, Dr. Gary Rodin, along with his colleague Dr. Sarah Hales, had developed CALM. Dr. Rodin and his colleague Dr. Madeline Li were also doing interesting work in understanding what factors impact individuals in make difficult health decisions. One big decision in cancer care, one that has come about much more recently, is medical assistance in dying, or MAID. Dr. Shapiro wanted to bring a health equity and policy lens to this work. Dr. Shapiro didn’t start her work in psycho-oncology and behavioural science there though, she began her work in psycho-oncology in cancer prevention and working on vaccines. Vaccines like the HPV vaccine, and how we can prevent viruses that cause cervical and other cancers by supporting individuals in making behavioural choices, like getting vaccinated.

Less than two years before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Shapiro completed her PhD on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine hesitancy in Canadian parents. With colleagues at McGill University, she developed scales to measure vaccine attitudes and conducted research to understand the behavioural and social drivers of vaccination in the Canadian population.

. In 2019, she began working with the WHO developing tools for routine childhood vaccination and to measure the behavioural and social drivers of vaccination globally. When the pandemic hit, that work pivoted to understanding adult vaccine acceptance and intention to the COVID vaccines, as they became available

During the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Shapiro has been a member of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table’s Behavioural Science Working Group and she and her colleagues at the COVID-19 Science Advisory Table for Ontario (many of whom are also members of the Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Section of the CPA) published the brief ‘Behavioural Science-Informed Strategies for Increasing COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake in Children and Youth [link]’ in October.

While understanding the behavioural and social drivers that impact COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, she has also developed an interest in another cascading impact of the pandemic: missed or delayed routine vaccinations.  Dr. Shapiro and colleagues at the WHO and elsewhere have recently completed a study looking at missed routine childhood vaccinations in 26 countries during the pandemic [link - COVID-19 and missed or delayed vaccination in 26 middle- and high-income countries: An observational survey].

Imagine you have been through a cancer diagnosis, have been through surgery and radiation, and are now on the other side with a (relatively) clean bill of health as a result. A clinical health psychologist may have helped you through that process, but now there is another, out-of-your control existential threat – a global pandemic. Your continued safety, in your immunocompromised state, relies on those around you getting vaccinated against that pandemic. It’s not an easy place to be, but it is nice to know that Health Psychologists and Behavioural Scientists like Dr. Shapiro are out there, working on that as well.

Community Psychology

“People who are engaged in social change in their communities – community organizers, grassroots social movement folks – have equally rigorous theories about how change works as we might have in academia.”

Dr. Natalie Kivell is an assistant professor at the Wilfrid Laurier community psychology program. She says there are “two…and a half?” community psychology programs at Canadian universities, and that those who work in the field tend to be a lot more involved with the ‘community’ part than the ‘psychology’ part of that job description.

Ann Marie Beals is one of those people. Ann Marie is a graduate student in the community psychology program at Wilfrid Laurier. They are L’nuk of Mi’kma’ki - African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaq descent, and their work focuses on the erasure of mixed-blood Indigenous-Black communities historically and in the context of today’s society, Truth and Reconciliation, and the ongoing marginalization of both Indigenous Nations and Black communities in Canada.

Natalie’s student Ramy Barhouhe is originally from Lebanon and lived in the United States before coming to Wilfrid Laurier for the community psychology PhD program. His work is focused on colonialism and coloniality – how these power structures have shaped the development of whole community systems in North America and Southwest Asia. How this guides the way people perceive, feel, and experience the world in terms of time, space, morality, power, education, health, justice, politics, economics and more.

Ramy, Ann Marie, and Natalie have come to community psychology via very different paths, but all have similar outlooks in that they all put ‘community’ before ‘psychology’. They are all heavily invested in ways to dismantle our current systems – and they are all keenly aware that they themselves are working within some of those systems. Ramy is studying ways to decolonialize as part of academia, itself a structural vestige of colonial practices. Ann Marie is a member of the CPA, and the Treasurer of the CPA’s Community Psychology section, both institutions that are shaped by the legacy of colonialism. Natalie is a professor in psychology – a field of study that has long been complicit in not only colonialism but also the marginalization of minority populations.

Says Ramy, “the academic world is so intertwined within the neoliberal capitalist system that it’s really difficult to manage the disconnect. The power discrepancy between those who control the flow of knowledge and those that don’t is too big. For example, an academic is getting a grant in order for them to do some research, then they go use a community to get information from that community. But they don’t get approval from that community afterward with regard to knowledge distribution and mobilization. They get the credit, the acknowledgement, and the funding, but the community itself gets nothing from it. They’re just supporting and serving the academic. So that’s one problem with the structure of colonialism within academia that we still need to talk about further and to overcome.

We talk about this a lot in our program, and we acknowledge that we’re part of the problem as well. If we’re doing that research, we’re not absolved from the structure, and the impact it has on the community – we’re still part of that problem. We’re trying to find a way to reimagine this, and it involves a certain amount of respect and humbleness toward the community in which we work. Making sure they get their due, their respect, and even funding to serve their community’s needs. That’s where the shift is – how can we take the resources that are unfortunately part of a corrupt system and use them to benefit those communities? And, how to use their knowledge as their own, and not mine just because I did a survey.”

Ann Marie looks at the current situation, informed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as a window into the work that needs to be done. They say, “one of the things that’s been revealed from this pandemic is how neoliberal austerity policies and practices have affected our health care systems, and how precarious workers in minimum- and low-wage jobs – predominantly Black women, racialized peoples, newcomers, and Indigenous peoples, are disproportionately affected by a lack of compassion, care, and adequate safety nets that were dismantled by neoliberal governments.

As an example, our current Ontario government, within a capitalist system, legislated limited pay increases of 1% for public sector workers like health care workers, as inflation is looming over 4% [4.1% August 2021]. In our community psychology program we have student and faculty researchers who come from and live in communities that are directly affected by neoliberal and colonial practices, such as this one, that continue to widen the gaps in health care and economic stability. At the same time basic human rights such as housing, education, clean water, and quality of life remain not only unfulfilled but purposefully denied. So as a student researcher, I and other critical community psychologists examine the intersections of how power structures such as white supremacy, colonialism, neoliberalism and patriarchy intersect with human beings and with Mother Earth through myriad interconnecting identities.

We look at these power structures, through control of resources on stolen Indigenous lands, anti-Black racism, and colonializing policies. And by that I mean the people who support and hold up these power structures. Sometimes we speak almost abstractly or theoretically about power structures, but we have to be cognizant of the fact that      people      hold up and maintain these structures. They try to dictate how we live our lives, and systemically oppress anyone who does not fit the able-bodied white cisgendered heterosexual man dominated perception of what is ‘Canadian’. For me, it’s always about dismantling the power structures that oppress people in my communities.”

There are several words Ann Marie, Ramy, and Natalie all use quite often – intersection, dismantling, neoliberal, colonialism. Another word they all use, maybe even more often, is “collaboration”. Ramy speaks about working in collaboration with communities, so that the work done there is not extracting, but rather enhancing, the knowledge, the health, and the success of that community. Ann Marie speaks about collaboration in the sense that credit for the work done is not only not the end goal, but antithetical to the process of      self-determination in communities. And Natalie talks about dozens of other community organizations, grassroots activists, and scientific disciplines with whom she works to advance the myriad causes of social justice. In fact, the very first word she uses to describe community psychology is “interdisciplinary”.

“Community psychology is an interdisciplinary, values-driven, action-oriented, community-engaged social science. It addresses social justice at the intersections of racial, climate, immigration, gender, prisoner, and disability justice. We work at the intersections of the complexities of how social justice issues touch each other in an interconnected way. Community psychology is guided by a set of theories. We approach these complex social issues from places of prevention, ecological theory, critical perspectives, and decolonial perspectives. We look to situate relationships between individuals, communities, and societies. If we have equitable and just communities, we have healthier people. And therefore the target of community psychology is figuring out how to rebuild, re-imagine, and co-create equitable school systems, health systems, prison systems and so on.”

Because Community Psychology tackles such a wide array of systems and structures, their work crosses many boundaries into other aspects of psychology – criminal justice, environmental, educational, and more. Although they are small in number, their collaborations across disciplines, sciences, community groups and activist organizations ensures that they will continue to have an outsized impact.

Quantitative Methods

In the very broad field of psychology, Quantitative Methods is the indie college radio station of the group. The one who played U2 and R.E.M. in the 80s before ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Man on the Moon’ became ubiquitous. The one who “discovered” the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the early 90s before Blood Sugar Sex Magic and the Grammys. Or who, more recently, broke the Black Eyed Peas before the addition of Fergie and all that commercial success.

Quantitative Methods is the kid with the nose piercing and the plaid shirt who was into Structural Equation Modeling, Bayesian Statistics, or Hierarchical Linear Modeling, before it was cool. The one who spent months in their room, poring over the catalogue, learning every facet of this statistical method, before letting go and sending it out into the world to be used by psychological researchers. Most of these methods were studied in depth by a very small group of Quantitative Methods Psychologists at one time but are now used widely throughout the discipline.

They’re also, in another way, the Rick Rubin of psychology. You know how the Red Hot Chili Peppers made the big time with Blood Sugar Sex Magic? Producer Rick Rubin. Slayer’s magnum opus Reign in Blood, Adele’s 21, the Beastie Boys breakthrough Licensed to Ill? Rick Rubin. And for psychological researchers doing in-depth work – whether that be on depression, or vaccine confidence, or PTSD in military couples – the producer working behind the scenes to ensure scientific rigour is Quantitative Methods. The Quantitative Methods Psychologists help them craft their study to determine the best way to collect that data, to account for unforeseen wrinkles, and the sample size that is required to detect relevant effects.

Dr. Rob Cribbie is the Chair of the Quantitative Methods Section at the CPA, and a Quantitative Methods Psychologist in the Department of Psychology at York University. He says,

“It’s about research methods and the analysis of data. People who work in Quantitative Methods do everything from consulting on sample sizes, research designs, and the analysis of the data to researching new or improved methods for analyzing data. We also go into the psychometrics of the tools we use and how well they work.”

So what does this kind of work look like, on a day-to-day basis? What exactly does a Quantitative Methods Psychologist do? Dr. Milica Miočević is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Quantitative Methods Section, and a Quantitative Psychologist in the Department of Psychology at McGill. She gives an example:

“I recently published a paper with a co-author from biostatistics on power prior distributions. We were trying to find a way to use historical data from a study that’s related to the current study, but conducted using a sample from a slightly different population. We thought of ways we could quantify the differences between the participants in the previous study and participants in the current study, and tested whether using our method with data from a previous study can improve inferences in the current study. The article that we published will allow researchers in psychology to rely on historical data to improve statistical inferences of new research studies without requiring prohibitively large sample sizes.”

The field itself is, in a way, rather new. The Quantitative Methods Section of the CPA is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the discipline, while widely recognized today, was much less familiar ten or twenty years ago. Says Dr. Cribbie,

“I remember when I was interviewing for jobs, around 2000, most of the interviewees were asking ‘what’s your area of psychology?’ And I would answer ‘quantitative methods’, and they would say ‘no, we mean – is it depression, is it clinical, cultural – what do you study?’ And I would say ‘well…quantitative methods’. They didn’t see this as a discipline. There’s been quite a shift. Now it’s totally mainstream to say ‘I’m a quantitative psychologist’. The area of Quantitative Methods is so broad now, and there are so many tools that we use, that you really need people who specialize in the different methods.”

With the growth of the field has come a sea of change in the ways psychologists analyze and interpret data. The advent of software programs like R and others have opened up a world of possibilities that were a lot more difficult, even inaccessible, 20-25 years ago. And it is constantly changing. As a new method becomes popular and widespread throughout the world of psychology, quantitative methods psychologists have already moved on to something else entirely. Dr. Miočević says,

“We go through waves of what’s interesting and what we think needs to be developed more. When I was in grad school, Bayesian methods were becoming the popular topic. Now, it seems like it’s Machine Learning, and we’ll see what the next thing is. I feel like every few years we add something new to the quantitative methods toolbox in psychology. Sometimes the novel approaches are coming from statistics, sometimes they are coming from other fields like economics. There has been a lot of change in my ten years!”

You know that one pop song you really like? The one by Taylor Swift or Dido or Alicia Keys or Imagine Dragons with the guest rapper? That guest rapper is Kendrick Lamar. Quantitative Methods is, in a way, the Kendrick Lamar of psychology, though they will likely never get the solo recognition that he did when he won the Pulitzer Prize. They will collaborate with anyone from any discipline, any time – so much so that after a while you barely notice they’re there. Every facet of psychology, every individual discipline, is informed by the latest tools for data analysis, the most up-to-date research methods and practices, and the scientific rigour provided by Quantitative Methods. Says Dr. Cribbie,

“Quantitative Methods span all the areas of discipline. So, if you were to take every section of the CPA, Quantitative Methods play a role in every one of those sections. It’s great that there is this section that allows people with this interest to discuss new and different methods, and ways in which people apply these tools.”

It is for this reason that Psychology Month 2022 kicks off with Quantitative Methods – it is the one section that informs all other sections. Dr. Cribbie, Dr. Miočević, and their colleagues are the cool kids on the block who were way into that research method long before you’d even heard of it. You can follow the Quantitative Methods section on Twitter - @cpa_qm – on their website https://canadianquantpsych.wordpress.com/ or through their section newsletter https://cpa.ca/sections/quantitativemethods/newsletter/ so you, too, can be one of the cool kids who knows things before anyone else!

Teaching of Psychology

Dr. Steve Joordens, psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has an analogy to explain the Teaching of Psychology:

“I think of teaching as a craft. Like a craft beer – if you want to be a good brewer of craft beer, you need to know the science behind the recipes and the way you put things together. In addition though, there’s also a subjective element. The mix of ingredients that really works for you might, for one reason or another, not work for somebody else. So, there’s a mix of knowing the science – knowing the ingredients that could make for a powerful educational experience – but then the professor themselves have to find what works for them, and their class, and the context in which they’re teaching. That’s where the craft comes in, merging the science with the human to create a great educational experience for our students.”

Whiprsnapr Brewing Company in Bells Corners, Ontario has a craft beer called OK Lah. It’s a southeast-Asian inspired cream ale made with coriander and ginger. It is certainly not to everyone’s taste, and when I sent some to my sister it sat in her garage for two years as ‘that beer no one wants’. That said, it remains one of their best sellers year after year. It’s a tried-and-true formula that works for many people – but not most people. As in the Teaching of Psychology, inspiration can come from anywhere, but perfecting the formula for success is up to the individual.

Dr. Elena Antoniadis is a faculty member at Red Deer Polytechnic in Alberta and also adjunct faculty with U of Calgary. She is the Chair of the Teaching of Psychology Section at the CPA, and does research on ways to integrate basic neuroscience applications into teaching in order to promote and facilitate learning for students in higher education. She says,

“Teaching of Psychology is about research-based approaches to enhance teaching and learning in classrooms. Some of the research comes from laboratories doing studies in cognitive science that will inform our teaching. Other forms of research occur in the classroom itself. We’re collecting data in the classroom, and that data can inform our teaching practices. The goal is to effectively design and deliver curricula in post-secondary education by using these research-based studies in order to further inform our theory and our practice.”

In 2016, Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company in Vankleek Hill, Ontario made every employee of Beau’s a co-owner of the company. In 2011, they partnered with a local community organization called Operation Come Home to hire youth experiencing homelessness to deliver their beer. Not only are they a fixture in the community who buys their beer, they are involving the community in every step of that process, which has led them to enormous local success. This kind of approach informs a lot of the Teaching of Psychology, and that community involvement is called “service learning”.

Dr. Elizabeth Bowering  is a professor in department of psychology at Mount St Vincent University and the Past Chair of the Teaching of Psychology Section. She teaches a range of courses like introductory psychology and developmental courses. Some of her research is in the area of service learning. She says,

“In my adolescent development course, I have my students carry out service learning in the community. So they’re working with youth who may be at risk for dropping out of high school. They work with them, doing academic tutoring and mentoring, as a way to encourage them in their own academic pursuits. There are so many ways we’re trying to broaden the teaching/learning process not only for the ones who are already in our classrooms, but to make that accessible for other people.”

The Church Brewing Company in Wolfville, about three blocks from Acadia University, has a terrific gose called Saltwater Joys. A gose made with salt water makes sense – after all they’re right on the ocean and how much more local can you get? But just because something is there, and accessible, and sounds neat does not mean it is necessarily going to work. Dr. Joordens knows this well, as his specialty is in the effective use of technology to enhance learning. He says that in the past decade, universities have been more cautious about jumping on that latest bandwagon.

“Right from the level of procurement, universities are a lot more careful today about thinking in terms of educational practices and making sure they’re evidence-based. There’s got to be research to support this flashy new thing that they’re buying, and we’re not going to have people using it just because it’s cool. One of our big roles is to create that evidence base and support it. You can have the best technology in someone’s hands, but if you don’t support it well, it might not work for them and it might be a failure.”

The Teaching of Psychology involves that research, those supports, and the measuring of the evidence that goes into teaching – but not just of psychology. Although a lot of the work originates in labs, or in psychology classrooms, the hope for all of the research is that it can be applied to other classrooms, in other ways, and by other people to enhance the learning experience for all students. Dr. Antoniadis gives an example:

“A practical application could be enhancing social interaction in the classroom. Social interaction between students, but also between the student and the professor. Or an application could be used to enhance student motivation, or to direct and inform the use of assessments.”

Says Dr. Bowering, “I think regardless of how long you’ve been teaching, you’re always learning something new, and get surprised by the experiences you have inside and outside the classroom. Our section offers support and encouragement for people at all stages – the beginning academic getting their feet wet, the mid-career professor who’s taught a course dozens of times and wants to bring something new to it, or even somebody further along in their career mentoring others. Teaching of Psychology is really quite broad!”

The Lake of the Woods Brewing Company has locations in Kenora, Ontario and in Winnipeg. Much like virtually every other craft brewery, they have recently expanded their repertoire to include craft sodas – for example, their Hockeytown Root Beer. While it seems like a departure from their standard offerings, this expansion to soda has been universally successful for breweries across the country, and has provided them with another product to sell to folks cooped up in their houses amid COVID lockdowns. Just like how, in the Teaching of Psychology, the pandemic has created an opportunity for something that can be universally applied with success across Canada. Particularly, for students who might struggle with the financial burdens of obtaining a higher education. Dr. Antoniadis elaborates:

“In the last year I’ve been doing research on open educational resources. I also found the Diener Education Fund – it was created by two psychologists who happen to be married, who raised funds to pay for course releases for faculty members who are experts in specific subdisciplines. So, they’ll find a person who’s an expert in evolutionary psychology, and ask them to write a chapter on evolutionary psychology. Then an expert in statistics, or in development, and they fund a course release for that person to write that chapter. They designed a website called The Noba Project where faculty members can go in and customize their own textbooks. I can go in and take the chapters that I want, that cover the same material that exists in publisher-based textbooks. So, I’ve built my curriculum to align with learning outcomes. It comes with royalty-free images, power point slides that I design myself, and I’ve integrated this open educational resource into my learning management system. Our study looked at whether this could create a similar experience for a student who would otherwise have purchased a publisher textbook, and the results show that it did. The students had a positive experience, and did meet the learning outcomes in the course. I had an email from a student who said that he had just lost his job, and if he had had to pay for textbooks he wouldn’t have been able to stay in the course.”

Says Dr. Joordens, “I think of us as the ‘how’ people. Society continually brings up issues of things we’re not doing as well as we could: Providing an equitable education experience, providing a high level accessible educational experience, trying to up-skill all our students so they graduate as great critical and creative thinkers and so on. Making sure Indigenous pedagogies are represented in our educational experience. We hear a lot of these desires from society, and the question is – how do you do that? And we’re the psychologists who try to answer that question. It’s a little like they’re describing heaven, and we’re the ones building the stairways to heaven.”

There’s a Stairway To Heaven English Bitter brewed by the Burton Bridge Brewery in Burton-on-Trent in England. At least, until the inevitable Led Zeppelin lawsuit. Steve continues,

“I’ve recently been introduced to the word ‘intrapreneurs’ – those people working within an organization who are always trying to find a different way, an innovative way, to do things within that structure. And I think a lot of us in the Teaching of Psychology area are those kind of intrapreneurs, who are continually saying ‘how can I do this better? Is there something I could do differently that would make my class more engaging?’ that kind of thing.”

In 2015, Brewmaster, Co-Owner (with former Ottawa Senator Chris Phillips) and Intrapreneur Lon Laddell of the Big Rig Brewery in Ottawa changed the formula and ingredients of Iron Arse Ale. Iron Arse is the special-edition beer Lon creates every year for the motorcycle prostate cancer fundraiser Ride For Dad. There was some consternation at the time, as the previous formulation was well loved in Ottawa. But the new formula proved to be even more successful, and the beer even tastier, than it had previously been. I’ve got no further analogies here, just a suggestion that if you’re ever in Ottawa around the months of May-June, you could do worse than an Iron Arse Ale at the Big Rig.

Adult Development and Aging

“This isn’t your fault. Your brain is letting you down.”

There is still, to this day, a lot of stigma associated with memory loss. That’s why Dr. Colleen Millikin uses this phrase when she talks to older adults experiencing mild cognitive impairment or dementia.

“You don’t take it personally when you’re walking along and your knee gives out. But people respond differently when it’s their brain. If your brain lets you down and you can’t think of that word, or you can’t conjure up that name, you tend to blame yourself much more than when it’s your knee letting you down.”

Dr. Millikin is a clinical neuropsychologist with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority Clinical Health Psychology Program and assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Health Psychology, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, at the University of Manitoba.  She is the Chair of the CPA’s Adult Development and Aging Section. She works mainly in the public system, assessing older adults where there is a possibility of Mild Cognitive Impairment or dementia. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a term that is used to describe memory problems that exist between normal aging and dementia. Compared to others of a similar age, people with MCI are at higher risk of developing dementia over time.

“There are so many things that can interfere with memory that aren’t Alzheimer’s Disease or brain problems. Chronic pain and the medications for it, sleep problems, stress, PTSD, all kinds of things. Even thinking that you might have dementia can be a source of anxiety, and being anxious can make it harder to attend to information and remember it.”

The field of Adult Development and Aging Psychology is a wide-ranging one. It's the study, assessment and management of the physical, psychological, cognitive, emotional and social functioning of people 18 years and up and includes aging in all its forms, milestones, joys and challenges. Dr. Nasreen Khatri is an adult lifespan psychologist and neuroscientist at The Rotman Research Institute, a cognitive neuroscience institute fully affiliated with The University of Toronto. She is registered both as an adult clinical psychologist (18-65) and a gerontologist (65 years and up). She is the Treasurer of the Adult Development and Aging Section of the CPA.

“Specifically, I study the impact of depression and anxiety on the brain, beginning around age 30 and continuing all the way into old age. The biggest misconception about aging is that it is a static category or a state.  It is not.  It begins at conception and is a dynamic, ongoing process.  Aging is simply another word for living!”

Dr. Millikin speaks a lot about the breadth of the field, and the variety of work psychologists in this space are doing. In her field of cognitive impairment, she says,

“Age is the biggest risk factor for developing cognitive impairment, but I have seen people in their 90s with very good brain health and people in their 50s who are living with dementia. There is no single cause for cognitive impairment. In most cases, there is an interaction between a person’s genetics and other health issues.”

Those health issues have begun to be understood a lot more in recent years, thanks in large part to psychologists working in this field.

“We now know that exercise actually grows new cells in the part of the brain  that impacts mood and memory.  The best thing you can do for your brain and to age well is physical exercise. We have also learned that individuals with an untreated history of depression in mid-life have almost double the risk of developing dementia in later life, compared to those who do not share that untreated history. Depression is eminently treatable with a variety of evidence-based treatments. Dementia is currently incurable. Therefore, we do not want anyone to go down the cognitive path from untreated depression to cognitive impairment and dementia. Timely assessment and treatment of depression today may stave off dementia later on. In other words, taking care of your mental health today could save your brain tomorrow!”

Ideally, interventions to promote brain health should begin as early in life as possible. However, there is evidence that making lifestyle changes can reduce risk of progression to dementia even in people who already have mild cognitive impairment. This is what Dr. Millikin and her colleague Dr. Lesley Koven, a clinical geropsychologist, were seeking to address when they set up their Early Cognitive Change Clinic for Older Adults in 2013. They provide assessment to identify people who have mild cognitive impairment as well as an interview to evaluate the mental health needs of the person’s spouse or other close family member or friend.

“We run a psychoeducational program for people with MCI and their family members to help them learn about MCI, strategies to get around some of the memory difficulties, and lifestyle habits that assist brain health. Exercise and diet are important of course, and we’re also learning that sleep is a big one. Sleep is very important for brain health, but older adults tend to have difficulties with sleep at a higher rate. One of the challenges is that a lack of sleep is not good for your memory, but also that a lot of the prescription or over-the-counter medications people take for sleep can interfere with a brain chemical that is important for memory. Fortunately, there are behaviour changes that help with sleep and psychological treatments for insomnia!”

Family members of people with mild cognitive impairment can also experience significant stress. Again, Dr. Millikin stresses the impact early intervention can have.

“We’re increasingly recognizing the needs of caregivers. We’ve known for a long time that family members of people with dementia can experience significant stress. Even when a person has mild cognitive impairment, family members or close friends can still have some stress related to the situation, although they may not identify themselves as “caregivers.”  So if you’re going to do some intervention to help the family member with stress management, that really needs to start as early as possible.

There are many other facets of the psychology of aging and adult development, each as important as the last. Dr. Millikin provides a few examples.

“Dr. Kristin Reynolds, an assistant professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, started up a telephone-based program to help people with loneliness during the pandemic. The Past Chair of the Adult Development and Aging Section, Dr. Marnin Heisel, does research at Western University looking at ways to reduce risk of suicidality in older men. Dr. Norah Vincent, a colleague in my department, has developed online cognitive behaviour therapy treatment programs for insomnia.”

Dr. Khatri says the pandemic has had a profound impact on older adults, from mental health (e.g., depression and anxiety)  to exacerbating longstanding systemic issues  in long term care.

“It has shone a light on how we treat our elders and how we should treat our elders. This is a time for reflection to reconsider clinical, governmental and social policies that impact aging Canadians. Canada is an aging nation and as we go forward we will need to apply systemic policies that optimize our brain health (combination of mental and cognitive health) and allow us to grow older with dignity, autonomy and meaning. The future of brain health in Canada is in our hands, and one of the best ways to predict our future is to create it.

Last, the pandemic has taught us that we need to focus on lifestyle factors (diet, exercise, rest, social connection) at every age to keep us physically, emotionally and cognitively healthy and flourishing.”

In other words – there are many ways you might be able to keep your brain from letting you down. That said, it may happen anyway. And if it does, it’s important to know it is not your fault.

Justin Presseau

Dr. Justin Presseau is going to welcome a new baby in about a month. His wife Leigh is eight months pregnant, which means this new child will be born in the middle of a global pandemic.

This adds one more job to Dr. Presseau’s portfolio, which also includes Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Associate Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, and the Chair of the Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Section of the CPA.

As with many researchers, much of Dr. Presseau’s work had to pivot because of the pandemic. He leads a team co-developing new ways to support new Canadians with diabetes to be comfortable taking an eye test. Retinopathy is a manageable issue for people with diabetes when identified through regular screening but attendance rates could be improved, and so Dr. Presseau and his team are building relationships with different communities and community health centres virtually.

Another thing that’s difficult to do from a distance is blood donation. Dr. Presseau and his team are working with Canadian Blood Services and local communities to develop approaches to support men who have sex with men who may want to donate blood plasma, as screening and deferral policies continue to change to allow more MSM to donate if they want. Part of that work involves addressing the historic inequities that led to the exclusion of these men in the first place. But then – there was a pandemic, and his team like so many others have pivoted to continuing to develop key community relationships and campaigns virtually.

In addition, Dr. Presseau is tackling a lot of COVID-related projects, like for example a national survey of to understand what factors are associated with touching eyes, nose and mouth. The research is changing as we continue to develop an understanding of how COVID-19 is transmitted.

Maybe the most important of these COVID-related projects is the  , a group of behavioural science experts and public health leaders who summarize behavioural science evidence in the context of COVID-19 and identify actionable guidance for Ontario’s pandemic response. Dr. Presseau is the co-Chair of this working group, which also involves CPA President Dr. Kim Corace.

“We sit within the larger Ontario Science Advisory Table. We’ve brought together expertise in behavioural science and particularly psychologists across Ontario, based both in academia and within government, to work alongside public health experts and ministry representatives.”

Dr. Presseau says that because the working group contains representatives from all these different areas and the team can communicate directly in this setting with decision makers and policy creators, it is the most direct form of knowledge transfer and knowledge mobilization of behavioural science in which he has been involved in his career.

“From an impact perspective, we get to translate our science to people who can make use of it right away, and they can also provide feedback to us – what are they looking for? What’s helpful to them? Of all the things I’ve done in my career this feels among the most impactful. One of the hats I also wear in the hospital where I’m based is Scientific Lead for Knowledge Translation [in the Ottawa Methods Centre], so I think about knowledge translation a lot. The ability to connect directly with those in the field that are making a difference is excellent. It’s also such a validating experience for me, as a behavioural scientist and a psychologist, to see that there’s recognition of our science and a need for an understanding of how we can draw from the behavioural sciences to support Ontarians and Canadians.”

The Behavioural Science Working Group is currently focused on vaccine confidence and uptake among health care professionals. Over 80% of Ontario health care workers say overwhelmingly that they intend to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available to them. The working group is looking to communicate behavioural science approaches to support healthcare organisations across the province to optimise their vaccine promotion programs – for instance, by clarifying that despite having been created at record speed, these vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective and it’s important that those in the healthcare field get one.

Part of this is modeling good behaviour for the rest of the population. And within the healthcare field, modeling good behaviour is one way the working group is hoping to reach those who may be undecided. It’s one thing to have politicians and celebrities get vaccinated publicly, it’s another far more effective thing for your peer group, and hospital CEOs, and team leaders, to do so in front of your team.

Much of this work involves drawing on the literature from around the world to inform hospital policy or public policy. But some of it happens directly, and goes in two directions. For example,

“Our co-chair Dr. Laura Desveaux and her team did surveys with healthcare workers that not only ask if they intend to get the COVID vaccine, but also ask questions that are drawing from behavioural science and psychological principles around the specific constructs or factors might be associated with greater or lesser intention. So they were able to identify key predictors in healthcare workers in January of 2021, the most current data we have. So it’s kind of exciting to be able to quickly draw from on-the-ground data, iterate principles, and push that out to the field to support those who are doing this.”

We have asked most of our Psychology Month participants if they see a ‘silver lining’ in the pandemic. Something that is good, but that would not otherwise have happened absent the pandemic. Dr. Presseau says one silver lining is that it has highlighted just how important and relevant health psychology and behavioural medicine are to understanding and supporting health behaviour change and health and well-being during pandemics.

“After all, behaviour underpins most if not all the public health measures and vaccination activities that are key to seeing the other side of this pandemic.”

When Leigh and Justin’s baby is born, the pandemic will still be ongoing. But that baby will be born into a world that has a much greater understanding of pandemic science, of the behavioural science that accompanies it, and with more and more diverse teams of interdisciplinary experts working together to solve problems – locally, provincially, nationally, and globally.

One day, this baby will grow into a person who can take pride that Dad had a lot to do with that.

CPA’s Communications Specialist, Eric Bollman talks to CPA’s CEO, Karen Cohen

“The tail of COVID is going to be a long one. It’s going to be psychosocial, and financial. Long after we get vaccines, long after we achieve population immunity, we’re still going to be addressing the psychosocial and financial impacts of living through a pandemic this long.”

Shortly after the NBA announced the suspension of their season on March 11, 2020, there was an all-staff meeting at the CPA head office in downtown Ottawa. The realization was dawning on everyone, and fast, that we were about to enter a different world – both in terms of our own work lives, and in terms of the role of psychology in the world at large.

We knew things were changing – if the NBA could shut down, the rest of the world was not far behind. We knew we’d all be sent home, and we spent that meeting discussing how that would work. Who needed a laptop? Who needed a refresher on Microsoft Teams, having slept through the training session less than a week before? What we did not know was that this would be the last time we saw each other in person for more than a year.

Our CEO, Dr. Karen Cohen, does not follow basketball. For her, the realization was more incremental. But she reached it at the same time, if not a little before, the rest of us. She made the decision to shut down the office and send everybody home.

“We were trying to make the decision that not only would best take care of our workplace, but that would make us a good corporate citizen. It was clear that if the world was going to be successful in managing the pandemic, we had to put in a community effort. “

As the world changed, and the CPA started working from our homes across Ottawa and connecting with people across the country, we realized that psychology was going to have an outsized role to play in helping people and communities manage the pandemic. CPA wanted to help in that effort.  Dr. Cohen credits the staff at the CPA for making this transition work, almost seamlessly.

“Everything CPA has been able to contribute to managing the pandemic is to the credit of the association’s leadership, its membership and its staff. From the outset, our goal was to listen and respond to what people needed; what staff needed to work efficiently from home, what individuals and families needed to support each other, what members needed to face disruptions in their work, and what decision-makers needed to develop policies to help communities.

At first though, those lockdowns were not extended – we truly thought we’d be back at work in a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. Karen and the rest of the management team made sure to check in, and to cover their bases early on.

“One of the things we did at the outset was to survey staff – asking what’s keeping you up at night? How can we make things better? What are you most concerned about? And not just to ask the questions but to try to do something about them. We developed policies and made decisions that considered the things staff were worried about and responded to what they needed.  We realized that psychology had some tools and suggestions to help them cope so we developed a webinar for staff on coping and resilience.  We also reached out to staff one on one and really tried to hear them so we could help make things easier for them.”

We then thought that the survey and webinar might be helpful to the staff of other of CPA’s not for profit association partners and we delivered them to about a dozen of them. The survey enabled leaders to better understand the needs of their workplaces and psychology had some tools and suggestions to help workers cope.   Something that was created internally, for the use of our own staff, ended up being of value to other organizations and an unforeseen contribution our team has been able to make.

While we didn’t know how long the pandemic would last, or what the long-term effects would be, the one group we knew for sure would be affected long-term were frontline health care workers. We were already seeing reports from Italy and Spain of overflowing hospitals, a health care system in crisis, and doctors and nurses overcome with exhaustion and despair. So what could we do?

The first major effort of the CPA during the pandemic was to ask our practitioner members if they would be willing to offer their services to frontline healthcare workers, on an urgent basis, as they faced the stressors of delivering health care services during a pandemic. It seemed essential that the people who were out there fighting against this scourge of a virus had every support possible as they took care of everyone else and, because of their work, faced heightened risk of contracting the virus and bringing it home to their families.

“Hundreds of psychologists came together to do that.  It was good for CPA, it was good for psychology, and most importantly, it has been good for the health providers psychologists helped.

From there, it was a question of developing and delivering information, and getting as much of it out to members, decision-makers and Canadians as possible. Psychologists across Canada answered the call to help create more than a dozen COVID-specific fact sheets for students, psychologists, faculty, people working from home and more. Our team developed webinars, started a podcast, and undertook the herculean effort of moving the CPA annual convention online with just a few months notice.

The CPA team has been collaborating with innumerable other organizations and agencies, commissioning surveys and public opinion polls, and advocating for mental health to be front and centre in every governmental pandemic-related decision and policy across Canada. The work is ongoing, and it is not likely to stop any time soon.

“We know that rates of anxiety, depression and substance use have gone up as people cope with this prolonged chronic stressor. We can see the impact managing the pandemic has had on our work, relationships, and wellbeing.  Maybe the pandemic has shown us that a pandemic takes as much of a psychological toll on our lives as a biological one.  Maybe the pandemic has shown us that managing a critical health event successfully is as much about psychological and social factors as it is about the biological ones. Maybe, governments, workplaces, and insurers will fully realize that mental health matters and that it is time that making investments in mental health care matters too.”

Laila Din Osmun, Jenn Vriend, and Mary Simmering McDonald

Everyone is swamped. Kids, learning virtually for the past year and dealing with constant uncertainty. Parents, looking after those kids and trying to work remotely or cope with being out of work. Psychologists, whose services are more in demand than ever but who don’t have any spots available for new clients.

Dr. Laila Din Osmun is a parent and a psychologist, dealing with two young children learning from home and an increasing demand for her professional services. She started spending time with her two children, aged five and seven, throughout the week and moved her practice to the weekends. She found she was turning people away because she just didn’t have the availability to see the number of people seeking services. And so she did something that may seem illogical – she added a whole other project to her workload.

In conversation with her friends Dr. Jenn Vriend and Dr. Mary Simmering McDonald, Dr. Din Osmun found that they were experiencing the same thing. The three had become friends during an internship at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), and now all three were child psychologists in private practice in Ottawa. None of them could keep up with the demand.

How do you get essential information to as many people as possible as quickly as possible? Nothing can replace one-on-one therapy, but there was clearly a void as the supply was not coming close to matching the demand. Dr. Din Osmun proposed a podcast. Coping techniques for kids, delivered one episode at a time, coupled with discussions of the issues facing families during the pandemic and some personal stories about spending time at home with their own children.

The CopingToolbox: A Child Psych Podcast was born. The first episode was published February 17^th, discussing specific coping strategies (setting boundaries, practicing gratitude) for children and parents during COVID.

“Everybody’s feeling overwhelmed right now, myself included. My friends, my clients – it’s a really difficult time. One of the things I’ve been practicing is just allowing myself to feel some of those feelings. Sometimes we feel sad and we don’t want to, or we feel anxiety and we don’t want to. But it’s a really difficult time and we’re going through a lot, and I think it’s really important that we allow ourselves to feel that feeling for a little while.”
Jenn Vriend, The Coping Toolbox Episode One

Future episodes will deal with subjects like depression, as the three friends try to bring more services to more people through a new and interesting platform. On the podcast, they refer to themselves as ‘Dr. Laila’, and ‘Dr. Jenn’, and ‘Dr. Mary’. To an outsider, this might remind people of the ‘Dr. Bobby’ episode of Friends (okay it’s me – I’m the outsider who was reminded of that episode) but it also creates a friendly and welcoming atmosphere should kids be listening with their parents. This was clearly an intentional choice, as was the use of the word ‘toolbox’. Says Dr. Laila,

“We called it The Coping Toolbox because we wanted to provide tools for coping. Not getting into too much detail, and we wanted it to be useful. At the end of every podcast we give three coping skills that we review for the people listening.”

In episode one, those skills are; take a few minutes and breathe, modeling positive behaviours for your kids, and being kind to ourselves. On the podcast, Dr. Jenn says;

“We’re modeling positive behaviours, but we’re not doing it perfectly. So we can take a deep breath, do our best to model those positive behaviours, for ourselves as well as our kids, and then just be gentle and kind to ourselves knowing that we’re doing the best we can given the situation.”

All three Coping Toolbox podcast co-hosts know about doing their best given the situation. They all have young children at home, and each of them brings a different perspective. While Dr. Din Osmun has set aside a large portion of her work to take care of the kids while her husband works a demanding job, Dr. Simmering McDonald, a mom of 3- and 5-year-old boys, is balancing her clinical practice with her husband’s long work days, limited childcare, and weekly appointments regarding the health needs of family members.

In The Coping Toolbox Episode One, Dr. Simmering McDonald notes, “it’s important to consider our own well-being and our own mental health. This is necessary for our own functioning but also for the functioning of our kids and our families.” Dr. Vriend speaks about grief, something many people are experiencing with COVID-19. She separated from her son’s father a few years ago, then sadly he passed away in the summer of 2020. “I’ve had to learn not just single parenting but lone parenting, where you’re it – you’re kind of the everything. I think that perspective, during the pandemic, is going to be interesting to discuss. I remember at one point feeling like ‘I’m my son’s entire world’. I’m his teacher, and I’m his coach, and I’m his mom, and I’m his dad, and it felt very overwhelming. It can add a different perspective because there are a lot of people who discuss both parents, and when you’re a single parent it can hurt a little bit and I think the pandemic has created a whole other layer for single parents and for lone parents.”

In professional practice, divulging personal details is not something psychologists do. But in the context of a podcast, doing so can help the narrative hit home – a narrative that, in the case of The Coping Toolbox, is warm, friendly, expert-driven and truly helpful for many who can’t access that help in other ways at the moment. Dr. Din Osmun says,

“It’s been a crazy time, and we just can’t meet the demands right now. It was getting really frustrating, and the three of us kept talking in group conversations – how can we help? We’re so limited in what we can do. We had the idea of creating a podcast, but we knew nothing about podcasting. The three of us are clinicians in private practice, we have no expertise in podcasting whatsoever. It was a huge learning curve, but we figured this IS something we can do to help people because it’s something the three of us can do from home. We felt like this was a way to help more people in a shorter period of time.”

Laila has taken the lead on the podcast, including taking on hosting duties and – the most painstaking and time-consuming job of all – the editing after the fact. It will all be worthwhile if enough people listen and take away something helpful they did not already know.

You can find The Coping Toolbox: A Child Psych Podcast on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-coping-toolbox-a-child-psych-podcast/id1553993639

Penny Corkum

“When we launched our survey study asking parents during the pandemic how their child’s sleep was impacting them, what really came up was that it’s the whole family and not just the child. So we not only had to help the child sleep better but also give strategies for the parent to sleep better. So we added that into the intervention as well.”

It probably goes without saying that sleep is incredibly important for children. Difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep can have a big impact on a child, in terms of daytime functioning. They’re not able to focus or learn as well, and it might result in behavioural problems. Dr. Penny Corkum has been studying sleep in children for a long time. In the last decade, her sleep studies have taken the form of connecting parents and families with the interventions they now know work for children and sleep. Part of this is an e-health program, online tools that parents can access when they need them.

Between 2016 and 2018 Dr. Corkum and her team ran a cross-Canada trial called Better Nights, Better Days, to see if this program was effective. It was, and the program resulted in improved sleep, improved daytime functioning, and even parents were less tired during the day as a result. Then the pandemic hit, and it became a constantly evolving crisis – lockdown for a while, then lockdown lifted. School online from home then back to in-person classroom learning. Right away, sleep patterns were disrupted for both children and adults around the world.

The team went back to the families who had participated in the original Better Nights, Better Days trial, to see how they were doing during the pandemic.

“It seemed like a good place to start because we already knew about their sleep, and we knew that they had learned a lot of strategies to help their child sleep. We were curious – were they still using these strategies? There was some research coming out at the time that suggested families were actually having better sleep, since they didn’t have to get up at a certain time. But that’s not what we found. A small portion of our families were doing better, but about 40% of the children and 60% of the parents were sleeping worse than they were before the pandemic.”

A lot of this was happening because of disruptions in routine and structure. We sleep best when we have consistency in our days – a regular bedtime, a regular time to wake up, a standard time for supper. All of this was being upended by a constantly evolving pandemic and the restrictions that went along with it. Two of the biggest factors were anxiety as a result of worry about the pandemic, and screen time. Kids were using screens a lot more while locked down at home which was disrupting their sleep in a big way.

With new data collected from the Better Nights, Better Days cohort, Dr. Corkum and her team could move forward. Almost all the parents said they were still using the interventions they had used for sleep pre-pandemic. 95% of them said that they thought other families should have access to these strategies during the pandemic. Based on this, the Better Nights, Better Days team was able to get some funding to launch an intervention for all families during the pandemic.

That new program launches Very soon – hopefully very early in March. It is free for families to use, intended for parents of children ages 1-10 who are struggling with falling asleep and staying asleep. There have been slight modifications, now that Dr. Corkum and her team have information about the pandemic and how it impacts sleep. They’ve also added to the intervention some information about parents’ sleep, and how to help parents sleep better. Sleep is essential for the whole family!

Dr. Corkum also runs a diagnostic clinic in Truro, Nova Scotia that brings together pediatricians, school psychologists, health psychologists and others to do differential diagnostics for kids who have fairly complex presentations and need a comprehensive assessment. Well, she normally does. But in the past year the doors have remained closed because they just can’t have all those people together in one room. It’s disappointing for Dr. Corkum and her team, who likely won’t be able to re-open until next year. Therapy can be done virtually, diagnostic assessments not so much.

Dr. Corkum says she misses working at Dalhousie and seeing her students, staff and colleagues but doesn’t miss the walk! Her parking spot is far from the office that carrying a bag, and papers, and a laptop through deep snow or a blizzard makes the walk to work something of a nightmare and a serious workout, every winter. She’s still getting the walk and the workout in – but walking a big dog three times a day is a much more pleasant experience.

Fresh air, exercise, and sleep are three of the things that can make life during the pandemic a more pleasant experience. And with the launch of Better Nights, Better Days which has been modified for the COVID-19 context, Dr. Corkum is making at least one of those things easier and more accessible as of today. You can sign up for the Better Nights, Better Days during COVID-19 study here:

https://betternightsbetterdays.ca/covid-19

Natalie Rosen

Where are all the babies? When the COVID-19 pandemic started creating lockdowns in March of 2020, the memes were everywhere. The generation that was sure to come from the pandemic baby boom was being given all kinds of names – Coronials! Baby Zoomers! We were all looking forward to making lame jokes in 2033 about these children entering their Quaranteens.

It made some sense that we would think that way – hey, we’re stuck at home with nothing else to do, we’ll probably all bake more cheesecake, learn a new instrument, and make a bunch of babies. But the boom never came. In fact, Canada’s birth rate in 2020 declined by 0.73% from 2019 – continuing a steady trend downward that continues into 2021 (we are projected to decline by 0.74% this year). So what gives?

Dr. Natalie Rosen specializes in couples and sex. Dr. Rosen is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Dalhousie University. She and her team are currently in the middle of several longitudinal studies with couples, some of which began before the pandemic. They’re hoping that they get some good data at the end of the studies that can shed light on the impacts of pandemic-related stress on sexual health, particularly for vulnerable groups like new parents. In the meantime, she’s looking at other studies that are just now starting to release data.

“A study published last Spring in the States looked at the impact of COVID on people’s sex lives. What they found was that just over 40% of people said their sex lives had taken a hit and were declining. Just over 40% said it was about the same, and then there was a minority of about 13% who reported that their sex lives had actually improved during the pandemic. I think it’s fair to extrapolate to some extent to Canadians, which means a big chunk of us are experiencing a declines in their sex lives.”

So what happened? Why aren’t people having sex more than ever? Where are all the babies we were promised in the memes? Dr. Rosen says we probably should have known this would be the case.

“I think that was wishful thinking. We actually know that for many people, stress and uncertainty puts quite a damper on mood and desire for sex. Of course, there are lots of individual differences, so not everyone is the same, but for many people stress and uncertainty negatively impact sexuality. Also, when you think about all the young families who have had these extended periods of time with their kids at home – not only is that a stressor, but it’s also interfering with opportunities for sex.”

Dr. Rosen’s research focuses on sexual dysfunction from a couples’ perspective. In the past, much of the research has focused on the person with the problem – but of course many sexual problems exist within the context of the couple, and she says that very often the other person in the relationship really wants to be involved and to do something differently in order to help their partner and improve their sex lives. Dr. Rosen’s team is hoping to expand the availability of couple-based, empirically supported, treatments available for sexual dysfunction. They have an upcoming publication reporting on a randomized clinical trial for the results of a novel couple therapy vs. a medical intervention for pain experienced during sex, and they are hoping to do the same with low desire. They’ve just launched a CIHR-funded study into couple therapy when women have low sexual desire.

Dr. Rosen’s clinical work is small. She works with a few couples each week who have sexual problems, such as pain during sex and low desire, and with couples who are going through major life transitions, like becoming new parents. In the beginning of the pandemic she paused her practice because it was impossible to meet in-person, but Halifax is doing well enough that she was able to start seeing couples in person again last Fall. She says that some of the couples she sees have adapted to virtual sessions and now prefer that, so going forward it looks like her clinical practice will be the kind of hybrid model we might expect to see in most clinical settings post-pandemic.

The biggest disruption for Dr. Rosen is likely the lack of travel – in a typical year she’s on a plane every six weeks or so, going to an academic conference, or visiting her family in Ottawa or Toronto. She says that now, she hasn’t seen most of her family in over year outside her husband and two children – but that this slowing down of the pace of life has had its benefits.

“For us it’s been a kind of investment in the nuclear family, spending lots of time just the four of us. And we’ve also had the chance to really explore a lot of the nooks and crannies of Nova Scotia! I also find that it’s forced me to take a step back and evaluate what’s important to me. I can get caught up in the minutia of my work, and particularly early in the pandemic I felt the frustration of trying to find work-life balance with two young kids at home. But you take a deep breath, and you figure out your values - health, family, happiness. I care about my work a lot, but there’s a pandemic, and there are many times when it just can’t be the number one priority!”

People across Canada are re-evaluating their priorities and have been for almost a year now. Like Dr. Rosen and her family, they are finding ways to support one another, to balance work and home life, and to stay as healthy and happy as they can throughout. Dr. Rosen emphasizes that finding ways to prioritize and connect sexually with your partner has many benefits for health and well- being. And that’s a valuable thing to do – just don’t feel like you have to live up to the memes of March!

Joanna Pozzulo

“You’re going to come out of this pandemic either a contestant on the Great Canadian Baking Show, or a really good murderer.”

“Hmmm. Yes, I hope it leans more toward the baking…but you never know?”

Dr. Joanna Pozzulo spends a lot of her spare time during the pandemic learning new recipes, and reading murder mysteries. Dr. Pozzulo is the world’s foremost expert in the psychology behind children’s eyewitness identification. She has spent more than two decades working in Criminal Justice psychology, and so she doesn’t read a murder mystery the way the rest of us do. She notices what is plausible, and what is implausible, and the many mistakes the killer inevitably makes. “I wouldn’t do it that way”, she thinks…getting one step closer to becoming really good at murder.

As the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Carleton University, Dr. Pozzulo has been doing a lot more during the pandemic than baking stacks of cookies and devouring stacks of mystery novels. She and her department have launched a virtual space for researchers, students, and other stakeholders called MeWerth (The Mental Health and Well-being Research and Training Hub). It’s a means of connecting the university with community organizations and anyone else who might be a consumer of mental health and well-being research.

“It’s a varied group, all focused on conducting research that is of high quality around topics of mental health and well-being. Ultimately, being able to disseminate evidence-based research to the public to improve daily lives.”

MeWerth was planned before the pandemic began, which meant that the virtual platform was a little bit ahead of the curve.  Dr. Pozzulo says that COVID had little impact on the creation of MeWerth, but it did make the team rethink how they were going to bring people together.

“Even though it is a virtual space, the traditional idea is that you have a launch, and you invite people to a place and you have, almost a party. We were initially going to launch it in September, but we were in the middle of COVID, so we moved the launch to December and made it virtual. It worked out really well, because we were able to reach a far larger audience without concern for borders or public health risks. We had people attend from all over the world. It was great to get so many people involved when traditionally that would not have been possible. We had one person tune in from Turkey – you can imagine the travel from Turkey to Ottawa, I’m thinking it probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

MeWerth is a multi-disciplinary space with a broad range of topics. Some are COVID-related, most are not. Dr. Rachel Burns is a member working on studies related to diabetes (how and when do spouses influence the health and wellbeing of people with diabetes?). Dr. Johanna Peetz is researching financial factors in well-being. Dr. Michael Wohl is looking at several facets of addiction, notably gambling addiction, including a study on casino loyalty programs.

Every Wednesday is #WellnessWednesday at MeWerth. On the website there is a ‘Wellness Corner’ where this week Dr. Robert Coplan’s research explores the novel concept of “aloneliness”, conceptualized as the negative feelings that arise from the perception that one is not spending enough time alone. A concept that very much applies during the current pandemic. This is just one of many facets of MeWerth, a platform Dr. Pozzulo already considers to be a success.

“We had 800 people register to attend the launch, a number that’s unheard of in an academic environment - to have so many people from so many different backgrounds be interested in something. I was really pleased, and it signalled to me that we were filling a need, and maybe we had underestimated how much that need was there. I’m seeing lots of interest in MeWeRTH – and its continued interest. I’m thrilled about that and I hope we can continue to grow MeWeRTH both locally and globally.”

For Dr. Pozzulo and her team to grow MeWerth, more researchers, students, community groups, organizations and other stakeholders will need to discover the web platform and sign up (https://carleton.ca/mental-health/). So, if you are one of those individuals interested in mental health and well-being, you probably should sign up. Or else…

Or else Dr. Pozzulo might not share any of her fresh-baked chocolate and candied-pecan éclairs with you.

Vina Goghari

Dr. Vina Goghari had big plans for 2020. There were going to be conferences that would synergize with her vacations – including one in Banff where she was planning to rent a cottage and hang out with some of her friends. A couple of talks in Vienna were going to allow her to explore the nearby areas and experience Austria for the first time. Instead her breaks disappeared, her workload increased threefold, and she ended up stuck at home with a kidney stone for five months. 2020, right?

Dr. Goghari is a professor at the University of Toronto where she is the Graduate Chair of the Clinical Psychology program. What interests us here at the moment is Dr. Goghari’s position as the editor of Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, the flagship journal of the Canadian Psychological Association. The bulk of a journal editor’s work is remote already, so very little has changed in that respect, but the pandemic has created a bit of a slowdown in the review process.

“The ability of academics to spend their time on peer review has been impacted. I find they’ve still been gracious, and people are still volunteering to review these papers, but sometimes we find that people need more leeway in terms of time to actually get us the review back. We’ve been lucky that both the authors and the reviewers are having a little bit more patience with each other, and the editor, and the associate editors. It allows us to make sure this process is still equitable and fair and we still get enough reviews.”

Another thing that has, predictably, changed is the number of submissions Canadian Psychology is receiving concerning COVID itself. So many, that they have prepared a special issue just for the pandemic. Dr. Goghari says the volume of articles has been overwhelming.

“We did a call for COVID papers in May dealing with psychological perspectives on the pandemic – we feel a psychological, as well as a Canadian/International, lens is very important to helping people deal with the pandemic in terms of work and life balance and mental health. The Special Issue will be coming out in the next few weeks. We saw a record number of papers for that call. This was especially so (true) for the two of us who are the English-speaking editors ̶ we were fielding a tremendous number of papers! It was positive in the sense that the psychological perspective on the pandemic is resonating with people, but also really increased our workload, as we always want to ensure we do a professional job with all submissions. Luckily we were able to get through all of them, and I really think we have a fantastic special issue

Canadian Psychology is a generalist journal, which allowed Dr. Goghari and her team to design the COVID special issue with intention. They wanted the articles to cover a wide range of topics related to Canadians, and to reflect different parts of our society and our population. There are articles about work, sleep, mental health, adults, children, training, and much more. There are also two articles in French, and Dr. Goghari hopes that there is something for everybody in this journal issue.

Not only have they seen an increase in COVID papers, but papers regarding race-related issues that have become increasingly front and centre over the past year. More papers addressing topics such as mental health and racial disparities have been submitted. Dr. Goghari says she wishes this has also been the case for journal in the past given the importance of these societal issues, but is heartened to see that this is more of a focus now.

“One of the things COVID highlighted was that the pandemic doesn’t affect everyone equally. There are certain groups that are more affected by the pandemic like the elderly, we know that there were racial disparities in both outcome and incidence of the virus. And so the two things came together – the societal tensions on race, but also highlighted and made worse by the COVID pandemic interacting with these factors.”

Dr. Goghari says that she is encouraged by the rise in awareness created by the new focus on inequities and dismantling the systemic causes of racism. She is also encouraged by the number of papers she and her team are receiving surrounding COVID and expects that the studies launched later in the pandemic that focus on longer term impact, challenges, opportunities, and resilience, will produce some new, useful, and fascinating results. Dr. Goghari is above all an optimist. Even when it comes to missing out on some great trips, and a kidney stone!

“I find I don’t really miss the things like travel – they were just perks. I miss seeing my friends and my family. I also had some interaction with the health care system because I had a kidney stone for five months. I was very grateful for all the people who are still doing ultrasounds and CT scans and keeping the hospitals clean for us. They were just so kind! Even though they themselves were dealing with all these things, I was touched by their professionalism and their help even while I could see the burden on the health care system. When the kidney stone clinic had to close, there was an onslaught of people and we all have to get in…it was a very eye opening experience. Given what the health care workers go through, they were tremendous even though they must be in a difficult situation. I think COVID plus a kidney stone made me grateful for all the smaller things!”

Judy Moench

“I feel like a budding musician who started out in the basement! During COVID we weren’t able to get into a studio or anything like that so I literally developed these videos in my basement using audio on my phone.”

The Self-care Traumatic Episode Protocol fits into a neat little acronym – STEP! Was this one of those programs that worked backward, to shoehorn its description into an easily-remembered four-letter word? Dr. Judy Moench says no.

“It was named that on purpose because it’s a modified version of a protocol that was developed called EMDRGTEP – which is the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Group Traumatic Episode Protocol.”

Nobody worked backward, I think we can assume, to make EMDRGTEP a neat little acronym!

Dr. Moench is a registered psychologist in Alberta with a private practice, and also an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta. During COVID, she’s been working on a number of protocols that might be helpful in the community. One is a school-based program, focused on the universal promotion of emotional health with an emphasis on the well-being of students. Prepped 4 Learning is a self-regulation program that starts with teachers and parents helping kids regulate to learn, all the way up to what to do if there is a crisis in school. Dr. Moench thinks STEP might be helpful in this setting as well, for teachers in particular, and they are beginning research with school staff soon.

STEP was launched during the pandemic to assist mental health clinicians, medical staff, and other front line workers to decrease stress and increase coping. The idea was that because people were unable to meet in person a computer-delivered protocol was necessary. This was not intended to be a substitute for psychological treatment or medical diagnoses, but that a 90-minute session with STEP videos could develop containment strategies that would allow them to continue working on the front lines through this time of overwhelming stress. Eye movement is part of the process.

“Eye movement is part of EMDR Therapy, an approach that has an eight-phase model, and you go through all the phases with a client to help them resolve unprocessed material and recover from distressing life experiences. STEP is an adapted protocol but it still uses eye movements and goes through modified phases of treatment – you print out a worksheet, and the person taps from one side of the protocol sheet to the other side and follows with their eyes as they’re doing that. The eye movements help to add distance and give calmness around the event that is being processed.  It helps to consolidate the memory in a more cohesive way.”

Normally Dr. Moench and her team would do this kind of activity in groups in the office. You know, in the before-times. Now, this program has to be modified for online delivery, which means a few steps have been adapted. Typically, EMDR treatment would involve an extensive history with the client – with STEP, this has been modified to a few specific questions up front that ensure the person is ready and eligible to use the protocol. For example, someone who was thinking about suicide, or had a complex trauma history, may be better served with one-to-one EMDR Therapy.

Another thing that sets STEP apart is that it is designed to deal with only one very specific trauma episode at a time – right now, the trauma brought on most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Moench calls this ‘titration’, and it narrows the focus to that one episode and excludes the larger history that might otherwise be part of treatment.

“With STEP, the research study we did focused exclusively on COVID. Since then, I’ve used it with other things that aren’t specifically COVID-related…even though right now everything is kinda COVID-related! But there are other events that are happening along with the pandemic.”

The STEP protocol has been used in Alberta with mental health clinicians, with a small group of staff from the United Nations, and with other national and international groups in which Dr. Moench is a member. Right now, she and her team are making a more professional version of the current STEP videos – after all, the originals were shot in her basement with audio from her phone! Only time will tell if this psychology-as-garage-rock-band will be a pandemic-specific flash in the pan (like the Strokes) or a longer lasting international sensation (like U2).

Hey…that’s got us thinking now. How come there hasn’t been a Live Aid / Live 8 pandemic relief show yet? Those were always super-distanced!

Dr Chloe Hamza

Dr. Chloe Hamza is an assistant professor in the department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She’s the lab director of the CARE lab (Coping, Affect, and Resilience in Education), and her research has been broadly about stress and coping among postsecondary students. It was with this focus that she and her team ran a study looking at the psychological impacts of COVID-19 among postsecondary students.

Like so many other studies at this time, Dr. Hamza and her team were lucky to have already done a similar survey, that one in May of 2019. This meant that repeating many of the same questions with many of the same participants could give a good indication of where they were now, with the pandemic, compared to where they were before.

“We had some pre-COVID assessment data, and then we went back in May 2020 and surveyed students again. We were looking at stress, coping, and mental health before and during the pandemic. What we had originally hypothesized was that students with pre-existing mental health concerns would be those who would be most adversely impacted by the pandemic. But what we found was that students who had pre-existing mental health concerns fared similarly or were actually improving during the pandemic. Whereas students without pre-existing mental health concerns showed the greatest decline in mental health.”

This study, and these results, have resulted in an article that will be published in this month’s COVID-19 special issue of the journal Canadian Psychology. (See our upcoming profile of Dr. Vina Goghari for more on the journal the day the special edition comes out.) The article is called ‘When Social Isolation is Nothing New’, and it details these findings from Dr. Hamza and her team.

“When we looked at why those students without pre-existing concerns were declining, we found that increasing social isolation seemed to be associated with deteriorating mental health. What that seems to suggest is that if you were feeling socially disconnected before the pandemic, which in our case was among students with pre-existing mental health concerns, the start of the pandemic and distancing guidelines may have been less impactful. In contrast, if you weren’t used to experiencing social isolation, and this was a real change for you, your mental health was more likely to decline.”

It looks, for now, as though students with pre-existing concerns were already experiencing some kind of isolation socially pre-pandemic, and that has made the adjustment easier and less impactful for them than it has for others. There are of course other possibilities that might account for the findings of Dr. Hamza and her team, and they plan to explore those in a follow-up study that is beginning right now.

“For many students some stressors actually decreased. For example, having multiple competing demands, or academic pressures, lessened. Which sort of makes sense if you think about how universities initially responded to the pandemic. Students weren’t going to class any more, they may not be going to work, and so the demands on their time – both academic and vocational – may have decreased.”

The follow-up study is currently under way, where Dr. Hamza and her team are asking those same students how they’re coping now during the pandemic. Some of it will involve the results of the previous study, where they will ask the participants about the results. “Here are some of our findings – how does this resonate with you? Do you think it’s accurate? What are some of the reasons you think we might have seen this result back in May?”

While that study is ongoing, Dr. Hamza is also focused on her own students – trying her best to ensure that they remain engaged, well, and healthy through what has been a very difficult school year. Her department does a ‘wellness challenge’ which challenges people to get outside and walk, or pick up and learn a new instrument, or try a new recipe. All things we can do to maintain better mental health during this time of isolation. Things that are good both for those of us who are still new to distancing and socializing remotely, and for those of us for whom social isolation is nothing new.

Laurie Ford

“Every night we talk on FaceMail”.

Two things are getting Dr. Laurie Ford through this pandemic in a positive way. One is her nightly ‘FaceMail’ chats with her dad in Oklahoma. Not sure if this means FaceTime, or FaceBook, or Zoom or some other video chat platform, but dad calls it FaceMail and so FaceMail it is. The other is a community garden where Dr. Ford is the President. The garden has become a meeting-place and something of a pandemic oasis throughout the past year. Sometimes up to six or seven people, Laurie and her friends, will head to the garden after work, sit well-distanced on the various plots, and share a laugh and a glass of wine. Maybe pull some weeds. It’s a nice break from long days at work.

“I’m getting a lot of work done – when all I have to do is go to the front of my house and come back. The bad thing is I think many of us are working too much, as the lines between work and home are blurring.”

Even Dr. Ford’s beloved community garden has become part of that blurring of work-home-life, her meetings with friends inspired her to do the same with her grad students. A few months into the pandemic, she suddenly realized that most of her students lived in Vancouver but had never actually met one another in person! With the exception of one student stuck in Australia and one stuck in Alaska, she invited them all to meet, in person, at the garden. (The two stranded students were able to join virtually, by Zoom.)

Dr. Ford is at UBC. She is the Director of Training for the School and Applied Child Psychology program and has been involved in training school psychologists for a long time. She is also a board member at the CPA. As the pandemic has gone on, she has become more and more accustomed to Zoom calls, as has her dogs Gracie Belle and Cooper come to say hi and investigate the goings-on before wandering off to find more interesting ‘dog stuff’ as Dr. Ford goes back to teaching her now presumably more interested class.

“One of the big things, from a training perspective, is to figure out ways that students can get some of that hands-on training, in schools and in clinical settings, when everything’s restricted. The other part that’s related to training is – how do you move to train people to do service delivery in less traditional ways?”

Right now, Dr. Ford’s training is primarily preparing Masters and Doctoral-level school psychologists. Training that would ordinarily involve a lot of hands-on experience. Before 2020, Dr. Ford would take her students to a local homeless shelter for some classes. Others would take place in a rehab clinic, or a xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (People of the River Grass) longhouse located within walking distance of the UBC campus. Dr. Ford says, just being in these physical locations was a huge part of the experience. That, of course, has not been possible in the past year. So they are finding some workarounds.

Members of community join Dr. Ford’s Communities Systems class some weeks as they try alternate ways to immerse students in a variety of settings. In this class and others, she’s also experimenting with videos, podcasts, and other methods of delivering information that are different that simple Zoom lectures. She says she has been surprisingly impressed by how many of her students are doing the extra work and taking advantage of the extra content she makes available to them.

“I think I was just so determined to make this be awesome, even though it sucked being on line, that it’s made me become more familiar with the technology of teaching online, but it has also in some ways made me work harder to find diverse sources of information. I actually think I’m better teaching this course than I have been in the past. I’ve had to work harder to be more creative to find new and better ways to engage my students. It’s made me think like the kids a little bit – I’m doing less lecturing and I’m using podcasts and videos. They’re good teaching pedagogies that we talk about but then we kind of get lazy, you know? So I really think I’m doing a little bit of a better job this year!”

Dr. Ford has a big personality, the kind that can fill a lecture hall in person better than a Zoom screen. She says she misses that part of teaching, addressing a large room full of people, and it’s clear that will be the first thing on the docket, whenever this pandemic ends and she can get back to the front of a class. But while it goes on, she hopes that the innovations she and her students have come up with have made her a better teacher, and they have certainly made her more tech-savvy. When the spring arrives, her students will be able to meet one another again, in a safely distanced fashion. They still have the community garden.

And Laurie’s dad will still have his FaceMail.

Dr Christine Chambers

Busy mom of 4, PhD Psychologist, Scientific Director @CIHR_IHDCYH ,  Scientific Director @KidsInPain , Professor & Tier 1 @CRC_CRC  in Children's Pain @DalhousieU

• Christine Chambers’ Twitter bio

You’ll note that the first word in Dr. Christine Chambers’ Twitter bio is ‘busy’. It’s a shame that Twitter bios allow a maximum of 160 characters only…or maybe it’s a blessing? By the time people finished reading hers, they might have no time left for doomscrolling! That’s also why we have profiles such as this one, which, as you will note, has no character limit whatsoever.

I feel lucky to have been able to spend half an hour speaking with Dr. Chambers. When I first started at the Canadian Psychological Association, I had made plans to meet with Dr. Chambers in the spring of 2020, when she would be in Ottawa for a conference. Back then, that was how meetings worked – you would wait until you were in the same city, then you would squeeze in some time. Things operate a little differently now but with Dr. Chambers, even on Zoom it’s still about squeezing in time.

Dr. Chambers is speaking with me just after one Zoom meeting and just before another, each one involving a different hat she wears. One of those hats is as the scientific director of Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP).

“SKIP is a federally funded national mobilization network, focused on moving research into practice. We received funding for four years, so our first year of operation was in the ‘before-times’. - In that first year we laid groundwork, developed relationships, built momentum. The pandemic hit just as we were entering into our second year of operation. It’s fascinating, both in terms of the areas of focus that we’re engaging in right now, but also just the process of knowledge mobilization.

How research gets moved into practice is based a lot on relationshipsand bringing people together. In our first year we had so many workshops, and we played a key convening and catalyzing role in bringing people together on a number of issues in physical spaces. All of a sudden you lose your ability to do that. Thankfully we had a lot of partners in SKIP who were already in the digital space either with health providers or with parents, so we had the right tools and the ability to leverage those.

From a content perspective, obviously vaccinations are a huge topic right now. In the area of children’s pain, vaccination pain evidence is very robust. Anna Taddio and others like Meghan McMurtry (also a psychologist) have pulled together this evidence and there’s a clinical practice guideline. So we’ve been doing a lot of public engagement around needles, and how to prepare for needles.

Virtual care has obviously also been something people in the healthcare space have been engaging in in new and different ways, and Katie Birnie – also a psychologist in SKIP – has been leading some really interesting work in this space.

Another thing though, and every health person is struggling with this right now, is how do you keep your issue (in my case pain) a priority in the middle of the pandemic? We were working to improve pain management in Canadian health institutions, now we have to figure out how to keep that issue a priority while competing against all this very important focus on the pandemic. So it’s been a hell of a year!”

Dr. Chambers says she’s been pleased and surprised at how well the team at SKIP has been able to keep pain front and centre, and how well institutions are responding. There have been many champions for this cause working for many years, and the disruption of COVID may actually have made things a little easier. One, because a lot of people in the healthcare space are re-constructing their practices in a different way, and two, because talking about pain and pain management gives those health institutions a bit of a break from talking about the pandemic.

Another hat Dr. Chambers wears as an expert with the #ScienceUpFirst initiative, combatting online disinformation around the pandemic, the vaccine, and more. (See our profile of Dr. Jonathan Stea for more details on #ScienceUpFirst.)

“This is a fantastic collaboration led by Tim Caulfield and Senator Stan Kutcher, and I was thrilled to be one of the psychologists that was an early joiner. I’ve been using social media for a number of years to help promote the work we’re doing and to raise awareness with a particular focus on parents. So it’s been really nice to be a part of this group addressing misinformation head-on. I have my eye on the types of misinformation that gets shared around children and families. It’s a wonderful group of people trying to make sure that evidence (in my case psychological evidence) is embraced and accepted.”

Some more hats. Dr. Chambers is a professor at Dalhousie University. She runs a research lab where they generate new knowledge about children’s pain. And she is also the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health.

“It has been a busy year! It was going to be a busy year before the pandemic, but the pandemic really took it up a notch. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity engage in so many different roles, and I tell people I’m definitely not bored during the pandemic! And also I think that never before has Canadian science and global science been on such a stage. Never before have we needed science more, or have needed to communicate the role of science. So it’s important that psychologists have visibility, and that the psychological evidence be generated and shared. I’m always trying to put up my psychology flag at every table I sit at, and reminding people of the value of psychology.”

Dr. Chambers has four kids between the ages of 9 and 14. Several years ago, she realized that all this research – research she had been instrumental in creating – was not being used to the benefit of her own children. It was then that she started getting into the mobilization side of things, the advocacy and media and policy veins. This involved creating videos, becoming active on social media, and ensuring that knowledge moves to where it needs to go and it led to a career of many hats.

“All this great psychological research is wonderful, but if it sits in journals, or in conferences, and doesn’t actually get out into the hands of people who need it, then what was the point?”

Mélanie Joanisse

“I wrote this in what I would call a hypomanic phase…as psychologists, we always have to pathologize any kind of creativity.”

Dr. Mélanie Joanisse was still processing the fact that she was not going to be able to attend a Pearl Jam concert when she had something of a viral moment in the early days of the pandemic. Can we still say ‘going viral’? Or has that phrase now passed out of the lexicon like so many others before it that conjure unwelcome memories? Anyway, a lot of people suddenly found Dr. Joanisse’s work. Like, a LOT of people. Her ‘Guide To Wellness’ was being discovered.

“I got a call from the communications director at the Montfort hospital, who said ‘what was your marketing and communication strategy for this? [Mélanie laughs heartily] I was like…none? She said we were being bombarded with messages from people who said they like it, and I was starting to receive a lot of emails – even from people in Europe – saying ‘we like this, can we translate it?’ And so I said sure, go for it! So the communications team at the Montfort helped me to create a creative commune so people would understand that they could just take it.”

Dr. Joanisse’s has a private practice in Ottawa, but does a lot of work at the Montfort Hospital, Ontario’s only francophone hospital. When the pandemic first hit, she saw at the Montfort the stress that the staff was experiencing. The sudden worry among doctors and nurses. The occupational therapists and social workers who were wearing masks and gowns, something they would never have done before. It was all hands on deckand changed how everyone was working. She wanted to do whatever she could in her capacity as a psychologist to help.

“As a psychologist I’m not trained in acute care – no one would want me in the ER! So I figured maybe doing a guide would be helpful. I was reading a lot online, and there are a lot of good resources, but I was just picturing a physician or a nurse or an RT sitting down with a list of 25 papers that they could read on wellness. I just pictured them shutting down their computers and saying ‘I don’t have time or the capacity for this’.”

So Dr. Joanisse set about writing something that encompassed as much as possible about the evidence-based ways to wellness, but to package it in a more engaging way. Visually attractive, a little bit funny, and representative of what frontline healthcare workers were experiencing. An easily-digestible light read, rather than another arduous undertaking.

“The only mask you should be wearing is a medical mask; please discard the infallible mask, as research has shown it suffocates its users.”

• From the Guide To Wellness

The humour in the guide comes from Dr. Joanisse herself. She’s extremely funny, in a very natural way, and that good humour has helped her get through this pandemic and all the setbacks. Like the Pearl Jam concert she missed – her first realization of how big COVID-19 was going to be was that cancelation. Or, more recently, the Chiefs loss in the Super Bowl – her husband is a huge Chiefs fan and just after they were married they flew to Kansas City to take in a game at Arrowhead. In 2019, moments before the pandemic really took hold, the Chiefs finally overcame decades of ineptitude to deliver a Super Bowl victory to fans like Mélanie’s husband.

“Last year when they won, it was pre-pandemic so we were at a friend’s house for the Super Bowl. He got up and spontaneously screamed ‘this is the best day of my life!’ There was a silence, and everyone looked at me. I was like, sorry daughter…birth…wedding…I’m just putting that in my pocket. The next time I spend I don’t know what on what, I’m bringing that card out!”

Now, after watching her husband celebrate the greatest day of his life, Dr. Joanisse is something of a Chiefs fan too. This is perhaps more because of Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, the French-Canadian starting right guard with a doctorate in medicine who left the Chiefs in the offseason to join the front lines of the pandemic back in Montreal. Just the kind of person who might benefit from the Guide to Wellness.

Dr. Joanisse still sees stress in her co-workers at the Montfort. Now, it’s not the stress of uncertainty that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, but rather a stress borne of long hours, fluctuating numbers, a desire for the pandemic to be over, and sheer exhaustion. She’s heartened, however, that many have taken her Guide To Wellness to heart – not only at her own hospital, but at institutions around the world.

“Now I know people in Hawaii, BC, all over the world. All types of different healthcare workers have reached out to me. It has been quite the experience, I have to say. And very moving, to know that this has touched people in that way.”

Khush Amaria

“My Zoom background used to have my Parent Report Card up there but I took it down because I wasn’t doing very well – my cooking skills were poor, there were many problems.”

Dr. Khush Amaria’s Zoom background now has a bar graph made by one of her children, which really is ideal – it’s homey, warm, colourful and comforting – but also scientific! Just the atmosphere she probably wants to evoke for CBT Associates and MindBeacon.

If you are a resident of Ontario, a pop-up window appears when you go to the MindBeacon website. ‘Free therapy for Ontario residents! MindBeacon’s Therapist Guided Program is now free thanks to funding by the Government of Ontario.’ They were always providing live therapy through a digital stream with the CBT Associates division of the company, but it was restricted to Ontario only. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they have expanded their Live Therapy program (now capitalized and official) across Canada, and the Ontario portion is now free thanks to government assistance.

“The one thing that is so clear to me is the demand. In the summer we may have seen about 800 new accounts created each week. In the fall that number was reached close to 2,000 new accounts some weeks. It’s indicating that Canadians are struggling, but that they’re not waiting – they’re reaching out for help right now.”

Dr. Amaria is the Senior Clinical Director at MindBeacon and manages the CBT Associates side of the business. During the pandemic, that has meant she does a huge amount of speaking engagements. Companies who reach out looking for an expert in stress, or anxiety, or depression, get Dr. Amaria’s full attention, as she walks them through some of the steps they can take to alleviate the difficulties of their employees. She gets them to understand what level of help they might need, and what supports are available.

“Sometimes it’s a company that will come to me and say, ‘we’re all feeling a little concerned about each other, and we don’t know how to know if our colleagues are doing well’. So what I often do is talk about how we identify stress in ourselves. A common topic might be ‘what is burnout vs. just feeling burnt out?’ How can you be there for others? For me that’s a really nice way to make psychology and the science of psychology understandable to the day-to-day person. My intention with almost every single event I’m part of is to have people feel like they can walk away with a plan.”

That plan may be that they research the thing Dr. Amaria was talking about. Or they’re going to reach out to a friend that they think might not be doing so well. Or that they themselves will reach out because they’re not doing well. It’s always about reminding people of the supports that are available, and destigmatizing mental health – recognizing that mental health is an integral part of everyday health.

In March of 2020, MindBeacon was one of the companies chosen by the Ontario government to provide services quickly and on-demand to Ontarians, which meant that Dr. Amaria and her colleagues expanded their roster of psychologists, and other mental health professionals, very quickly.

“We had to figure out really quickly how we could build our roster, and we brought on psychologists but we also brought on registered social workers. We needed to be able to deliver services, and our psychologists could then be involved in places where diagnosis was required, or helping with triaging, or oversight. Our psychologists are involved in developing protocols. We recognized that some people don’t fit the criteria of having a depressive disorder or being anxious – but they have stress! So we launched this amazing managing stress protocol in the fall because many people just needed to ‘tweak’ their stress management skills. That was a psychologist who wrote that out and put that material in there. That’s the nature of what we do.”

Another major thing that happened during the pandemic was that MindBeacon went public. Dr. Amaria is a psychologist, still does clinical work, oversees the residency program at CBT Associates, speaks to large groups and does a lot of work as a spokesperson for the company. What she does not do is IPOs and the stock market.

“I’m not sure I really understand most of it – but the most amazing thing about it was the attention that this garnered, and the investment coming back into us as a company to continue to support Canadians. So that’s been really neat.”

When GameStop stock took off, and Wall Street was all in an uproar, Dr. Amaria says she got the Coles’ Notes version of it from her husband, presumably during one of those moments when she was not doing one of the many jobs she has at the moment. Maybe during one of the forced getting-outdoors breaks they take with their school-age children. Taking care of stress levels and mental health is something clinicians have to remember as well.

“I remind myself I need to take a dose of my own medicine in a way. In a week I might talk to 1,000 people about stress management, and share examples from my own life. It’s about recognizing that we’re all in it together, and we do really have to work on mental health. Nobody is immune – it doesn’t matter if you’re a psychologist or a therapist, taking care of your mental health is effortful, and we all have to do something.”

For some of us, doing something means reaching out to a friend, or taking a walk outside. For others, it might mean reaching out to Live Therapy from MindBeacon. Maybe doing something is as simple as learning something new. Like improving one’s ‘cooking skills’.

Dr. Helen Ofosu

“There are certain people who, pre-pandemic, were super-productive and making amazing contributions at work. But because they weren’t bragging, buttering up the boss, or charismatic, they were overlooked. But now, when everyone’s at home, it’s easier to track who is contributing – who is sending in work product. So, all the “doers” are kind of getting their chance to shine.”

Dr. Helen Ofosu is writing a book. The working title is The Resilient Career, and will impart lessons she has learned over a 20 year career in Work and Business (Industrial/Organizational) Psychology. It will be a resource for people dealing with underemployment, harassment, workplace scapegoating, or being a newcomer to Canada trying to adapt to a new culture in the workplace. A lot of the book will be about employees’ identities, and how those tie into career progression, as well as some insights around the “glass cliff” phenomenon (i.e., women and racialized people being more likely than men to achieve leadership roles in an organization in times of crisis, when the chance of failure is much greater).

It may seem like writing a book during the COVID-19 lockdown is something a person with a lot of time on their hands would decide to do. That does not seem to be the case for Dr. Ofosu, who is an HR Consultant, Executive Coach, and Career Coach who runs I/O Advisory Services in Ottawa. Much like the employees she sees getting more recognition for the work they do during the pandemic, Dr. Ofosu is getting more recognition as well. The bulk of her clients were once in Ottawa, but now that Zoom is the de facto way to connect she is working with companies all over Canada, and sometimes the US and Saudi Arabia.

An additional reason for that branching out is the newfound focus companies are placing on systemic discrimination, anti-racist workplaces and restructuring their policies around equity, diversity, and inclusion. That happens to be Dr. Ofosu’s specialty – what she refers to as a ‘passion project’ turned full-fledged business line. This process is taking something of a different turn now as well, with the pandemic forcing this kind of coaching to be done at a distance. At the moment, this is mainly taking the form of mentorship and sponsorship programs for employees.

“My favourite model is one that I’ve been experimenting with and tweaking – it’s blending mentorship with allyship. At the same time that we train mentors to be more effective working with racialized people with whom they may not have a lot of experience, we’re also going to train a second group of people called ‘allies.’ These are people who may be senior and well-intentioned in the organization, but who don’t have the time to dedicate to either a one-on-one protégé or a small group of protégés. But they can still benefit from some training around systemic discrimination and what it means to be a good ally and mentor. They can then be out there in their organization as resources and influencers on more of an ad hoc basis.”

The mentors and the allies both receive the same kind of training – but while the allies tend to have giant workloads and full calendars and therefore less time to dedicate to this sort of thing, the mentors commit to six month or year-long programs where they check in with Dr. Ofosu regularly.

Mentors are ideally people in leadership positions in the organization. They are people with good ‘soft skills’ (e.g., communication, empathy, judgement, strategic thinking, etc.) and a genuine interest in supporting the career development of more junior employees. This way they will be more effective at imparting the lessons learned to the rest of their teams.

It was shortly after the death of George Floyd that a group in Toronto reached out to Dr. Ofosu, and it’s with this group that she has been developing the mentorship program as it stands today to support communication, marketing, and PR professionals in Canada. Now the federal government has caught wind, and she’s working with them to get this program launched there as well.

That likely means more work, which might also mean less time working on her book. But Dr. Ofosu will find the time, while still taking the occasional break. One of the perks of living in Ottawa is all that free time outdoors taking long walks and shoveling snow, where she puts on her headphones and listens to R&B, gospel, and hiphop music. Then she’ll come back in refreshed, ready to work on that book (with support from her American editor) and to get busy supporting leaders and dismantling structural racism at organizations across Canada.

Maya Yampolsky

In the spring of 2020, there was a COVID outbreak at a homeless shelter in Ottawa. The outbreak was traced back to two immigrant women who were both working at multiple long-term care homes in the city, and who lived at the homeless shelter. As new Canadians with few job prospects, personal support worker positions were some of the only jobs the two women could get. Those jobs paid so little that they were forced to work in more than one location in order to make enough money to live. Even then, they did not make enough to afford rent and so they had to live at the homeless shelter. It was a perfect storm of transmission as vulnerable people in one population brought the virus to vulnerable people in another. As many pointed out at the time, this was eminently predictable.

COVID-19 has had a disproportionately devastating effect on Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants and refugees. Pretty much anyone that has been disadvantaged by institutions and societies over generations are now even more vulnerable because of health inequities. Dr. Maya Yampolsky is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Université Laval. She specializes in social and cultural psychology, with a particular focus in her research on the experience of managing multicultural and intersectional identities, and how those identities are related to our broader social relationships and broader social issues – especially systemic racism and how racism enters into our personal lives.

We’re speaking on Zoom, Dr. Yampolsky in her apartment in Quebec City, in front of a blank wall that I notice looks a lot like the hallway outside my high school gym. It turns out this is by design – an avid yoga practitioner, Dr. Yampolsky has been with a group call the Art of Living Foundation for about 20 years. They are an organization that promotes individual and community development through yoga and yogic philosophy. When teaching a course, Dr. Yampolsky prefers a neutral, blank background. That said, I get the sense that a yoga class with Maya would be an awful lot of fun. She is exuberant, cheerful, friendly and animated in a way that comes through even a Zoom screen. Even when the subjects we’re discussing are rather sombre and depressing compared to yoga. Subjects like COVID, and racism.

“A lot of research showed that Black Canadians of Caribbean origin or African origin, populations that are descendants of enslaved peoples from previous centuries, these groups have continuously been targeted. As a result there’s stress, and there’s illness that builds up in the body. So a lot more of these members of our population have chronic illness, which makes them more vulnerable to COVID, and to having a more intense experience with it. This means they have worse cases and a higher mortality.”

Around the world, Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Southeast Asian people have felt the greatest impact from the pandemic. This is in part because of the stress that comes along with the continuous targeting Dr. Yampolsky speaks about, but also because those groups are the most likely to be essential workers. Frontline healthcare employees, people who work in long-term care facilities, areas that are more susceptible to exposure. Worse health outcomes, increased exposure, and more long-term neglect of marginalized communities have combined to create a storm during the pandemic.

“This isn’t overt racism, like hatred. But it is something that manifests from the existence of structural racism that creates inequalities that then come to the surface when a pandemic hits.”

Dr. Yampolsky, along with her colleagues Andrew Ryder, John Berry, and Saba Safdar, created the fact sheet ‘Why Does Culture Matter to COVID-19’ for the CPA. That fact sheet inspired a review article she is currently working on with Rebecca Bayeh (1^st author) and Andrew Ryder (last and corresponding author). Every time culture and COVID is discussed, it takes Dr. Yampolsky and her colleagues in new directions. Racism is a big part of that. With the pandemic, one thing leapt out very early.

“The World Health Organization has said that we don’t name diseases after places. And yet, people kept insisting on calling this the China Virus or worse. From there we saw a lot of hate speech emerging, and there’s been a lot of hate crime. Here in cities like Toronto and Montreal, there were a lot of defacements of businesses and sacred spaces like Buddhist temples. Asian-Canadians and Asian people abroad, in the global diaspora, and people who looked phenotypically Asian (like Northeastern states in India) were being targeted as the source of the virus and being associated with disease.”

This is sadly not a new thing. We’ve seen this before many times, with virtually every epidemic and pandemic in human history (the 1918 influenza pandemic is still called the ‘Spanish flu’ today, even though the first reports of the outbreak were in Kansas, and no evidence suggests that Spain was particularly hard-hit or that outbreaks occurred there earlier than anywhere else).

Dr. Yampolsky explains that part of the reason for this is that the human brain has shortcuts wired into it to be able to avoid danger – we see disease and immediately try to determine the source of the danger, leading us to associate a virus with a whole group. But of course, it’s more complicated than just this. It wasn’t as though everything was great, and then suddenly the pandemic created more racism – there had been a steady rise in overt racism and hate groups leading up to the onset of COVID-19, a trend that was merely accelerated by the pandemic.

Racism has always existed, and it is always there among the public – the rise has been in overt, or as Dr. Yampolsky put it, “audacious” racism. Hate groups and far-right terror groups in North America and Europe have been more bold in sharing their vitriol publicly. Even some political actions have acted to exacerbate racial tensions. Dr. Yampolsky points to Bill-21 in Quebec, the law that bans people working in public services from wearing ‘religious symbols’ of any kind.

“Anything that essentially targets a minority group will also condone hate toward that group. By its very nature, it singles them out for discrimination. And we were seeing a lot of that already.”

Discrimination against virtually all minority groups has been amped up as a result of COVID-19, in large part because that discrimination was on the rise already. The advent of the pandemic became an excuse to further scapegoat those marginalized groups among those who were already trafficking in hate. These populations already tended to be more vulnerable than others because a history of systemic racism has set them up that way.

In the middle of this perfect storm, Dr. Yampolsky sees a silver lining, maybe a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Hopefully the fact that COVID happened, and then this latest big anti-racism movement – as far as I can tell, the biggest since the civil rights movement – in a way COVID facilitated drawing our attention to what was an existing situation. We weren’t going out, we weren’t being distracted, and so our attention was drawn towards anti-racism. This, positively, has yielded a lot more awareness about racism, and institutional valuing and awareness about racism as well. So that also gives me hope – in the sense that COVID showed us that we’re all connected, it also drew our attention to these things that needed repair, and needed work. I hope that it does end up building more responsible, more healthy, and happier connections with one another.”

There’s still a huge amount of work to do building those connections. To avoid another scenario like the one that happened in Ottawa in the spring, immigrants and refugees require greater supports. Personal support workers, and others we consider essential, require higher salaries. We also need to build ethical and cooperative interactions with Black and Indigenous peoples. There must be equitable and affordable housing for all. And the structural systems that create these conditions must be dismantled.

Dr. Maya Yampolsky is one of the people that will move us closer, as a society, to creating those connections. After an hour with her on Zoom, it’s almost impossible not to be inspired to get out there and start working on dismantling racist structures and historic disenfranchisement. And also, maybe even to sign up for her yoga class.

Karen Blair

“One student broke up with her girlfriend just as the pandemic began. She was sent home but wasn’t out to her family. So she was heartbroken, that young love heartbreak that totally guts you, but her family didn’t even know she was gay. And so she couldn’t be heartbroken in front of them. At the same time her brother was home, with his girlfriend stuck in another city. And so their parents were doting on him – empathetic and supportive of the poor moping brother, sad at being separated from his girlfriend. And she’s watching this knowing she can’t even tell them that she’s heartbroken, that she got dumped because of the pandemic.”

Dr. Karen Blair is an assistant professor of psychology at Trent University. She is also the Chair of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Section of the CPA, and has been since 2014, a fairly long time to be the chair of a section. She says she’s likely to remain the Chair until at least 2022, as it would be a pretty big ask to get someone to take over virtually, in the middle of our current pandemic.

One of the things Dr. Blair has done during the pandemic is the ‘COVID-19 Interpersonal & Social Coping Study’. It was a large, ongoing survey of hundreds of Canadians on a variety of topics. It found as the pandemic progressed between May and July, Canadians wore masks more often and supported mandatory mask mandates more strongly.

Dr. Blair and her team also looked at Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), and found that the sample couples who had negative reactions to COVID-19 were at greater risk of perpetrating and being the victim of IPV. Their results found that married or common law couples are at greater risk for psychological IPV victimization; women and married or common law couples are at greater risk for psychological IPV perpetration; and younger individuals, parents, mixed-sex couples, and individuals in newer relationships are at greater risk for sexual IPV victimization.

They also looked specifically at Nova Scotians and how they were coping with the pandemic relative to other Canadians. Nova Scotians reported higher levels of social support, mental wellbeing, and medical help seeking behaviours. Nova Scotians also reported more engagement in WHO recommendations, feelings of competency to engage in social distancing and more positive attitudes toward mandatory mask regulations.

Part of the survey had participants writing notes to their past and future selves - one was a message to a past self, before the pandemic began. The other, a message to a future self several weeks later (see Courtney Gosselin profile).

Perhaps the biggest thing Dr. Blair and her team keyed on in the survey was LGBTQ+ university students who were dealing with the pandemic, home life, and distance learning.

When the first lockdown and stay-at-home orders came down way back in March of 2020, students from all over Canada were sent home from school. Accommodations were made for those who could not return home – those whose home was in a hot spot, like Italy. Or those who may not have been able to get back to Canada once they left for their home countries. But students whose needs could be met only on campus, like the LGBTQ+ population, were not considered.

Universities across Canada closed on March 13^th. Students were, for the most part, given 24 hours notice that they would be moving back home. For LGBTQ+ students, that meant giving up the support systems they had cultivated at school – social groups, roommates, dorm communities and so on. It also meant that for many of them, they were going home to a place where there was simply no support at all. Everything else in the family might be fine, but for these kids there is a huge part of themselves that is having to hide.

“Parents were scrambling to get their kids home, kids were scrambling to move out. In all that chaos we never stopped to ask if we were sending closeted kids home to unaccepting families.”

In addition to the students who remain closeted at home, there are some who may have it even worse – their family knows, but is hostile about their orientation or identity. Which means they are being berated for it every day, stuck in a place they can’t escape, where the support system they’ve built outside the home is inaccessible.

Even virtual support becomes difficult for these students. Now stuck at home with a family that doesn’t accept their sexual orientation, or their gender identity, there is often not a place private enough to have that conversation over Zoom or Skype without the danger of a parent or sibling overhearing the discussion.

These youth, while experiencing all the same upheaval the rest of us went through with the pandemic, had this added layer of a difficult home life. Dr. Blair says this difficulty doesn’t tend to extend to adult LGBTQ+ people – the 30- or 40-year-olds who are settled and married.

“Someone asked me the other day how it has affected me, and I thought not really – I might actually be doing really well. I’m stuck at home with my wife… we’re both academics and often collaborate with each other so we’ve been able to be great supports to each other throughout the various lockdowns.”

Dr. Blair herself relocated during the pandemic to be closer to family. While her wife’s family is now within driving distance and they are only one flight (instead of two) from her own family, the pandemic has meant they haven’t been able to realize the benefits of seeing their families more despite living closer. But the fact that they both have families that want them to visit, and that are happy to be cooped up with one another, puts them in a place many of the university youth Dr. Blair speaks about can only dream of being.

One day, hopefully, those LGBTQ+ youth will get to that place. For now, they must navigate their way through a difficult school year, the same global pandemic with which we’re all dealing, and a certain kind of isolation and difficult home situation most of us won’t experience. What they are missing is a community, a peer group, and a support system. And someone with whom they can share their heartbreak.

Jonathan N. Stea

“That the outbreaks of Spanish influenza, which have given army officials some concern, may have been started by German agents who were put ashore from a submarine, was the belief expressed today by Lieut. Col. Phillip S. Doane, head of the Health and Sanitation Section of the Emergency Fleet Corporation. … 'It is quite possible that the epidemic was started by Huns sent ashore by Boche submarine commanders,’ he said. ‘We know that men have been ashore from German submarine boats, for they have been in New York and other places. It would be quite easy for one of these German agents to turn loose Spanish influenza germs in a theatre or some other place where large numbers of persons are assembled.’” (New York Times, ‘Think influenza came in U-boat’, September 19, 1918).

You can find that story on Page 11 of Dr. Steven Taylor’s book The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease. Conspiracy theories are nothing new. Conspiracies surrounding pandemics are nothing new. What has changed is the speed at which they are spread, and the maliciousness with which they are created.

Lieut. Col. Doane may have thought German U-Boat submariners were coming ashore to spread the flu in movie theatres, and his story was told to the New York Times. It was read by New Yorkers who may, or may not, have believed him. The fact that this opinion exists only in archival material and does not persist to this day, is indicative that either few people read it, few of them believed it, or both.

Lieut. Col. Doane’s theory was not posted to an 8-Chan thread, picked up by a Russian bot farm, posted to Facebook by sixty accounts, disseminated by dozens of questionable ‘news’ platforms, discovered by the President of the United States and tweeted to 90 million people, many of whom were eager to believe and spread the rumour.

This is where we live now, where disinformation and falsehoods can spread from one person to millions across the world in the blink of an eye. And in the time of a pandemic, this can be dangerous, destructive, and harmful in more ways than just fighting between friends and family members. It can put whole populations in greater danger than they need to be.

It is for this reason that scientists across Canada have come together to create the #ScienceUpFirst initiative. Dr. Jonathan N. Stea, a clinical psychologist and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary, is one of two psychologists who were asked to join the team. Along with Dr. Christine Chambers, Dr. Stea is providing his psychological expertise to combatting disinformation online – specifically, for , disinformation about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.

“It’s an ethical imperative for psychologists to promote evidence-based patient care and public health– so I’ve always been interested in things like pseudoscience and health-related misinformation. Calling that stuff out is one of our ethical imperatives.”

#ScienceUpFirst emerged from conversations between Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health, law, and policy at the University of Alberta, and Senator Stan Kutcher of Nova Scotia. Professor Caulfield has been researching online disinformation and how to debunk it for decades. Senator Kutcher, before becoming a senator, was the Department Head of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University. They got together to assemble a team of science communicators, epidemiologists, chemists, biologists, geneticists, bioethicists, infectious disease experts, and of course psychologists. Dr. Stea says,

“There is a lot that psychology can bring to the table. We’re trained extensively in science, we’re trained in critical thinking, and we’re trained to understand the ways in which we interpret information and the world more generally. I’ve personally applied these skills to communicate to the public through mainstream media channels, such as articles about tackling health-related misinformation, like how to address vaccine hesitancy and how to identify fake science news.”

This coalition of scientists is dedicated to debunking the misinformation that is out there now. They also want to do the same, as quickly as possible, after a new false narrative emerges online. And there are a lot of them – Bill Gates is microchipping you through vaccines, the numbers are being inflated to control people somehow, alternative medicine cures the virus, the list goes on. And on, and on, and on. Add to that the already loud and vocal anti-vaccination movement that predated the pandemic, and it looks like an uphill battle. But it’s one Dr. Stea is ready to wage.

“Science is an ever-evolving process, and sometimes there are disagreements between scientists. I think for the first time, science is being exposed to the public the way it has always been – as an iterative, evolving process. But for people who are unaware of that, sometimes it can be kind of jarring and it can leave people vulnerable to traps of misinformation. You’ll hear anecdotes, or testimonials on Facebook about how vaccines are extremely dangerous or how Bill Gates caused all this or something. And we want to take accurate, science-informed information and amplify that.”

The initiative is not just scientists railing against misinformation, it is designed for regular Canadians, and regular people around the world, to help amplify the message in the name of public health and protecting their communities.

Your brother-in-law posted online that the COVID-19 was engineered in a lab in China. Your former boss is constantly posting memes about the vaccine being unsafe and untested. Hank from high school is pretty convinced the virus itself is a hoax, meant to distract us all from Pizzagate. Go to #ScienceUpFirstFirst.com, the site that’s designed to help you in combatting these conspiracy theories and false information. They’re fully committed to this fight and want to provide you with the tools to join in as well so that you are not railing against misinformation alone.

Dr. Stea’s day job involves providing psychological treatment in a specialized interdisciplinary outpatient clinic for people who present with both substance use and psychiatric disorders. With the pandemic, he and his colleagues have helped people with these conditions adapt and cope with the additional stressful layer of COVID-related anxiety and uncertainty.. Social media, and the conspiracy theories it perpetuates, does not help. And the volume of these things is only increasing. And of course, that’s where Dr. Stea is spending a fair amount of his spare time.

In 1963, Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater refused to distance himself from the John Birch Society, a powerful conservative group claiming that the bulk of the American congress, including President Eisenhower, were communist conspirators. Later the JBS would push the bogus claim that laetrile, a chemical compound found mostly in the seeds of apricots, was a cure for cancer. In 1964, Goldwater was defeated in one of the biggest landslides in American history, and the John Birch Society was forced out of respectable Republican circles

In 2019, Marjorie Taylor Greene voiced support for the theory that the school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School was a “false flag” attack. She also advanced the conspiracy theory that there was a video – though she hadn’t seen it herself because it does not exist – circulating on the “dark web” of Hillary Clinton cutting off a young girl’s face and wearing it herself as a mask while drinking that young girl’s blood. In November of 2020, Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to Congress as a Republican Representative from Georgia.

Much of this, of course, stems from Donald Trump who was the biggest source of disinformation and conspiracy theories in the world. Disinformation about COVID-19 is estimated to have declined by 73% on Twitter since Trump had his account disconnected by the platform. And so now may be the perfect time to strike. If genuine science and fact can flood the internet at the same pace as false stories can be spread by trolls, then perhaps we have a chance to stem what the WHO calls a “global infodemic”.

It’s an uphill battle, but it is one that must be waged. Dr. Stea and his colleagues are ready to take it on – and they’re in it for the long haul.

To join the #ScienceUpFirst movement, follow @ScienceUpFirst on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and please visit www.ScienceUpFirst.com to learn more.

Adrienne Leslie-Toogood

“I learned what it’s like to do something for the last time and now know that it’s not about doing it perfectly but about the privilege of getting to do it and staying connected to my why.”
- Leanne Taylor, Canadian paratriathlete, #TerrificTuesdays

Dr. Adrienne Leslie-Toogood is sitting on a Bosu ball during our Zoom chat. This suddenly seems like a pretty great idea – a way to maintain a little bit of physical fitness during that portion of our days when we are most sedentary in front of our computer cameras. This may not have been Dr. Leslie-Toogood’s motivation for choosing the Bosu ball – there is a perfectly serviceable office chair right next to her – but that chair has been commandeered by a rather presumptuous dog. The presence of a dog enhances any Zoom call, and so this is a perfectly acceptable arrangement.

The pandemic has forced us all to figure out acceptable arrangements, the kind we might not have imagined a year ago. Very often those new arrangements turn out to be positive, and sometimes they break new ground. Such is the case with Dr. Leslie-Toogood’s work, and with her clients, many of whom are elite athletes across Canada and, currently, around the world.

Usually, those athletes are in their own little bubbles (not the COVID kind of bubble, but rather a “hardcore athletes striving for the same goal” bubble). Olympic athletes rarely interact with NCAA divers. Top-level gymnasts don’t tend to run in the same circles as paratriathletes. Even within the Olympic community there’s little crossover between say, cyclists and water polo players. That is, until now – when Dr. Leslie-Toogood and her team initiated #TerrificTuesdays, to connect elite athletes from all different sports, and all different levels, to support one another during the pandemic.

This involves weekly Zoom calls with NCAA players whose seasons have been canceled, Olympic hopefuls who missed out on a chance of competing at Tokyo in 2020, internationally ranked table tennis players whose tournaments have been delayed time and again, and basketball players in a tight bubble in Europe where their teams are located.

Those calls have been extraordinarily productive, as elite athletes from all walks of life connect virtually over great distances and share their experiences and their wisdom with one another. Dr. Leslie-Toogood and her team collate some of that wisdom and share it on the Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba Twitter account, @cscmanitoba, under the hashtag #TerrificTuesdays.

“We are all trying to be excellent people, but the path to that excellence is unique.”
- Michelle Sawatzky-Koop, Canadian volleyball player, #TerrificTuesdays

The #TerrificTuesdays program started to invite in outside guests, like dieticians to provide cooking lessons. Before long, it was being replicated in other programs across Canada as the athletes involved found it so helpful and productive. Now an expert on Zoom technology, Dr. Leslie-Toogood decided to expand her technological prowess even further.

She started a podcast.

Heroes In Our Midst is available - on her website www.drtoogood.com and features interviews with dozens of incredible Olympic and Paralympic athletes, coaches, referees, athletic therapists and more. What Dr. Leslie-Toogood wanted to do was to tell the story about the human being behind the performance. She says, “sport is not about how fast you run but about who you become in the process of trying to run fast.” The podcast series is really about who these athletes have become, as much as it is about their sport and their process.

“I love the freedom you get from riding a bicycle. I’m free to go explore anywhere in the world, anywhere there’s a road. I can go to the mountains. I can go find beautiful places. I can go fast and push myself. I really just love cycling for that.”
- Leah Kirchmann, Olympic cyclist, Heroes in Our Midst

Then there’s a book club for athletes – one of the books they read was Win In The Dark by Joshua Medcalf. Dr. Leslie-Toogood says “for me it was a metaphor for the time. So many athletes are training without anyone watching, doing a lot of work in the dark”. Like everything else, a book club is a tool for conversation. There’s more, but at this point it would be easier to list everything she is not doing than everything she is doing!

It’s all about creating community and connection. Dr. Leslie-Toogood has connections with athletes all over Manitoba and the world, but until now those athletes had little connection with one another. Now they’re dealing with a devastating global pandemic, the postponement or loss of some of their dreams, and the struggle to stay motivated while isolated or in quarantine. But they’re not dealing with those things alone. They are connecting with others going through similar experiences and sharing their stories in an effort to help as many people as they can.

One hopes that when life returns to a semblance of normality, some of these things will remain. It would be great if #TerrificTuesdays stuck around, and if the podcast series continued (there is a second season planned for April, featuring people in other disciplines with whom Dr. Leslie-Toogood works as well. Firefighters, teachers, RCMP, and more). And who can’t get behind a good book club?

One thing that will almost certainly evolve before the pandemic ends, however, is the relationship between Dr. Leslie-Toogood, her assertive dog, her comfortable office chair and her less-comfortable Bosu ball.

@cscmanitoba – twitter handle #TerrificTuesdays

https://cscm.ca/ - Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba

https://drtoogood.com/heroes-in-our-midst/  - Podcast