Remembrance of Psychiatric Patients Past
September 11, 2012
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Dr. Geoffrey Reaume is Associate Professor in the Critical Disability Studies graduate program at York University where he’s taught since 2004. His work as historian, author, video producer and playwright are all informed by his experiences as a psychiatric patient as a teenager and young adult. He explains the medical diagnosis he was given as a young person and how it affected his life. He discusses the history of treatment of people whose medical diagnoses led to confinement in asylums. He says what he learned from his examination of the Toronto Hospital’s medical files, 1870 to 1940. He says what we can learn from the history of caring for mental illness about family caregiving, the medical and social professions, and society. He identifies things that should be done better by the medical profession, governments and health care planners in supporting and caring for persons with mental illness, and shares his messages for persons and their family caregivers.
Family Caregivers Unite!
Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Variety Channel
Family caregivers are the people who provide care to partners, parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors and even co-workers. They are the people who provide care when everyone else has gone home. They are the people who organize the functioning of the home for the person with special needs, and for the family as a whole. They are the coordinators of care, the managers of appointments, the preventers of loneliness, and the makers of decisions even to the point of Power of Attorney. And they are so often people who themselves are burdened with their own health challenges and who may be in only marginally better health than the persons to whom they are providing family caregiving.
Dr. Gordon Atherley
Dr Gordon Atherley holds the British equivalent of the Canadian PhD and MD degrees, and LLD, Honoris Causa, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University. His awards include Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. His medical specialties are occupational medicine and public health.
As first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian equivalent of the US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he led the creation of Canada’s electronic information service in occupational health and safety, now used in more than 40 countries.
In academia, he held senior, tenured, full-time positions, including departmental chair, in university faculties of physics, engineering, and medicine. He is the author of a textbook and numerous articles and publications.
Since retiring from medical practice, he’s built up Greyhead Associates, which critically researches the safety, effectiveness and fairness of health services for persons with special needs.
Through Virtual Care International, a company of which he’s President, he’s involved in providing sensible technology to family caregivers to help them with their responsibilities, workloads, and concerns.
Now an activist, he urges family caregivers to unite because, more and more, it’s not just their families who depend on them, it’s also the healthcare system as a whole, as it struggles to meet more and more needs of more and more people.
