Portraits de psychologues

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

Andrew Ryder

Why have some countries dealt with the COVID-19 so much better than others? How is it that others have fared so very, very badly? It’s not always as simple as good government vs. bad, or effective messaging vs. chaotic messaging. More often, it comes down to the people themselves. Do they tend to be rule-followers? Is there societal pressure to take public health seriously, and how do citizens of those countries respond to that pressure?

These are the type of questions that are of particular interest to Dr. Andrew Ryder. An Associate Professor and, currently, Associate Chair in the psychology department at Concordia University, Dr. Ryder self-identifies as a ‘cultural-clinical’ psychologist. His research is largely about how cultural context shapes mental illness like depression and anxiety. With COVID now, there are some new avenues to explore.

“I’ve turned my attention to whether culture may be involved in shaping physical illnesses, which we’re accustomed to seeing as strictly biological. Rather than retooling myself as a COVID-19 researcher, what I’ve been doing is applying the cultural-clinical framework to research that is being done by many of my colleagues.”

Of course, no country is a cultural monolith. Within every larger society are smaller cultural groups, each with their own ethno-cultural backgrounds, residing in different parts of the country and having different socio-economic statuses. And the difference between those groups in terms of combatting the pandemic can be stark, even within the borders of the same country. And on an even smaller scale, each individual within each community differs on their belief, approach, and conformity to the larger group ethos.

But let’s begin on the “macro” level – how might culture be involved in shaping physical illness?

“It’s an infectious disease, and an infectious disease that is socially transmitted. You have to get it from someone. Many of the things we are being told to stop the spread are behavioural. For example, wearing a mask. You might say ‘well that’s the same behaviour everywhere’, but it isn’t really. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, it’s doing that thing you always do even when you just have the sniffles. For another cultural group it might be doing something absolutely novel.”

Then on the “meso” level – how might smaller cultural groups within those larger societies approach this?

“We know of some cultural groups where [mask-wearing] immediately seems like an imposition on liberty. Like there’s some kind of core cultural value that is violated by the government telling you to do something unusual. Your psychological state is different when you’re doing something that feels normal versus abnormal under the circumstances.”

What ends up happening, says Dr. Ryder, is that while we all feel like we’re doing the same things – mask wearing, social distancing – those things actually play out very differently for different people. He has spoken to some clients who were into the second week of lockdown before they even knew there was a lockdown. Computer programmers who lived in their basement and had their lives changed very little. Then there are others whose entire way of life was upended overnight.

So what, given the significant differences across cultures on a large scale and a small scale, should be done? Dr. Ryder co-authored a fact sheet for the CPA on Culture and COVID-19 with his colleagues Dr. Maya Yampolsky, Dr. John Berry, and Dr. Saba Safdar, that sought to answer that question. (‘Why Does Culture Matter to COVID-19’)

“An unprecedented number of people worldwide are concerned about the same disease and are experiencing broadly the same distancing measures. As such, there may be a temptation to focus on the similarities. At a minimum, policymakers, healthcare workers, and the public at large should keep in mind that the pandemic experience may be very different for different people. These differences are shaped by the society in which one lives, the communities of which one is a part, and culturally-shaped individual variations. Complicating matters, appreciation for difference does not mean treating all responses equally when it comes to effectively mitigating a pandemic. Clearly, some cultural patterns are more effective than others.”

Cultural differences seem to be enormous factors both in containing the spread of COVID-19 and in accelerating it. Some countries are doing exceptionally well, others not so much. And no one factor can determine why but Dr. Ryder points to a few factors. One is the “tightness” of a society, meaning the level of uniformity and narrowness in that society’s understanding and expectation is when it comes to rules, norms and customs. This seems to correlate directly with the degree to which that society accepts and implements public health guidelines. Another is “relational mobility”, which is a measure of how much people move around, and especially how much they move around between various social groups. This tends to correlate with the speed of the spread in those societies.

Never before has there been an event like the COVID-19 pandemic that can highlight the cultural differences in communities, cities, regions, and countries around the world, in terms of how they respond. For self-identified cultural-clinical psychologists like Dr. Ryder, that presents a whole new fascinating series of studies upon which to build his understanding and his work.

His attention is now turning toward cultural variations in how we will recover. Who will bounce back first, and who will bounce back better? How will the logistics of vaccines be handled, and how will those logistics intersect with public concerns about those vaccines? More than anything else, Dr. Ryder’s interest is in the long term. How effectively will different people in different societies respond to the crisis, learn from it, and be better prepared down the line for any future similar outbreaks?

Some of those questions are being answered right now, others will take some time before a larger picture emerges. In the meantime, each of us is fighting a devastating global disaster in our own way. It’s the difference in the ways each of us fight it that could be most illustrative in mitigating potential future damage the next time something like COVID-19 occurs.

Ian Nicholson

It is a tough time to work in a hospital. Hospitals are, of course, one of the first places to have felt the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even those that are not currently nearing capacity are well aware that an increase in COVID-19 cases in their community could suddenly make beds scarce. Across Ontario, they are planning ahead for this by ensuring there are beds available, all the while dealing with patients in as safe a manner as possible and supporting vaccination clinics for the rest of the community.

London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) is one of those hospitals. In addition to juggling advance planning, vaccination, and the safety of staff and patients, it has a few other balls in the air as well. An acute care teaching hospital, they have changed the way instruction is delivered across the board. They are also a children’s hospital, and provide a broad range of other physical and mental health acute care services, all of which have had to make major alterations as a result of COVID-19.

Much of this comes under the purview of Dr. Ian Nicholson, the Manager for Psychology and Audiology at LHSC. While COVID-19 in London was not, at the time we spoke, overwhelming the hospital and pushing it to capacity, LHSC was accepting patients from elsewhere in the province where the strain was more severe, and the possibility that such a thing could happen in London was always in the back of everyone’s mind. This means that Dr. Nicholson has to perform a delicate balancing act between keeping his staff safe, both physically and mentally, and providing psychological services to the patients that come through his hospital. Said Dr. Nicholson,

“The primary difficulty from a management standpoint is the balancing of the need to provide psychological services to patients in a way that is both safe to the patients as well as safe to staff. Given the broad ways in which psychologists work with patients in acute care hospitals, that means a broad range of strategies that have to be used to keep everybody safe during this pandemic.”

Those strategies are myriad, and most involve virtual technologies. Students who do not require work hours in a hospital to graduate are not going in. Psychology Residents are being trained to provide care virtually, often by teachers who are themselves just learning how to deliver virtual care. The supervision of residents and their educational activities are also being done virtually. The team of psychologists is still going into the hospital itself for work, but providing much of their expertise virtually, from offices elsewhere in the building.

Dr. Nicholson still goes in to the hospital every day. He gets screened at the front doors, just like the rest of the staff and the patients who enter the building. He spends the bulk of the day in his office, as he did before. The biggest change he sees in his own job is that he misses the casual discussions that would occur thanks to a chance meeting somewhere in the hospital – walking down the hallway, standing in the cafeteria line, those quick chats about a new idea or a new approach.

“In management, very often you have the meeting, but then you also have the chat before the meeting, or the meeting after the meeting to follow up on one of the items. Those things aren’t happening as much now. When you have these virtual meetings (we use WebEx at my hospital) there’s very little opportunity for schmoozing or chit-chat. This makes it more difficult to have the conversations you normally would around other things.”

Much like psychologists in other hospitals, one of the things Dr. Nicholson is seeing in staff is the impact this pandemic is having. Not that they are putting in longer hours than they normally do, but the added layers of protection mean that every procedure, every intake, is a little more difficult now. Constantly thinking about the pandemic takes its toll, as does being prepared for a wave that could come at any time. And, like elsewhere in the province, the pandemic is affecting both the home and work lives of all staff.  Thankfully, he believes we are rounding this corner with something of a light at the end of the tunnel – a light that starts at the London Health Sciences Centre.

At the direction of the Government of Ontario, the hospital has set up a vaccination clinic, and they are vaccinating people as quickly as they can, as much as their supply allows. Based on direction from the Ministry of Health, the health units are prioritzing  staff and residents of long-term care facilities, but are hoping that with more vaccine supply they can move on to the hospital staff and physicians shortly.

When the end of the pandemic does come, it will be thanks to the efforts of hospitals like London Health Sciences Centre. On that day, it will still be tough to work in a hospital. But rather than being the place where they watched the pandemic begin, they will be able to look at their workplace as the place where it began to end.

Gabrielle Pagé

“Chronic pain has always been one of the more neglected areas within the health care system. Within the context of the pandemic, we didn’t expect that to improve – rather, the opposite.”

Dr. Gabrielle Pagé is an assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the Université de Montréal. She is also a clinical psychologist working out of the Montreal General Hospital specializing in chronic pain conditions. When COVID-19 struck, Dr. Pagé and her team decided now was the time to move more toward an advocacy role, to inform the public about chronic pain, and to make this a larger part of the overall health care discussion.

They began by launching a Canada-wide survey of people experiencing chronic pain, and found out that over the first few weeks of the pandemic and the lockdown, 2/3 of them reported that their pain was getting worse. This was in April-May, right as the first wave was rising across all provinces. The idea that most people’s chronic pain would get worse at this time was an expected result given the magnified difficulties to access pain treatment, increased stress and social isolation.

What was less expected – and almost shocking for Dr. Pagé and her team – was that a small group, 5-10% of respondents, actually reported that their pain had been lessened during this time.

Stress is a big predictor of the severity of chronic pain. When patients are stressed out, they experience more pain – more pain leads to more stress, which leads to…well, you get the idea. So it was very surprising that such a large number of people reported an improvement. Maybe they were going for walks, taking the time to connect with family members, or were laid off from a job that had been causing the bulk of their stress. Dr. Pagé can’t say what the cause is, or was, but she is determined to find out.

As I’m speaking with Dr. Pagé, her team is wrapping up a follow-up study to the one they conducted in May. Will the outcomes be similar, or will something new present itself? They should know soon enough. Also, as we’re speaking, Montreal is entering Day One of the big winter lockdown. Curfews in place, all non-essential businesses closed, and the multidisciplinary pain clinic in the Montreal General Hospital is deciding how to move forward.

Dr. Pagé’s clients, for the most part, have been receptive to virtual therapy. Even the group therapy programs which were a concern seem to have adapted well.

“The social bond, the connection that they make and just being around other people who get what it’s like to have pain every day, is one of the central elements of group psychotherapy in chronic pain. So we were wondering how that would translate into a virtual format, being able to see people only through a screen. We’re doing a qualitative research study around this. And while it’s very preliminary, so far it appears that the screen is not a barrier for them to create bonds between one another.”

Because of the nature of the work, however, many of Dr. Pagé’s clients either don’t have access to computers, phones, or tablets – or are unable to use them. For this reason, the clinic has moved to a more hybrid form of care. Group sessions and many individual meetings are still conducted online, but for those who are unable, or uncomfortable doing so, the clinic remains open for in-person masked and distanced visits. While it`s great to be able to offer this service, it`s quite a challenge to demonstrate presence and empathy during therapy through a mask and face shield!

This means Dr. Pagé still goes into the hospital, in one of Canada’s COVID hotspots. She gets screened for symptoms at the door goes through the protocols every time and then she goes home to an 8-year-old who is, at the time of this writing, doing virtual schooling, and a 4-year-old boy going to daycare.

It can be a demanding situation. Thankfully, Dr. Pagé does not experience chronic pain herself. But she is doing everything she can to collect data and get the message out. It’s stressful to have pain. And it`s painful to be stressed. There is a vicious cycle there, and one that is under-recognized in the overall health care system. A system that is starting to realize, more than ever before, where all those gaps lie.

Jenn Gordon

The pandemic, and the resulting lockdown, has not affected everyone equally. This is true across nearly every demographic, including the most highly educated among us. In a survey of almost 1,000 academic faculty members, it was found that parents of young children were less productive and worse off all around – especially, and most significantly, women who were parents of those young children. Women like Dr. Jenn Gordon.

Dr. Gordon is an associate professor at the University of Regina, and a Canada Research Chair in the bio-psychosocial determinants of women’s mental health. She is also the mom of three very young children. Her husband is an accountant. That meant that when the pandemic first started, causing lockdowns back in March of 2020, Dr. Gordon’s husband was in the thick of a suddenly more complicated tax season.

With her husband working long hours preparing taxes, their children gravitated toward Mom – even though Mom had a huge amount of work to do herself. In addition to her work with the University of Regina, the research she does on the effects of estrogen on the mood of menopausal women, and her work with the Women’s Mental Health Research Unit, Dr. Gordon is also the editor for the Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine newsletter at the CPA. It was the section newsletter that sparked the idea for this study.

Dr. Gordon and Dr. Justin Presseau, the Chair of the Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Section, were discussing article ideas for the newsletter. Dr. Gordon says,

“I suggested a piece that talked about academics, and the tough time that faculty are having. Particularly around parenthood, and juggling having kids at home while working and that sort of thing. [Dr. Presseau] suggested that instead of just a piece, why don’t we survey profs across Canada and ask how they’re doing. So we did.”

Almost 1,000 professors responded to the survey, and many of the results were as expected. Most experienced a decrease in work satisfaction, in productivity and publications and grant submissions – with data collection being totally on hold at that time. What was more surprising however, was the size of the gap in those areas between academic faculty who had kids under the age of 13, and everybody else. And then the even bigger gap between men and women who were parents to those young children.

Women were worse off compared to men. Fewer grant submissions, fewer first-author publications, and an ever-widening gap in work satisfaction. Dr. Gordon acknowledges that this survey represents only a slice in time, a snapshot of where we were when the pandemic and the lockdowns began. A follow-up study is in the works, to see whether these effects diminished over time or increased. Her situation today hearkens back to concerns Dr. Gordon had when she first decided to become a researcher several years ago – the idea of work-life balance.

“Could I have a family if I was a researcher, would I have to give up my life? I was always flip-flopping, but over time I decided that I really love research, and the choice became clear.”

While she found that work-life balance soon after embarking on a career in research, specifically research into hormone levels and estrogen levels and how they affect the mood of menopausal women, the pandemic has altered that balance significantly – both for the participants in her survey, and for Dr. Gordon herself. But it has also provided her with an interesting, and timely, research study that, depending on how long the pandemic lasts, might produce more studies down the road on academic faculty, gender disparities, and work-life balance for parents of young kids. Parents like Jenn herself.

Steven Taylor

“I knew a pandemic was coming, we all did. But I didn’t think it would be quite so soon.”

When Dr. Steven Taylor says “we all” knew a pandemic was coming, he means infectious disease experts, world health authorities, epidemiologists and mathematical modelers - and psychologists like him, who work in this space. He does not mean the rest of us – the general public who were, for the most part, blissfully unaware that such a global disaster was looming. Those of us who thought of pandemics and epidemics as something that devastated one part of the world while staying mostly contained to that region. Ebola, SARS, H1N1 – we’ve lived through those and, as regular Canadians, they haven’t changed our lives a whole lot.

This time, the pandemic has changed our lives. And although he saw it coming, Dr. Taylor was not exempt from the disruption. Of course clinical work, teaching, research, and interviews have all been moved online. This is something for which Dr. Taylor’s unit was better prepared than some others – but it is his leisure time passion that may have taken the biggest hit. He loves scuba diving and super-macro photography. In December, when news of the pandemic first broke in Wuhan, he was in the Galapagos taking extreme close-up portrait photos of colourful sea slugs and other marine life. Thankfully, there is some interesting marine life to photograph off the coast of BC, but those opportunities are understandably fewer and farther between than they once were.

Dr. Taylor’s initial publisher was one of us regular people in the sense that they thought of a global pandemic as an ethereal, far-off concept. When he wrote his book The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease, his American publisher rejected it. Who wants to hear about some unlikely hypothetical catastrophe anyway? Thankfully, a second publisher thought there was some value there and agreed to publish the book. It came out in October. Of 2019.

It is the first comprehensive look at the psychology behind every aspect of a pandemic. The initial public response. Panic buying. Conspiracy theories and xenophobia. Adherence to, or refusal to follow, public health guidelines.

“What really surprised me was that all the phenomena that had been described previously unfolded almost like clockwork throughout 2020. It’s one thing to synthesize the historical literature and say X, Y, and Z are what happens – it’s a completely different thing to see those things happening in real time. That’s the astonishing thing for me – that everything that has happened before is happening during this pandemic, except on a grander scale and faster.”

Dr. Taylor points to the 24-hour news cycle, social media, and the fact that we are all digitally interconnected as the reasons for the acceleration in behaviours humanity has seen before. There was a major backlash against a public mandate to wear masks back in 1918 during the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ outbreak. There were conspiracy theories during a Zika virus epidemic a few years ago that never really went away, and are being recycled today as the conspiracy theories we see pop up on our Facebook timelines related to COVID. All that was old is new again.

“There’s a very interesting article from the New York Times in 1918 where they cited one of the health authorities. He thought there was some credence to the theory that the ‘Spanish Flu’ was being caused by German U-Boat submariners coming to shore in Manhattan, getting out of their U-Boats, and going into cinemas to spread germs.”

It is stories like this, and interviews with epidemiologists and disease modelers, that convinced Dr. Taylor that The Psychology of Pandemics was an important endeavour. Those interviews, and those stories, resurfaced in 2018 with the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic. As he absorbed those stories he realized that a plurality of infectious disease experts believed that there would be a global pandemic within the decade. And that it would be a flu, likely caused by a corona virus. Dr. Taylor also recognized that there was a surprising lack of psychological literature on the subject.

“It’s all psychological. Psychology is essential to the spread of these diseases – that is, people choosing to travel – and also essential to containment, because all containment measures require people to do agree to do stuff. Agree to wash your hands, to cover your cough, to get vaccinated, to wear a mask, to maintain physical distancing.”

Dr. Taylor and his team have, of course, been staggeringly busy since the first mention of the virus in Wuhan, and have been studying the psychology of COVID-19, specifically, since December. They have published 6 or 8 papers, and have another 5 or 6 under review (it’s tough to remember exact numbers when you’re doing so many!)

“There has been more research conducted on pandemics in the past 12 months than has been conducted for all other pandemics in the history of human existence.”

There is now enough material for a second Psychology of Pandemics book, describing how all the phenomena we see are interconnected. From vaccination non-adherence, to mask rebellion, to disregard for distancing, to COVID-related emotional distress, excess alcohol consumption, and general coping during lockdown. None of which is particularly new, but all of which has a new context and better data and can build on the historical findings laid out in the first volume.

Dr. Taylor believes that people are resilient, and that we are not going to be wearing masks for the rest of our lives or becoming germophobes. We will one day get back to doing the things we love to do, even though that is likely to come too late for him to take his scheduled scuba diving trip in South Africa in June.

There will, however, be another global pandemic. Hopefully it is decades away, and not two months after the release of Volume 2 of The Psychology of Pandemics. But when it does arrive, we will be better equipped, as global citizens, to handle it. We’ll be more prepared thanks to the work Dr. Taylor did putting together the historical information last year, and the work he and his team are doing to learn everything they can this year.

Will the follow-up book be called The Psychology of Pandemics Volume Two: I Told You So? Almost certainly not. But it could be.

Meghan Norris – The Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science

Throughout Psychology Month (February) we have been highlighting people who have completed advanced psychology degrees and gone on to work in a field outside clinical practice and academia. Some work in the aviation industry, like Marais Bester or Gregory Craig. Others are business owners, like Susan Underhill and Lauren Florko. And still more are government scientists, like Natalie Jones and Chrissy Chubala.

Part of this campaign has been designed to show people in general what psychology is, and what people trained in the discipline do all around us. Another goal has been to show students what a wealth of possibilities await at the end of a psychology degree. It is in this pursuit that our campaign has intersected with that of Dr. Meghan Norris, a social psychologist and the undergraduate chair in psychology at Queens University.

Meghan has created an open-source (FREE online) book, The Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science. It is a guide for psychology students featuring all the things she wishes she had known as a psychology student herself. This begins with obvious practical advice for the job-seeking student. The best way to construct an email, leave a voicemail, or ask for a letter of reference. It moves on to things that might not be top-of-mind. How to dress at a conference. Where to wear your nametag. Which plate is which at a formal dinner setting. And how to practice holding food in your left hand at a reception so your right is free for shaking hands.

The Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science contains a lot of information about the possible career paths open to those with a background in psychology. There is a list in the first chapter of all the skills upon which employers are currently placing a premium. They include skills related to leadership, teamwork, communication (written and oral), problem-solving, work ethic, initiative, adaptability, and analytic and technical skills. All areas where Meghan realized psychology students tend to tick all the boxes.

There are some practical and specific job possibilities included in the book, the way we’ve included them in our Psychology Month campaign. Community mental health worker (like Evangeline Danseco), grassroots organizer (like Amanda Parriag), community development (like Troy Forcier), program or project director (like Alexandra Thompson), policy analyst (like Natalie Jones), the list goes on and on. But it does more than that. The Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science is designed a little more like a roadmap.

As Meghan says, the earlier students start thinking about this stuff, the more opportunities they’re going to have. The work of career development is incredibly important, but it doesn’t tend to feel urgent for people. You can’t start networking a week before submitting a job application. Chipping away at small healthy behaviours when it comes to a career is a good thing to do as early as you can. And once you have started down the path to an education in psychology, a world of possibilities awaits.

Leanna Verrucci

Leanna has a Master’s in Child Development from Carleton University, and that degree has carried her all over the world, from Toronto to Ottawa and then back to Toronto and then Ottawa. With quite a bit of time in Tuscany tucked in the middle. Leanna is the Director of Marketing and Membership at the Canadian Psychological Association, but her journey to get here has taken many turns.

She has worked in television, as a field producer and reporter for CBC TV and other stations. She started Food & Leisure newspaper here in Ottawa back in the 90s before selling it. She has been a hiking and biking guide, a communications professor, and the Director of Bespoke Travel. There were also stints as a Marketing Manager, a Senior Brand Manager, a Communications Director and, more recently, the Managing Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Algonquin College.

It’s a lengthy resume, and it’s probably longer but I couldn’t be bothered clicking ‘next page’ on LinkedIn. I had just one question for Leanna – how does all this tie together, and how did psychology play a role?

“The one through-line in all my work has been communications. In television, newspapers, travel, and marketing it all really is about communication. In addition to learning how to do research and gather and analyze data, the main thing psychology taught me was how to speak to people, how to listen to them, and the right questions to ask. It’s important as a manager to know what motivates each individual, and how to play to their strengths.”

In the time she has been at the CPA, Leanna has built a cohesive and complimentary team. Yussra, with her sharp analytic mind and quiet persona. Kathryn, who has terrific people skills and a gregarious demeanour. I’m probably good at some stuff too. And, of course, Leanna - who holds it all together with spreadsheets, forward thinking, and strategic plans that make our lives easier and create an environment in which we enjoy coming to work every day.

Leigh Greiner

When she was in school, completing her PhD in Forensic Psychology at Carleton University, Dr. Leigh Greiner learned from experts in psychopathy, risk assessment, female offenders, sex offenders, youthful offenders, and more. All were areas of interest then, and all remain relevant to Leigh now as the Director of Research and Strategic Planning for BC Corrections. She leads a talented and diverse multi-disciplinary staff with backgrounds in mathematics, criminology, education, and many other disciplines.

“My education gave me a solid understanding of so many areas of forensic psychology, including where the field has been and where it’s going, and evidence-based practice more broadly in Corrections. As my role touches so many aspects of our business, this breadth of knowledge has been so useful, as have the relationships I built while completing my degrees—many of these relationships I have maintained in my current role and are people with whom I continue to work collaboratively today!”

Day to day, Leigh and her team are responsible for examining the effectiveness of correctional programs, assessing the need for new jails, providing data to inform policy or practice decisions,  working to improve the quality and usefulness of the organization’s data, providing research expertise when developing new correctional programs…and the list goes on. Their portfolio is extremely large, and they are rarely left twiddling their thumbs.

It’s the variety that Leigh enjoys most.

“Every day is different, and each day brings new problems to dissect and analyze… and hopefully solve! I’ll admit that at times it can be challenging to juggle all the various demands placed on our unit, as we support the research and data needs of the entire branch. However, being part of an organization that values evidence and wants to make decisions based on data really makes my job easy.  Being able to see the impact our work has on the organization and, though less directly, on the individuals in custody and those under community supervision makes the job very fulfilling.”

A wide scope of knowledge is great preparation for a wide scope of responsibilities. And in BC, from evaluating programs designed to help offenders to change their behaviour, to determining how effective body scanners are at detecting contraband, Leigh and her team are right in the thick of it.

Marais Bester

Despite some tragic news stories in the past few years, air travel remains the safest mode of mass transportation. It can seem otherwise, as plane crashes make the news far more often than motorcycle accidents and sinking boats. But a lot goes into putting planes in the air, and just as much effort goes into keeping people safe while they’re up there.

A lot of those safety protocols are the purview of a rapidly-growing discipline, that of aviation psychology. Dr. Marais Bester has been in that field for more than five years, since graduating with a PhD in Industrial Psychology from the University of South Africa. Seven months ago, he moved from Dubai to Qatar to become a Manager of Assessments and Psychology at Qatar Airways.

Working with a team of two other Industrial/Organizational Psychology PhDs, Marais is responsible for ensuring that the personnel operating Qatar Airways aircraft are healthy, supported, and working well with their teams. This begins with psychometrics for talent acquisition (the job interview process) and continues through talent development (workshops, trust, resilience and team building).

Pilots must be resilient and cope well with pressure. They also must be one of those rare individuals who are both meticulous rule followers and are able to think on their feet and act very quickly. The cabin crew must be open to diversity and embrace new experiences, and have a high aptitude for teamwork and cooperation.

Like the employees with whom he works, Marais is always learning and changing at his own job. He is implementing best practices and creating new standards all the time. He maintains membership in the British Psychological Society and the European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP), to connect with like-minded people in this quickly growing field.

After a tragic incident in 2015 when a German co-pilot took his own life, and the lives of his passengers with him, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) has required airlines to have psychologists on staff. This is one of the reasons the field is growing so quickly around the world, which Marais thinks is wonderful – after all, it will make air travel even safer than it already is. He quotes Richard Branson:

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

So Marais and his team take care of their employees, through career facilitation and coaching, career guidance, psychometrics and team building. And in doing so they are not only helping those pilots and crew members in their lives, they are helping to make the skies safer for all of us.

Natalie Jones

Dr. Natalie Jennifer Jones wears many hats. Singer-songwriter, perpetual learner, yoga enthusiast, cat person. Today though, we’re going to talk about just one of those hats. The one she wears as a Senior Program Evaluation Officer with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

What this means is that she is part of a team that examines the effectiveness and the efficiency of federal granting programs. They determine whether these funding programs are achieving the goals they were designed to achieve. They go into the field to interview the recipients of those grants, they do data analysis, and a vast range of other things on any given day.

(A note for those who are looking to obtain SSHRC grants – Natalie has nothing to do with that process. So buttering her up will not help you achieve this goal. That said, if you want to ingratiate yourself to Natalie for any other reason, volunteer at a cat rescue.)

Natalie completed her PhD in Forensic Psychology at Carleton, and SSHRC was not on her radar as a career option. And while she acknowledges that the job she’s currently doing is outside her area of study from a content perspective, she says,

“All of the research skills, and core analytical skills, that I developed in grad school are highly transferable to my current work environment. Everything from research design to quantitative methods, those are skills that I use every day. So there’s actually a lot of overlap – it’s really interesting, and I love working there.”

Many of us can attest that our co-workers make all the difference in whether we like our job or dread going to work. And so it is with Natalie, whose favourite thing about SSHRC is her colleagues. Half of them work with Natural Science and Engineering Research Canada (NSERC), as theirs is a joint evaluation division with SSHRC. Many have psychology backgrounds just like she does, and many have a background in a wide variety of other scientific fields. They all work together toward a common goal.

“It’s really important to have a group of colleagues that you get along with and that you respect. They’re all very good at what they do – a lot of attention to detail and they care about quality. We’re very like-minded in that way. I’m proud to call them my friends. We help each other out professionally, but I know they always have my back in my personal life as well.”

That personal life is as busy for Natalie as her professional life. Her hobbies include: enrolling in a 16-month graduate diploma program in Public Policy and Program Evaluation, which she completed this past December. She suspects that she will still be enrolling in classes and continuing to learn well into her 80s. She’s involved with cat rescue charities, and planning to get back on stage at her local cafés as a singer-songwriter. It’s a safe bet that when she does, the first three or four tables will be packed with scientists and researchers from SSHRC and NSERC.  Natalie’s co-workers and friends, both in the lab and out.

Jen Welter

For much of Psychology Month, we have been putting the spotlight on one job at a time, showcasing the variety of careers populated by people who have advanced degrees in psychology. But what if you didn’t have to pick just one thing? What if you could use your psychology PhD to do everything? Dr. Jen Welter is doing as many things with her psychology PhD (from Capella University) as she possibly can.

She runs girls-only football camps, as well as football-and-tech camps called KickGlass with her partner Mike Brown (former NFL player turned tech entrepreneur). She’s just coming back from being the keynote speaker at VISA’s pitch competition for female founders doing great things in technology and commerce during New York Fashion Week. She’s working on a project with Ryerson University’s Experiential Sports Lab to reach for gender equality in sports media. She’s the executive producer of a TV show called Fangirl, set to debut soon about two superfans who get a chance to run their favourite college football team. She’s even talking about collaborating on a project with high-fashion designer Vivienne Hu, something more street-savvy than high-end.

Before getting to this point, Jen did a whole lot more. Things no one else had ever done, and that most would never consider doing. She was the first female professional football player in a contact position (running back for the Texas Revolution of the Champions Indoor Football League). The first female head football coach in international competition (Team Australia for the 2017 World Championships). And the first female coach in the NFL (2015 with the Arizona Cardinals). She also played on Team USA twice at the world championships, winning gold medals in both 2010 and 2013 (both times defeating Canada).

She tells us that her psychology training and background has come into play throughout all of this. As a football player and coach, she says

“Even as I was learning things in school I would try them out in my own games. Something as simple as sitting on the bench and looking up at people. Your body posture says a lot, and you would never find me with my head down. That was something I learned in psychology – the way we interpret the behaviour of other people, and realizing that the impact you have on your competition is just as relevant between the plays as it is during the plays you make. I still work with athletes on a lot of that to this day, in both big and small ways.”

Jen, in addition to producing TV, breaking barriers for women in sport, collaborating on fashion projects and encouraging young girls to break through preconceptions, is currently working on a follow-up to her book Play Big: Lessons in Being Limitless from the First Woman to Coach in the NFL. The follow-up will focus a lot more on the lowlights of her career than the highlights. She says it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t get spoken about very often, since we all tend to talk about the highs without truly examining disappointments and struggles. For example,

“My first book got turned down by everyone because they said ‘women in football doesn’t sell’. I mean…I’m pretty sure I was the first – how many times have you tried? I’ve done it on the field, and now I have to do it in literature?”

Then, she sums up her entire post-psychology-PhD career in one sentence.

“It’s constantly answering questions that other people have not even known should be, or could be, asked.”

Eva Best

When Eva Best stays up way too late, it’s because she’s gone down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, researching marine animals and getting more and more engrossed in the nesting habits of the leatherback sea turtle. That, or she’s strumming the ukulele, shredding on her Fender Stratocaster, and making music until the wee hours.

Many of the rest of us stay up way too late playing Overdrive City or Disney Magic Kingdoms on our iPad. And we are the people who are of particular interest to companies like Gameloft. Eva is the manager of the qualitative research department in user experience at Gameloft Montreal, one of the biggest mobile gaming companies in Canada. Psychology graduates, and researchers like Eva, are becoming more and more a part of gaming companies as their particular sets of skills are ideally suited to the job. They allow gaming companies, and really any company that has a service or an interface used by human beings, to make decisions based on reports and data that is accurate, correct, complete, and relevant.

Qualitative research in a gaming company is currently more geared toward usability and functionality. Whether an app works, how easy it is to navigate, and so on. Moreso than in the past, the approach to user experience is a ‘holistic’ one, and people with backgrounds in research – especially those whose research experience is in a multidisciplinary environment – are increasingly in demand.

Eva graduated with her Master of Science in psychology from the University of Montreal, then obtained a PMP (Project Management Professional) certification from the Project Management Institute, precisely so she could get a job like this one.

Last year, Eva’s Master’s thesis on the “positivity effect” earned her a Certificate of Academic Excellence from the CPA. The positivity effect is a phenomenon where elderly adults tend to rate negative stimuli as less negative and positive stimuli as more positive than do younger people. Eva’s research provided a ‘proof of concept’ that this trend appears to be almost a straight line from birth, as children rate their responses to stimuli more negatively than do young adults, who in turn report more negative feelings than older adults, and so on.

Her project proposed a new theory on “lifespan emotional development”. One that put the positivity effect at the peak of development by showing that it can be produced in younger people as well. When they are desensitized by exposure to a negative stimulus, even younger people are likely to rate all other stimuli in a more positive way. Even the most neutral (boring) stimulus can feel more positive under these circumstances.

Gaming makes life less boring while in the waiting room or on the bus, for example. Figuring out how to improve your gaming experience is the goal of the qualitative research department. Who better to help create and ensure a positive experience than Eva? If she can make you as interested and invested in a mobile game as she is in gaming, sea turtles and the ukulele, then mission accomplished!

Dr. Lauren Florko

“Consultant” is such a nondescript term, isn’t it? Virtually everyone can style themselves a “consultant” when writing a CV or a LinkedIn profile. Which is why it’s good that Lauren Florko can get a little more specific than simply saying she’s “self-employed” as a “consultant”.

Lauren created Triple Threat Consulting, a firm which provides managerial consulting for a variety of projects - from corporate social responsibility to change management to organizational development. With a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology specializing in workplace stress, Lauren’s statistics training gave her a competitive advantage over similar consultants who come from a HR background.

Triple Threat Consulting plays on the film industry’s play on ‘triple threats’ as she specializes in Talent Management. The “Triple” also plays on the concept of triple bottom lines (planet and people outcomes on top of profits).

Triple Threat Consulting also fills a unique market need with psychological assessments, thanks to Lauren’s training. This means empirically-based strategies with practical implementations. Statistical analysis and reporting to produce key business insights. And the ability to engage a variety of audiences through keynotes and workshops.

The founder of a Multi-disciplined Research Lab, one of Triple Threat’s clients, says:

“She's doing advanced research methodologies...doing hierarchical linear modeling and item response analysis...She is highly motivated, particularly with high end analysis – she gets excited about that. She is very punctual with delivery."

What Lauren likes most about her job, she says, is the work-life balance it affords her. Well that, and of course the excitement she derives from high-end analysis to drive better business decisions.

Heather Orpana

This is an excerpt from a larger article written by Dr. Heather Orpana in this month’s issue of Psynopsis. Click this link to read the whole article.

My path to a career in psychology was in no way a straight one. I started an undergraduate degree in science with a specialization in physics before completing two years of a baccalaureate in nursing and then finally switching to, and graduating with, an honours degree in psychology. After spending a summer as an intern at a non-profit organization writing plain language summaries of research studies that would impact patients, I decided to pursue a career in research and applied for my doctorate. I wanted to be part of the system that creates the evidence used to promote the health of the population.

I completed my doctorate in experimental psychology at the University of Ottawa, at the same time that the university was establishing a multidisciplinary program in Population Health. I was very fortunate to be funded by Health Canada’s National Health Research and Development Program, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research during my doctorate and was hired by Health Canada to conduct policy-relevant data analysis before I had finished my program.

It has been sixteen years since I started my career in public service. During that time, I have worked in three federal departments: Health Canada, Statistics Canada, and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Every single position I have held has benefited tremendously from my training in psychological science. My first analysis project demonstrated the relationship between mental health and healthy living behaviours, in 2003, using Canada’s first national mental health survey. After working for several years at Health Canada, conducting analysis, and contributing to data policy and coordination, I moved to Statistics Canada to focus on research and analysis. There, I engaged in research in the areas of healthy weights, healthy aging, and mental health, all informed by my education in psychology.

Most recently, I have been appointed as a Senior Research Scientist and am working in the Substance-related Harms Division, supporting surveillance and applied research contributions to addressing the opioid overdose crisis. In this role, I advise on research methods and conduct research studies to inform our understanding of how the crisis is evolving.

Public health cannot address the complex problems we are faced with in the 21st century without the knowledge and skills of psychological science researchers. I have yet to find a single public health issue that is not informed by our discipline. Even public health issues that may seem like they belong more in a wet lab, such as anti-microbial resistance, can be addressed only with the incorporation of a behavioural perspective. I hope that other psychological science researchers see their value in contributing to improving the health of all Canadians.

Gregory Craig

One day, you might take a flight from Saskatoon to Dublin. There will be in-flight movies, tiny difficult-to-open bags of peanuts, flight attendants distributing cheap headphones and tiny pillows, and free tiny cans of wine once you’re over international waters. There will, however, be one major difference. On this flight, there will be no pilot.

At least, such a thing is possible. But not until a whole lot more studying is done on the subject. Some of those studies are currently being conducted by Dr. Gregory Craig and a team of human factors researchers at the National Research Council of Canada.

Gregory has been involved in a wide variety of research projects. He’s done research on night vision goggles, displays for infrared cameras for search and rescue, and the design of symbolic information displays for pilots. Currently, he’s involved in examining ‘trust in automation’ to assess pilots’ trust in automatic flight systems.  This ranges from basic elements like an off-the-shelf autopilot to looking at fully autonomous (no pilots) flight.

Gregory spent his formative years at Carleton University, earning a PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 1997. While his current role is mostly unrelated to his studies, he credits the people he met along the way for getting him to where he is today.

“There is a wide gulf between what I studied in university and the type of research that I do now.  The main elements of my university studies that helped were basic experimental design, document editing and data analysis. Much of my training in applied research came from one of my supervisors who was employed at the Communications Research Centre and an adjunct at Carleton. He encouraged me to participate in several of the applied research projects that he worked on for CRC. The other source of applied research thinking came from a course for which I was a teaching assistant at Carleton. The course was a basic introduction to sensation and perception, but the prof teaching the course had a large number of industrial design students in the class. For those students, the prof took the time to explain how basic elements of sensation and perception could be applied to the design of systems and products intended for use by the general population.”

One might expect a psychologist to lead project teams, analyze data, submit research proposals, prepare reports and presentations, and manage projects. But maybe not to design and conduct flight tests, evaluate advanced cockpit technologies, and explore human factors issues for pilots, crew and passengers.

So think about Gregory Craig the next time you’re on a plane – it might be his work that enhanced the technology in the cockpit, or designed the display used to navigate. And while you’re doing that, you might want to check to see if, up front in the cockpit, there’s still a pilot.

Alexandra Thompson

Alexandra Thompson is helping to devise a vision for future scientific exploration, as a Program Leader with the National Research Council of Canada. She manages a large team and a portfolio of science and engineering projects focused on a strategic goal. Specifically, that goal is focused on the ‘High Performance Buildings’ program.

This program, established in 2013, aims to reduce energy emissions in buildings by identifying the industry, scientific, technological and societal issues that could stall the adoption of new technologies. Alexandra is working at knowledge mobilization (the translation of science to action) to ensure the science is used for environmental change. She also has the chance to encourage younger researchers to develop their careers, scientific interests and to have confidence in their abilities.

In 2007, Alexandra obtained her PhD in environmental psychology and human factors from the University of Southampton in the UK. She says her training has aided greatly with, among other things, knowledge mobilization.

“My psychology training has enabled me to ensure good scientific methodologies and statistical analysis are used and the ethics of a project are considered. Also, working in an engineering multi-disciplinary environment understanding the human and societal implications of an engineering project has helped with the applicability of projects to real world conditions or expectations.”

As climate change becomes more and more devastating, and as environmental concerns become the number one national priority, programs like ‘High Performance Buildings’ will be at the forefront of the effort to curb emissions. Knowledge mobilization to that effect is becoming more critical than ever. We’re glad that Alexandra Thompson, and others like her, are working on those exact things. Bringing about the change that is needed to tackle the most serious issue of our time.

Suzanne Simpson

For much of this month, we have been focusing on jobs and careers available to psychology majors once they graduate from school. Suzanne Simpson not only found one of those careers, she helps others find theirs. Suzanne is the founder and CEO of Human Resource Systems Group Ltd. (HRSG), a software-as-a-service talent management firm.

What that means is that her company creates software for human resources departments to simplify their work. Need to build the perfect job description, so you can attract the perfect employee? HRSG has the software for that. Then they have an interview guide built for you, so you can make the correct decision. Now you have a new employee with a job description that puts them and their management on the exact same page. From there, that employee might use one of HRSG’s career pathing programs, complete with assessments and learning resources to help them in their current job today, and to reach their dream jobs tomorrow.

All of this is built based on Suzanne’s training in psychology. She earned her PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Ottawa, and says the training she received there supports the main focus of HRSG’s service and software offering to their clients.

HRSG celebrated 30 years in business in 2019 and offers its services and products to organizations worldwide. HRSG employs professionals trained in Industrial / Organizational and other related disciplines from across Canada and around the world.

It is challenging to build a business, and very rewarding when it comes to fruition. Suzanne takes satisfaction in offering a service that is highly valued by her clients, and embraces the continuous learning and innovation that comes with her role as CEO.

Chrissy Chubala

My name is Chrissy Chubala, and I am a Defence Scientist in Maritime Decision Support at Defence Research & Development Canada’s Atlantic Research Centre. My job is to guide and assist in the development of tools that will help naval personnel make better decisions during mission planning and execution, from the perspective of cognitive psychology. This involves a consideration of human factors, human-computer interactions, team dynamics, and basic cognition.

My training in psychology (PhD, Cognitive Psychology, University of Manitoba 2017) has provided me with both concrete and abstract forms of knowledge that help me in my current role. The concrete skill sets of experimental design and statistical inference are directly applicable to my work, although the constraints and goals of applied research are different enough from those of academia that some relearning and rethinking has had to occur.

Thankfully, the more abstract forms of knowledge provided by my training have positioned me well for this transition. My training in psychology taught me versatility, creativity, and lateral thinking. I have the ability to learn about a new topic very quickly, to creatively apply my existing knowledge and skill sets to new scenarios, and to find connections between seemingly disparate ideas or fields of study. With these abstract skills in hand, I have been able to adapt my more concrete areas of expertise to the requirements of the job.

What I enjoy most about my current position is the level of structure it provides, the direct sense of impact that comes from conducting applied research, and the ability to collaborate and exchange ideas with a very diverse group of scientists.

I receive specific problems to solve but I am free to explore them in any manner I see fit; this provides me with some structure around which to focus my efforts, but enough flexibility to follow my interests. Moreover, the ability to see the direct effects of my research on the lives and work of others is rewarding in a way that my academic career in experimental psychology was not. Finally, I get to work with interesting and brilliant researchers from all areas of study, from physics to chemistry to computer science. Not only do I get to learn new things I would otherwise know nothing about, but my own unique perspective and expertise are a valued part of the whole and I get to teach as much as I learn.

Amy Bucher

“Mad*Pow leverages strategic design and the psychology of motivation to create innovative experiences and compelling digital solutions that are good for people and good for business.”

That is Mad*Pow’s mission statement, ripped right from their webpage. Mad*Pow employs medical doctors and all kinds of behaviour change design experts. But perhaps you would be surprised to learn that Mad*Pow’s behavior change experts come from a variety of training backgrounds. Currently, there is only one person on the team with a PhD in psychology!

That one person is Dr. Amy Bucher, the vice president of behaviour change design at Mad*Pow. Amy brings a unique skill set to her position, and took a rather unique path to get there. She started school at Harvard, doing an undergrad focused on social psychology. From there, she moved on to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour for her Master’s and PhD in Psychology. Although that is the official title of her degree, it was achieved a little over a decade ago in a program that no longer exists.

It was called Organizational Psychology. It was not an Industrial/Organizational program of the type we see offered now, it was more as Amy describes it a “contextualized social psychology program”. That means that when she graduated she was more of a social psychologist, albeit one with a deep knowledge of workplaces and organizations.

Amy realized as she was nearing the end of her schooling that she did not want to go into academia. That track meant specialization, and she wanted to broaden her horizons rather than narrow her focus. She began to work with other researchers and learned many different research methods before graduation. She learned how to dive into information and deal in the “grey areas”. After all, research is always in progress.

That comfort with the “grey areas” has served her well at Mad*Pow, as often clients will ask Amy for definitive answers on how to tackle a problem. She is adept at explaining that while formative research can provide a direction, it can’t often come up with a concrete and foolproof series of steps to take to achieve an aim. It’s important to experiment with different approaches that are specific to the clients’ customers and their needs to figure out the best solution.

Her desire to broaden her scope is also an asset, as Amy thrives on having a variety of projects and problems to work through. She likes being exposed to new things. She says,

“Right now, I’m leading a project to understand what people with a rare genetic condition might be looking for from an online portal to support their condition management. So we’ve designed moderator guides, recruited people with this condition, and recruited people who serve those with this condition to conduct interviews. We’ll be creating output reports with insights from that research, doing a workshop with the client that we will also design, then translating all the insights from the research into designs for this portal.”

Amy says that before starting this project, she had never heard of this particular genetic condition before (it is very rare). Now she’s had the opportunity to learn quite a bit about it and understand more about the day-to-day lives of the people who live with it.

“I feel excited by this type of new knowledge that I don’t think I’d encounter in any other way.”

She’s also excited at the prospect of some new colleagues. There are many different types of researchers at Mad*Pow (which further helps Amy broaden her horizons as she learns from them), but soon there will likely be a few more psychology grads joining the fold. As Amy says, there are now many great opportunities outside academia for graduating researchers. And working alongside Amy seems like a pretty great opportunity.

Liane Davey

“You need to have more conflict.”

This is Dr. Liane Davey’s advice to almost every organization with which she works. These include enormous companies like TD Bank, Amazon, and smaller companies like Shoretel. Chris Burgy, former VP of Strategy at Shoretel, says of Liane and her company 3COze,

“Liane supported us in rolling out a methodology for productive communication and conflict to our top 100 leaders in the company. Without a doubt, I fervently recommend Liane to any company seeking to improve their organization’s accountability, communication methods and for those seeking a fantastic facilitator for strategic level planning.”

3COze is named in conjunction with their mission statement. They seek to transform the way people “communicate, connect, and contribute” in their organizations. Liane is the co-founder and principal of 3COze, and brings her “more conflict” approach to CEOs and senior leadership teams around the country and across the world.

She says the number one thing that’s getting in the way of productivity is that people are avoiding conflict and being passive-aggressive. That means conflict sits unresolved causing a lack of productivity, eroding trust and engagement, and causing stress for individuals.

Liane says the things she learned in obtaining her PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Waterloo are the same ideas she puts into practice today.

“It’s very much applied social psychology. So, issues of motivation, team dynamics, conflict, culture, all the sorts of things that are the bread and butter of organizational psychology have been my whole career.”

And what a career it has been! Not only does Liane work with some of the biggest CEOs and companies around the world, she is also an author (her book The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track is available at online book sellers everywhere), a blogger (at www.lianedavey.com) and a public speaker, bringing her message of productive conflict to corporate crowds everywhere.

She is also a volunteer member of the board of trustees at the Psychology Foundation of Canada (PFC), a charity that brands itself a “child-based (birth-18) mental health promotion organization” thanks in part to Liane’s strategic skills in directing the board and the group. And also her ability to create productive conflict, and not to shy away from uncomfortable conversations.

She first encountered the PFC at a fundraising breakfast twelve years ago, and was impressed by what they were able to do with so few resources. With just a handful of staff members and an army of volunteer facilitators, they were able to create resilience, attachment, and stress management skills in what are now hundreds of thousands of Canadian children every year.

When not writing, blogging, speaking, volunteering, or whipping a group of executives into shape, what does someone like Liane do? Well, she says it’s often important to do things at which you are terrible. With that in mind she just had a Bob Ross paint night with her kids, and the painting now rests proudly in her house. A Bob Ross paint night sounds like just the kind of soothing, mellow thing that might be as far from “conflict” as possible. And even the expert on the subject likely needs a break from conflict now and then, if only for a little while.

Angela Febbraro

What messaging does an extremist group, like ISIS, use to recruit young people to join? Is their messaging different for young men than it is for young women? And how can we create a counter-messaging strategy to dissuade those people from a life of extremism? These are the questions currently being tackled by Angela Febbraro and her team of (mostly social psychologists) at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC).

Angela is a Defence Scientist, and has studied all kinds of issues pertaining to national defence, most of them around gender. Early on, she studied the leadership styles of women in leadership positions in the military. Did they feel the need to conform to a more stereotypically “masculine” leadership style, or were they comfortable forging their own? It turns out that women in those leadership positions did not feel the pressure to behave in a more “masculine” fashion, but at the same time women in more subordinate positions felt this pressure quite acutely.

In discussing the studies in which she’s involved, Angela speaks a lot about context. Early on in her school journey, she was struck by the notion that human behaviour depends in such an enormous way on the context in which that behaviour occurs. Now, after all that school and a PhD in Applied Social Psychology from the University of Guelph, context still matters a great deal.

Yes, the messaging from extremist groups target men and women differently. But counter-messaging must take into account much more than just gender. Angela and her team look at the local landscape in the areas that are being targeted. The culture in that part of the world, the method through which they receive the extremist messaging. A counter-messaging campaign to prevent the radicalization of a young woman in the Idlib Governorate in Syria might be vastly different than one targeting a young man in Maple Ridge BC. Or even one targeting a similar young woman in a neighbouring province of Syria.

There are many highlights in Angela’s job, but she says this, specifically, is the best part:

“The opportunity to apply my expertise (e.g., on gender and diversity, developed during my graduate training in psychology) to current defence and security challenges (to work on interesting/exciting challenges, such as gender and counter-radicalization!); the opportunity to communicate my research findings/analyses through written reports and articles; and the opportunity to mentor junior scientists.”

Angela’s scientific training in psychology, both content-related and methodological, has helped her carry out her responsibilities as a defence scientist. At DRDC her focus is on conducting applied, defence-related research, and broadening her expertise to address current and future defence and security challenges. Her responsibilities include planning, organizing, conducting, analyzing, and reporting basic and applied social- and organizational-psychological research; interacting with the Canadian Armed Forces and other national/international security partners; and building the scientific capabilities of the entire organization.

And currently, of course, using psychology to counter the propaganda of extremist groups all over the world.

Amanda Parriag

“Amanda is a star! She has leveraged her MUN education to provide stellar research and evaluation services.  She has become a trusted advisor to her clients and is a leader of Women's issues in Ottawa. She was the president of MediaAction for 8 years, has run Ask Womxn Anything for more than 5 years, and sits on the board of the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCEVAW). She has owned and operated her own business for 20 years and for me, she is a friend, a supporter and a role model.”

Susan Underhill is effusive in her praise for Dr. Amanda Parriag, her current colleague and collaborator and long-time friend since university (MUN is the Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied psychology together years ago). Amanda obtained her PhD from MUN, but not a lot of her clients know this. She doesn’t refer to herself as “Dr.” and rarely tells people she has a PhD in psychology. That’s because when she does, she finds people behaving a little differently, choosing their words more carefully, and thinking that Amanda is psychoanalyzing them at every turn.

Not exactly her thing – Amanda is a researcher – but on occasion this response can come in handy! Amanda runs the ParriagGroup, a consultancy that specializes in research, evaluation and performance measurement. Her small business has been running for 20 years, and while Amanda is the lead on everything, she works with a team. She has six research assistants and six consultants that she pulls in at different times to complete bigger projects.

The ParriagGroup works mostly with governments and not-for-profits. Recently, she and her team worked with an Ottawa not-for-profit on a program they were doing jointly with another not-for-profit. It was a program to work with women who were potentially victims of gender-based violence, and were intersecting with the child welfare sector. The program was designed to provide an intersectional lens  in supporting the women and their families. It had been running for a few years, but the group wasn’t sure they were helping the women in the way the program was designed. Amanda and her team looked at the location of the program, the governance, how it was resourced, the skill sets of the people working within the program. The ParriagGroup also did a document review to determine what had been written about how these types of programs were supposed to function.

The group took Amanda’s recommendations to heart (always gratifying!) and ran with them. They made some immediate changes, started to implement others, and looked to outsource a few more. Amanda says,

“Hopefully, because of my work, women in the community who are in this frustrating space, intersecting with the child welfare system and potentially experiencing gender-based violence, can get better support. This can help them make better decisions and move forward in a more sustainable and human way.”

This is where Amanda’s real passion comes out. She feels lucky to be living the dream – she works out of a home-based office with the rest of her team spread across Canada. She can carve her day out as she pleases.  And on a beautiful sunny day, she can post an out-of-office and spent time in the pool.

And she also loves the time she can take to work in the community. The focus of her studies at MUN and Carleton was gender-based violence, and she is still doing everything she can in that field.

Susan mentioned Amanda’s work with OCEVAW, and Ask Womxn Anything. AWA gathers together amazing women from the Ottawa community to talk about their expertise on a particular topic. People from across the city are invited to come and have a discussion in a warm and inviting environment. Amanda says,

“Women are not often heralded as experts and so this is an opportunity for these women to be recognized as such, especially among our peers. And it’s an opportunity for women and men in the Ottawa community to see these experts. You can’t be what you cannot see.”

The next Ask Womxn Anything event is called ‘Black Womxn Making the World A Better Place’. They are focusing on black women because February is Black History Month, and the AWA panels are designed to be intersectional without tokenizing the participants. ‘Black Womxn Making The World A Better Place’ is coming up February 18^th – at the Pressed Café, if you’re in the Ottawa area. The speakers include Deborah Owusu-Akyeeah, a feminist activist and Campaigns Officer at OXFAM. Meghan Wills, President at Parents for Diversity and current project coordinator at the Michaëlle Jean Foundation. And Maya McDonald who is an educator, facilitator, and storyteller – among many other things!

AWA is a great way for people in Ottawa to get to know experts and remarkable women. Much like Amanda herself, and Susan, and the splendid teams with which they surround themselves.

Anne-Marie Côté

Anne-Marie Côté became passionate about the field of education after accepting a three-month replacement contract in a school in Guyana, South America, where she ended up spending the next two years. She was able to experience and understand the crucial impact teachers have on shaping how kind, resilient, adaptable, and confident students become regardless of curriculum taught, and therefore how important it is for students to be surrounded by positive role models at school. Back in Canada, she now teaches an online English as a Second Language course to children in China, and she also works with TakingITGlobal, a non-profit whose mission is to empower youth to understand and act on local and global challenges. She mainly works on a program called Connected North.

Connected North delivers immersive and interactive education services to remote indigenous communities in Northern Canada through Cisco’s TelePresence video technology. Anne-Marie coordinates virtual field trips and guest experts for schools in Nunavut. She also works on developing Francophone content for the program.

Anne-Marie says her Master’s in Organizational Psychology from Carleton University has served her very well in her professional career:

“My psychology training has helped me in my work with children and Indigenous communities. It's helped me approach everything I do from a standpoint of compassion and understanding. Every behaviour has a reason. People don't just ‘’do things for nothing’’. It's helped me appreciate that anyone "in trouble'' (or not, everyone in general) has their own story and if you're trying to make change you need to invest and really care about people.

My organizational psychology training has also helped me understand the dynamics of the workplaces I have been a part of. It's helped me understand good and bad leadership, and how to recognize these. Although I’m not currently consulting, it's also helped me guide some of my workplaces through change and development as well as understand program evaluations and other organizational development processes.

It’s also made me become a better employee in general. I know from the research what makes happy employees and organizations and it has made me brave enough to ask for certain things or just share some of this knowledge with employers in hopes to make a better workplace for everyone. This training has also made me more compassionate. Just understanding some of the processes behind human behaviour makes you really care about people and where they’re coming from.”

Anne-Marie is thrilled that she is able to positively impact children in so many different ways.

“Children spend most of their time growing up at school and I think it's so important for them to be surrounded by supportive adults and be in an environment where they feel safe to be who they are and to learn. Equally, it’s important that they have access to engaging and culturally relevant educational resources, regardless of where they are. That's really my main goal working in education; build empowering and innovative classrooms and be a positive role model children feel like they can come to easily.”

She loves being part of this incredible program that creates opportunities for Indigenous communities in the area of education – an area that's so important, and where a lot of trauma still lies. Her hope is to begin to focus on programs that promote mental health and teach emotional regulation early on in those schools where she makes such a large impact.

Susan Underhill

For people who work in the non-profit sector, doing more with less is a massively important key to being successful. When it comes to the public sector, we Canadians are all invested in efficiency and innovative practice. Thankfully, there are people out there who specialize in helping such organizations become the best they can be. Susan Underhill is one of them.

Susan is a management consultant for both government and the non-profit sector, as President of the Connor Claire Group. She does policy research, organizational design and development, coaching, business process improvement, and much more to help improve the performance of organizations of all shapes and sizes. Her colleague and collaborator, Amanda Parriag of the ParriagGroup, says of Susan,

“We went to university together and have stayed friends through the years. In the last few years we’ve had the opportunity to work together. It’s really a joy for me. We don’t agree on everything, but she can present things where she needs to change my mind in such a way that I can hear it. I implicitly trust her, she’s extremely smart and gets things very quickly. I really love working with her.”

We asked Susan how her training in psychology (she has a Masters in Experimental Psychology from the University of Newfoundland) has helped her in her current role.

“I am a good researcher - both qualitative and quantitative. I know what questions to ask, where to find information, and how to interpret that information to provide sound, evidence-based policy advice. Psychology has also helped me to consider organizational dynamics and the impact of these dynamics on implementing changes.”

One of the highlights of a job like Susan’s is that there are a never-ending set of policy questions that require new research. Susan says she loves the variability of her job and supporting government and not-for-profits to better serve individuals who need important services.

Sophie Kenny

Somewhere in the world, right now, there are researchers using a specialized device manufactured by VPixx Technologies. These researchers might be working in a behavioural laboratory, an MRI or MEG space, or even working with non-human primates. That device might be an eye tracker, a video projector, a sound system or a calibrated visual display.

Whichever device they are using, there is a strong possibility that Sophie Kenny helped to bring their work to fruition. As a staff scientist for VPixx Technologies, Sophie works directly with the academic community. Her role is not only to understand the current needs of researchers, but also to identify research trends and opportunities for growth of the company.

More precisely, Sophie provides consultation services for lab setups. She writes work orders for custom software and hardware development, designs and presents product or technology-oriented workshops, and gives seminar lectures and invited talks. She also visits conferences (Society for Neuroscience, the Vision Sciences Society, the Psychonomics Society) to interact with academic clients and partners. It is there that she sets up independent and collaborative research projects, such as conducting literature reviews, methods papers, and perceptual/cognitive experimental research.

Sophie obtained her PhD in Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Sciences from Queen’s in 2017, and says that her academic studies have prepared her admirably for her current career:

“During my research training, I have worked on research spanning attention, reading, memory and movement perception research. Through this broad experience, I used advanced methodologies which have included eye tracking, whole body motion capture, virtual reality headsets, fMRI recordings, and scripting for high-level research experiments software and game engines. This knowledge and skill base has been invaluable, because in most aspects of my work, I am called to comment and advise clients and colleagues on a eclectic variety of research designs and applications.”

Now working for a company doing those exact things, Sophie has found her niche.

“VPixx Technologies is an incredibly dynamic and collaborative environment. I feel that as a staff scientist, my work has a positive influence on the quality of the work that happens in our industry,  and ultimately, in the laboratories of the researchers who use our devices.”

Troy Forcier

You might expect someone with an M.Ed. in Education Counselling Psychology to work as a Child and Youth Mental Health clinician, or some such thing. And Troy Forcier did, for several years after graduating from UNBC. From there, he moved on to a job as a clinical supervisor, before taking on his current endeavour.

Troy is the Director of Operations for the Ministry of Child and Family Development (MCFD) in Williams Lake, British Columbia. The MCFD is, among other things, the main child protection service for the province. They also do a lot of preventative work (family support, parent psychoeducation groups, Child and Youth with Special Needs support). Troy manages contracts, HR, resources and guardianship, facilities, child and youth mental health for the region, and community relations.

After spending many years dealing one-on-one with children and families, Troy embraces the more bureaucratic nature of his new position. There are two things, above all others, that make this job pleasurable for Troy. One is working with people – something he has always done, but it is now in a different context. The other is making change – specifically, changes he can help create at his own specific bureaucratic level.

Natalie Therrien Normand

My name is Natalie Therrien Normand, and I'm a Program Manager at the provincial team that oversees grants made by the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF), an agency of the government of Ontario. I have my MA in Experimental and Applied Psychology from the University of Regina. I received it in 2013, but so much of what I did at university I am still doing today.

I help people apply for grants by delivering presentations (like the courses I used to guest lecture in as a TA) and doing one-on-one coaching (like office hours), I assess grant applications when they come in (like scoring papers and exams as a TA), and monitor grants that are funded (which works a lot like monitoring all the work happening in my old labs). I also work on OTF's volunteer education initiatives to train our volunteers to meet corporate goals. This means a lot of juggling, like in my academia days.

Studying psychology has helped me in a myriad of ways. First are the obvious project management skills I learned in my graduate level studies, which apply to managing grants. Juggling multiple projects and deadlines is essential to my work, and indeed my career. But beyond that, learnings about human behaviour and the mind keep popping up, whether it's communication skills, the team-forming framework I learned in, literally, one sports psychology class that comes up over and over again. People think you have crazy ninja human behaviour skills, but it's things anyone can learn in basic psychology courses (which is what I tell them!). What may be most important are my critical thinking skills, and being adaptable in a field where feedback and constructive criticism are constant. We all know from our training that the constant cycle of producing work, receiving feedback, and working to improve that work is how you grow, or how a project/paper gets better.

I love that I get to work with people. I love that I get to apply my skills in an unexpected way. I work with people with super varied educational and professional backgrounds but I don't think anyone expects to have someone with an advanced degree in Psychology among them. The assumption is that this would mean I'd be a clinician or a counsellor. And as I mentioned above, even the basic principles of an education in psychology come up in the every day working world.

Sandra Meeres

In 1994, Sandra Meeres graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a Masters in Applied Social Psychology. Sandra is also a Credentialed Evaluator through the Canadian Evaluation Society. She achieved the designation in 2017. Today, she remains in Saskatchewan working for the provincial government. Sandra is the Manager of Planning, Evaluation and Improvement in the aptly titled office of Corporate Planning Evaluation and Improvement. She conducts needs assessments, program development and design, program review, and evaluations in human services. Her current work focuses on justice, corrections, and policing. Sandra says,

“All aspects of my formal psychology training have helped in my current role - especially the internship and practicum placements that were part of my graduate program. I have also relied on ongoing professional development to ensure I stay up to date with current practices and trends. I have been working in my field since I graduated – more than 25 years - and I have enjoyed every minute of it.  I get to work with a variety of people in many different roles throughout the organization, and also with stakeholders from other ministries and external service providers.

It's very fulfilling working with key stakeholders - gaining insights by interacting with everyone from clients and participants to program managers and leaders. My work is very satisfying because I know it is helping to provide decision makers with the essential information they need. It guides them to see what aspects of programs and services are working well, and where there are gaps or areas that could be strengthened or improved.”

Jenn Richler

The January issue of Nature Climate Change has papers on changing bird migrations, projections of lemur habitats in the Malagasy rainforest, climate change detection in daily weather, and the risk of breadbasket failures. It’s a publication that brings together a number of disparate disciplines from every corner of the world in a common cause – tackling climate change. One of the people responsible for this publication is Jenn Richler, PhD Cognitive Psychology, Vanderbilt 2010.

Jenn works at Nature Research, where she is a Senior Editor at Nature Climate Change and also another research journal, Nature Energy. She evaluates, selects, and oversees peer review of scientific manuscripts from across the behavioral and social sciences, including psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, political science, human geography, and communications. In addition, she commissions, edits, and writes non-primary research content like Reviews, Comments, Research Highlights and Editorials. It’s a job perfectly suited to a psychologist, and Jenn says,

“A key part of my job is evaluating scientific manuscripts from across social science disciplines. Although I handle manuscripts outside of psychology, training in scientific thinking and research design applies broadly across the fields I cover. We also get very ‘hands on’ with papers that are ultimately published, and so the experience I have writing manuscripts and presenting data is very valuable. Finally, being in academic publishing means that I rely a lot on what I learned about publishing and peer-review when I published my own papers in graduate school and during my post-doc. Those experiences were critical to shaping my ideas about what makes peer-review work well, what the problems are, and how we might develop innovative solutions.”

One of the highlights for Jenn is the intellectual side of the job –justifying editorial decisions requires balancing a lot of different factors, as few decisions are easy. It’s intellectually stimulating to craft arguments about each manuscript, and then discuss them with colleagues. This is the part of Jenn’s work that takes place behind the scenes, but is of crucial importance to the final product. Jenn says that, and highlighting the work of others, give her the deepest satisfaction.

"I always liked research, but I was never deeply passionate about any one research topic - I never wanted to have to convince anyone that my research was interesting. I get much more satisfaction from getting a bird’s eye view of a lot of different fields, inviting experts to write about important topics, championing the work of others, and helping authors make their work as strong and impactful as it can be. I feel that I am truly providing a service to my authors, and take a lot of pride in that.”