‘I walked out and the world had transformed’: As CAMH remakes itself, patients feel the difference
TheStar.com – News/Insight – As walls come down and new buildings go up, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is focusing on research and […]
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Health History
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Health History
The radical ex-hippie who infiltrated Ontario’s health-care establishment
His improbable trajectory has taken him from firebrand to respected senior hospital executive. Along the way, he has established himself as one of Canada’s strongest advocates for disadvantaged patients… a skilled, hard-working, team-playing professional. He is credited with using his leadership roles to help develop a multitude of programs and services for disenfranchised patients. But when conventional means of addressing gaps in their care didn’t work, a different Philip Berger would emerge
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Health History
How Canada got addicted to fentanyl
The supply chain for illicit fentanyl begins in China, but the problems Canada is experiencing start right here at home: No other country in the world consumes more prescription opioids on a per-capita basis, according to a recent United Nations report. The widespread use of prescription opioids is behind the rise of a new class of drug addicts, many of whom are turning to the black market to feed their habit… many of those deaths could have been avoided.
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Health History
Universal health care was the Centennial Generation’s greatest achievement
In the early 1960s, the Royal Commission on Health Services, appointed by a Progressive Conservative government and chaired by Justice Emmett Hall, discovered that more than 40 per cent of the population – 7.5 million Canadians – had no health insurance. It recommended changing that, by following the model of NDP-led Saskatchewan. As a result, between 1960 and 1970, Canadian governments made health insurance public and universal.
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Health History
Doctors tortured patients at Ontario mental-health centre, judge rules
Patients at a maximum-security mental-health facility in Ontario were tortured by medical doctors over a 17-year period in unethical and degrading human experiments, a judge has ruled in a lawsuit. The techniques used on the patients between 1966 and 1983 included solitary confinement, as treatment and as punishment; the administration of hallucinogens and delirium-producing drugs, including LSD; and brainwashing methods developed by the CIA
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Health History
Cutting through the numbers on health-care funding
Ottawa’s cash transfer covers 37 per cent of the costs of hospital, diagnostics and physician services (which were $92-billion last year). Federal tax dollars also go to health via equalization payments and targeted programs… beyond the dollars, there needs to be discussion about why Ottawa transfers dollars for health care. It should be to ensure that there is a semblance of a national system, to ensure that all Canadians have similar and equitable to care, regardless of their ability to pay, and where they live.
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Health History
Brain man: Jeffrey A. Lieberman on the evolution of psychiatry
… psychiatry should not become a specialty that focuses just on the biological aspect of a patient’s illness. It needs to be pluralistic and include genetics and other sciences that impact the brain… Psychiatrists are physicians trained in the illness of the brain… the most expensive of health professionals and governments try to use their time in a more economical way… For talk therapy or cognitive rehabilitation or marital therapy, patients will be encouraged to use a less expensive social worker or psychologist or trained lay therapist do that work.
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Health Delivery System
Health History
Simcoe clinic in a grocery store breaks barriers for migrant farm workers
The clinic was created to serve the more than 4,000 migrant farm workers toiling at farms and greenhouses in the region south of Brantford. Designed to eliminate some of the systemic barriers migrant workers face in getting basic health care, the pilot project has been a resounding success — reducing visits by such workers to the Norfolk General Hospital by 80 per cent… about 60 per cent are Spanish-speaking patients from Mexico, the rest from various Caribbean countries.
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Health History
Mad Pride Toronto seeks to bring mentally ill into the mainstream
Most discourse about mental illness tends to be either medical or institutional — how to treat and what to do with those who suffer from it. Mad Pride Toronto 2014 offers the much needed opportunity to engage with people living with mental illness as equals within the community, their forms of cultural life, their singular history. Madness needs to go mainstream.
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Health History
40-year-old health report was prescient about today’s challenges
Despite… the importance of addressing the socio-economic determinants of health, we have yet to heed Mr. Lalonde’s warning that the “traditional view of equating the level of health in Canada with the availability of physicians and hospitals is inadequate.” … We continue to spend on sickness care but we have savaged many social programs and made our tax system far less progressive.
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