WICKED MIND

PODCAST

Episode 7:
Peeling the Onion: The ongoing battle to de-stigmatize HIV/AIDS and what we can learn for mental health with Scott Elliot

WICKED MIND

PODCAST

Episode 7:
Peeling the Onion: The ongoing battle to de-stigmatize HIV/AIDS and what we can learn for mental health with Scott Elliot

WICKED MIND

PODCAST

Episode 7:
Peeling the Onion: The ongoing battle to de-stigmatize HIV/AIDS and what we can learn for mental health with Scott Elliott

Transcript

Intro

Scott Elliott: “Mental illness is not something that we need to hide and have in the closet all of the time.

And I think there are some really interesting relationships between that and the original HIV/AIDS.

You know, when we think about, you have to hide everything for myself.

I’ve had an anxiety disorder my whole life. So if you had asked me about that 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have said anything about it.

I’m also a drug addict and alcoholic that ironically is easy for me to say. It’s easy for me to tell you, ok, I’ve been in recovery for a long time, but talking about the mental illness, quote unquote or the anxiety disorder is something that’s been a lot more difficult. And so I don’t know how stigma inter-play in all of those, but it certainly does.”

Dr. Diane McIntosh: I’ve been eagerly anticipating my chat with Scott Elliott for several reasons. First, he’s got a remarkable ability to articulate fresh innovative ideas. Second, his commitment to lowering barriers, creating a safe nurturing environment for those who may have never had that experience. And third his unwavering dedication to making a positive impact, which is truly inspiring.

I remember the first time I met Scott when he gave me a tour of the Dr. Peter Centre where he serves as executive director. It was a mind-blowing experience because I was completely unaware of the incredible work that was happening there.

Full disclosure, I had the privilege of joining the board of the Dr. Peter Centre last summer.

Today, we’re diving into the history of the Doctor Peter Centre and the remarkable story of its namesake Peter Jepson Young. We also discuss the progress made in the de-stigmatization HIV/AIDS and contrasting that with the de-stigmatization of mental illness.

Scott draws attention to the layers of stigma facing individuals with complex health conditions, including mental illness, substance and traumatic life experiences. He describes stigma as an onion with multiple layers encompassing self perception, societal judgment and the way individuals perceive and react to the words and actions of others.

I took a lot away from this conversation and I think you will too.

—————

Welcome Scott, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a couple of reasons. One is I know you’re very articulate and the other is that you’re just an incredible force for good.

So I’m looking forward to asking you a bunch of questions.

I will say I remember meeting you first about a year ago and uh you and your role as executive director of the Dr. Peter Centre gave me a wonderful tour which blew my mind. I had no idea what was going on there and full disclosure last summer, I had the real privilege of becoming a member of the board of the Dr. Peter Centre.

So I want to jump right in asking you to share the history of the Dr. Peter Centre who was Dr. Peter Jepson Young.

Sure. Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

And Dr. Peter or Peter Jepson Young, as he was known back in the day, was a family physician here in Vancouver.

And in those days, well, he contracted HIV/AIDS about 35 years ago. And if you think about those days, we weren’t, it wasn’t, um, HIV wasn’t a thing we talked about. You were fine. You got ill, you went to the hospital and something was wrong.

And in his case, he was diagnosed with full blown AIDS. And at that time, there was no medication. And so he was told you probably have six months to a year to live, uh, figure out your life and tie things up as it turns out, uh, as it turns out, Peter lived for another five years.

And during that time period, one of the things that happened for him is that he went blind, um, his AIDS affected him neurologically.

So he was a physician but was blind. So he couldn’t work, but he wasn’t ready to just give up.

So his friends rallied around and they were asking him, what do you want to do now or what do you want to do next?”

They knew a producer at CBC television and they created, they talked him into a 10 episode, uh sort of series of, um, a day in the life of the guy with AIDS called ‘The Dr. Peter Diaries’. And as it turned out, it was so fantastically successful that it continued weekly for just over two years until about three weeks before his death.

At that time, his friends got together again and they were like, um, what do you want to do now? Well, what do you want your legacy to be?

Because he knew he was coming towards the end of his life. And they were thinking, how do we honour your legacy? Because now he had captured the public imagination around a topic that was highly stigmatized around a topic that people were fearful of and didn’t want to talk about.

And so that’s how the concept of the Dr. Peter Centre was born. 

Right, and so what was the Doctor Peter Centre doing to support people who were dying from AIDS?

The original concept was creating a clinical space or a medical space that allowed people to live and die with dignity in a stigma- free, compassionate environment.

So a lot of the times the people knew they were going to die and so, um, not new but assumed they were going to die, but being able to do that in a way where you’re surrounded by people who don’t judge you, you’re surrounded by people who care for you. 

It is really a gift because so many people didn’t have that. And especially in smaller communities or even in other large cities around North America. 

Was it difficult to get people to work in the centre to offer that support, to offer the medical care?

Interestingly, no, it was never really difficult to find staff. There’s always people who believe in, you know, caring for those who are the most vulnerable or the most marginalized within our society.

And in those days, even though there was a, it was a highly stigmatized, um, disease. At the same time, there were many people who were real advocates and particularly 30, 35 years ago, the disease was predominantly in the gay male community. There were also some other groups, but they were much smaller in terms of the overall population.

And that’s also when the gay community itself came together and started demanding some real changes in terms of how we address health care, how we engage with physicians. 

Because in the past before that, it was really just your doctor tells you something, you listen. And it was really about that time when we saw patient advocacy, really raising its voice as well.  

Reflecting what my experience is from someone looking from the outside and thinking about the community, having always had to fight for themselves to, to be heard, to be respected, to be treated with dignity and compassion.

But also always seeing it as a very strong community, really supporting one another. And maybe I’m, I’m wrong about that, but it seemed like the community existed because people had to fight to get basic rights and respect.

And I, I wonder about the parallels with mental illness related to stigma because you brought stigma up a couple of times.

One of the things that I remember about that time was big stars. People who were, maybe that was part of it. They were artsy, they were creative but they were known to have Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana who had, you know, good big friends with Elton John.

And so I remember when she hugged the patient who had AIDS or when she was in New York and held a baby who was HIV positive or had AIDS and that shifted something for people over time.

And I wonder how, because of the power of stigma within mental illness, how we can do the same thing. I don’t think we’re anywhere with stigma really a little bit, maybe off the, the edge off of our mental illness. But this has really changed within the HIV/AIDS world.

Yeah, It’s interesting, you know, when I think about HIV/AIDS and the stigma that surrounds it in particular, I would love to think we’ve made a lot of progress. But even just today on the news, Uganda passed a new law where now, um, uh, gay sex or gay relationships are now punishable by death.

And so when we think about it in a worldwide context, you know, we’ve come a long way in so many ways, but there’s also been a backlash uh from ultra conservative elements and sometimes ultra conservative countries. 

At the Dr. Peter Centre for the past 20 years or so, the vast majority of our participants that we serve and that we work with are at the intersection of HIV. So that’s, you know, one of the key things, but they also have mental illness, substance use and what we call chaotic life. 

And so chaotic life. could be in and out of homelessness, in and out of incarceration when it comes to the mental illness, you know, piece of it or any of the pieces, but especially with mental illness, there’s still a huge stigma and there’s still a huge misunderstanding of what it is and all of it’s interrelated.

So if I think about our participants, trauma is a huge part of their story, so you’ve, if you gotta think about an onion, just that the, the analogy of the layers of an onion, you’ve got trauma you put on top of that mental illness, you put on top of that substance use, which they’ve used to treat their mental illness because they haven’t been diagnosed or they haven’t been treated properly. You add on top of that poverty and you add on top of that racism, sexism et cetera. 

So now you’ve got this really hard ball of layer and layer and layer of stigma. Each one of those is a stigma. And stigma is also the way that I see it, it’s how we see it ourselves or how I bring it on to myself. 

Someone looks at me and I might get triggered. Is that stigmatizing? Well, perhaps the person didn’t mean it that way. But if it triggered me, then it can be.

So, yeah, we’ve made some advances. I don’t want to get too excited about the advances on the stigma side with HIV/AIDS because I would argue that there’s still a lot of stigma there. We just choose not to talk about it anymore. And the gay community as a, a vocal community isn’t strong or doesn’t talk about it anymore.

And we’re starting to see more and more vocalization within the mental health community, which is fantastic as we start to see people coming out and saying, ok, mental illness is not something that we need to hide and have in the closet all of the time. And I think there are some really interesting relationships between that and the original HIV/AIDS. You know, when we think about it, you have to hide everything.

I’ve had an anxiety disorder my whole life. So if you had asked me about that 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have said anything about it. I’m also a drug addict and alcoholic, which ironically is easy for me to say. It’s easy for me to tell you, Ok, I’ve been in recovery for a long time, but talking about the mental illness, quote unquote or the anxiety disorder is something that’s been a lot more difficult. And so I don’t know how stigma interplay in all of those, but it certainly does.

Well, I think your reference to Uganda really is on point and I should have spoken more from a Canadian context because while we’re not perfect here, I feel like there’s been some advances regarding HIV/AIDS, stigma compared to where we are with mental illness. 

I guess one of the things that differentiates mental illness from HIV/AIDS is the fact that it’s viewed as real, right? We don’t, we have blood tests, we have an ability to make this diagnosis. So people don’t think, well, they’re just trying to get off work by saying they have either HIV positive whereas, you know, you’re, you’re lazy or you’re just trying to get away with something is still a belief system for mental illness.

And one of the things that I’ve really struggled with as a physician is the fact that stigma lives in medicine related to mental illness. Physicians, nurses, whatever health care providers, they self stigmatize. So they don’t show up to get care when they need it. And they also stigmatize the individuals who come to get care.

So that’s why people are not treated respectfully and compassionately always, when they come to seek care and the people that they trust are going to take care of them.

Do you see analogies with HIV/AIDS and what people faced and what people who are living with mental illness are now, do you see them as the same? 

When I think about the participants we serve now, And you know, the Dr. Peter Centre, one of the things that constantly arises is the trauma and stigmatization they’ve had from the medical system itself.

So we right now have just over 450 people in our day health program and each one of them is connected to a GP because of their HIV status. Each one of them has complex medical conditions. So they would probably have specialists and so forth.

The vast majority, maybe 90%, don’t want to go see the doctors. They don’t want to go to the hospital. They don’t want to engage with the medical system because when they go, they’re bullied, they’re not given a choice. Their choice is taken away from them, they don’t feel valued.

And so while the medical community is doing the best it can, it has a long way to go to be able to serve a population that’s more vulnerable.

So what happens at our Centre is that we’re able to work with people in a relational standpoint in a very holistic way. So they don’t, it’s not like you go see your doctor, you’ve got seven minutes, Right? Or you go see your psychologist or psychiatrist, you might have 45 minutes.

They come to us, they can spend all day at the Centre. And so we see them possibly all day, sometimes every day they could come for years.

So we develop relationships with the people in a way that’s very different from when we would engage normally with our, um, you know, with our medical practitioners.

And that level of relational engagement allows for trust, right? And allows for a trust that we don’t see or we don’t see between our participants and their doctors.

The idea behind this podcast was really trying to look at what the challenges are within the mental health care system and then look at solutions.

And the reason I thought about asking you, Scott to talk about the Dr. Peter Centre is because I thought about how, elegantly,  you have come in and filled a really critical gap.

And I think when we’re talking about the problems within our health care system, it also, very often falls at the feet of the physicians or the nurses or the providers. But I think it’s much deeper than that. We have bigger problems and throwing for doctors at this is not going to fix all the problems in our health care system or our mental health care system.

What I’ve seen is this sort of putting your arms around the people who attend the clinic a wrap around care and we’ve seen this in mental health with Clubhouse models as well being really effective and they’re not that expensive.

And that’s why I wanted you to talk about it. Where do you see that you fit as a piece? Do you see the Dr. Peter Centre as a, as a part of a solution around mental health care challenges at the Dr. Peter Centre?

We’ve got one group of people that we’re starting to see are having more mental health challenges. Aging gay men as an example.

So someone who’s had HIV, for 30 years or 25 years, uh, when medications came out 25 years ago, they went on medication, they started doing exceedingly well. So they went from dying, you know, get your house in order to, oh my God, I’m taking one pill a day and it’s a chronic illness more or less and doing well.

But now what we’re seeing as well as the same individuals, um, they’re isolated, they’re lonely. Um, a lot of their friends died 30 years ago. Like this whole generation of gay men died 30 years ago. And I think as their mortality starts to come up that you’re getting a little, you’re getting trauma coming up as well. 

And now there’s no organizations in the city that support them. We don’t support them anymore. I mean, the organizations don’t exist and the community itself doesn’t exist. It’s a very ageist community and the gay male community.

So if someone is 65, 70, 75, there’s no community for them, there’s no literally no physical place for them to go in Vancouver, which is in a way shocking. Then if we look at, you know, kind of the third with our clients are, the clients or participants we have at the Dr. Peter Centre are very complex.

So one of the things is that by coming to us and being with us and having some stability, having some relational connections, not being lonely, you know, being able to, we, one of our saying is we tend the soul, you know, to cure the body or to heal the body.

And so you’ve got to deal with it all, right?

And what that also does, it keeps them out of hospital, it keeps him out of incarceration.

So an acute care bed might be $1000 a day or $42 a day. Very big difference in terms of cost.

So if we look at centers for people or ways of having people engage quite often, it’s not even so much the medical system they need. They need an engagement system. They need to be able to have a place where they can come and talk together.

A specific example of how people can engage, we started a program for aging gay men so they could come together, and talk and have some friendship and communion. It’s a clinical program because one of the ideas was that if we can get them, you know, together to trust each other, would they talk about their medications? Would they talk about what issues they’re having?

And some really interesting things came up. We saw men in their seventies starting crystal meth and other drugs for the first time because it was one of those things where they were so isolated, no one wanted to be around them.

But if they were part of the drug community, all of a sudden, people wanted to be around them because they had drugs. 

You know, so it’s, t’s a really negative way of saying that we need to have um a way for people to come together. 

Even amongst the older people in my life, my in-laws, my mom, just seeing the impact of isolation over the period of the pandemic and how that affected their ability to physically move around and impact on cognition for a lot of older people because they were so isolated. I can see that this was an incredibly powerful decision for the lives of these individuals because it would have been even doubly that impact when you’re in such an incredibly vulnerable group.

What did you learn about mental health? The impact of the COVID pandemic on the mental health of individuals during that time. 

We’re still learning about it. We’re still learning about, you know, the impact of COVID on mental health. I would say within our staff population or staff base. It’s as relevant now as it was then different, but equally as relevant.

When I think about the participants first, like my parents are in long term care facility or assisted living and, and for them, they were told they had to stay in their building, they stayed in their building, you know, we communicated, they, they did fine, but there was a huge shift in how they lived in the world.

Our participants other than having, you know, no access to services, some things didn’t change. Like uh when you talk about social isolation and, and people during COVID experience a lot of social isolation, our participants have that on a daily basis.

On a daily basis, people don’t give them eye contact. On a daily basis, people don’t talk to them. On a daily basis, people avoid them.

And, and that’s what we saw during COVID with the general population. I don’t know if you remember, but I remember in April – May of 2020, walking down the street and there’d be someone on the sidewalk and they would literally walk to the other side of the street.

It was the weirdest thing, like it was like you could catch COVID from being within 10 ft of someone. That was reminiscent of the AIDS days, you know, 30 years ago. We saw that.

It must have been so unnerving to experience that avoidance again after so many years for a totally different reason. I want to ask you, Scott, what’s been your experience through the Dr. Peter Centre with access to quality psychiatric care?

I would say close to all of our participants, you know, have or need psychiatric care, full stop. I mean, that’s who we work with. So it’s no surprise to us that people need it and we see it every day. We also see a lot of, uh, people who don’t want it or haven’t had the proper access to it because it could be both camps, right? 

Where my office sits, I see the front stairs and there’s often a gentleman who’s having an argument with his girlfriend, it’s a very almost violent argument every day around the same time, but his girlfriend only exists in his mind.

And so we see that and I’ve asked a couple of times, well, could we try and set him up for medication and so forth? And the response is he doesn’t like what the medication does to him.

And so it’s an interesting interplay of, we don’t have enough services for acute or even ongoing. And also sometimes people’s choice will lead them down a different path. And then as we layer on substance use, a lot of people self-medicate. And so we see people all the time self medicating pain, whether that pain is physical, emotional or mental, it really doesn’t matter.

Pain is pain.

The story that’s happening right now. A friend of mine went into treatment for drug and alcohol issues. And after about 12 days left went out and got himself admitted into the psych unit. Because before he could even think about cleaning up, he had to get his mental health and his mental health medications balanced and under control. So there’s a complete interplay between these two things.

So when we see people with addiction, there is likely, you know, a strong mental health component that’s not being addressed.

I worry that they’re often conflated substance use and, and mental illness and they’re both disorders that can co occur, but that they’re not the same thing. And I, I guess I’m concerned about that because our funding is so poor for mental health care and that so many people end up with addiction issues because of the fact that their mental health was not considered, it was not adequately treated. We don’t do a good job of caring for people who are struggling, who have trauma, and therefore they end up down the road in a substance use disorder situation.

One of the things that blew me away when I first walked through the Doctor Peter Centre was the eye contact. There was the lack of judgment, but more important than anything else was just oozing compassion for these individuals who are other, who are pushed away, who are almost untouchable.

And that’s why I wanted to talk to you about this today because I think it’s one of the things that we lack most in our healthcare system, particularly for individuals who struggle with addiction, who are other, who have a mental illness, is a complete lack of compassion.

How do we bring that back?

We talk about harm reduction a lot. And most people don’t know what harm reduction means, but they’ll often think well, in the drug community, that’s a needle, a clean needle. So you don’t get blood borne, you know, infections. I could be a pipe. So you don’t get lung infections and stuff like that.

We see food as harm reduction. We see love as harm reduction. We see a pair of socks as harm reduction. A smile is harm reduction.

So it’s really not complicated. It’s really not. Like it is so common sense that we don’t see it. And I think that’s one of the, one of the problems we have, all we need to do is be kind to people and that sounds very Pollyanna and I get that, but we’ve structured a whole environment so that we’re kind to people and we, we don’t use the word love because the word love gets kind of weird for a lot of folks, but that’s truly what it is.

You know, it’s truly being able to see someone as a human being and being able to see their behaviours as different from them as a human being because they might have negative behaviours that we perceive. That’s a judgment. But then you understand, like the one gentleman who has auditory hallucinations, like it’s real for him. Like that’s real. 

And so once we figure out, oh, ok. Well, that’s real. Let him have let him finish the conversation and when he’s done the conversation. Yeah. Then we go in and we can intervene, you know, and we can work with him.

And one of the things that’s great is when people understand that we’re actually there to support them in their way, that they can be a part of the Centre and they feel comfortable and their actual behaviours de-escalate because when we de-stress situations, we have no security guards.

So we don’t have security guards, we don’t have, you know, bulletproof glass or anything silly like that. We have counsellors and therapists and nurses who look people in the eye, who know your name. And we also know you well enough to, if things are going poorly, we know how to have an intervention with you and how to shortcut the way. So you don’t have to spiral, you know, to the ultimate. 

When you mention the fellow who has auditory hallucinations, he is talking to his girlfriend and he doesn’t like how medication makes him feel. And of course, as a psychiatrist, my immediate reaction is we have better medications. That’s a failure of, of the choices that we’re offering and, and creating a therapeutic alliance and safety with someone that they’ll be willing to try again.

One of the things you mentioned was that you approach all of the participants at the Dr. Peter Centre without judgment, you say you can choose, this is your choice and I am completely behind that idea. 

But how do you support options? What you’re comfort with saying, you know, there’s new ideas here, there’s new treatments when, when people often reflect on a bad experience and that colours all of their path and the way they look at psychiatry or how care in general fairly deserved that they’ve had a bad experience.

Is your team comfortable with trying to support a new narrative?

As an organization, we’re very comfortable with new narratives. Um, and we’ll bring those two participants, but it really is up to the participant.

One of the things that we’ve found with, again, our clients and doctors who work in psychiatry and so forth, who know this. It’s so relational based and it’s not, um, our folks are not the one hit wonder. And what I mean by that is they’re not going to come in once you’re prescribed to come in a second time, you adjust to medications third time and they’re fine for the next three years.

That’s not their reality.

The gentleman I was mentioning earlier, he’ll be at the Centre almost every day for probably 3 to 4 hours a day. Now, imagine a psychiatrist’s time, you know, being able to invest in that and the system’s not set up for that.

Plus he won’t go to the office. He’s not welcome in the medical care offices. He’s not welcome in the hospital. Like the security guards won’t let him in. He’s not welcome in the drug store. He’s not welcome in Starbucks. Do you know what I mean?

And so how do we reach these people as well?

That society, not just the medical system, but society overall has put up a wall. So, so they’re, they’re kept out and I understand why it, it’s just it, it doesn’t allow him to feel any safety, a relational capacity to be able to engage in his own health care.

Yeah, I, I hear what you’re saying. The commitment to being a safe place for the most marginalized without judgment. It’s truly remarkable.

So given that you can’t flip a switch and fix someone. How do you measure success? Considering the services offered at the Dr. Peter Centre? What do you consider success?

I would love to tell you that, you know, someone will come into the Dr. Peter Centre after a year, they’ll go out and be a contributing person in the community. That may or may not be true. It happens, yeah, but that’s not our goal. 

Our goal is for me, a return on investment.

If someone comes and shows up to the Dr. Peter Centre, they have lunch, they learn to smile, they learn to engage and have a conversation with someone. That’s it. It’s literally that simple. Um, that person is more human. They have a better life. They’re, they’re reengaged in society. We’re not trying to rehabilitate people. We’re trying to engage people, you know, back into society and as we do that, they’re happier, they’re more fulfilled.

The societal benefits are, it’s cheaper frankly. We work with them in a way that keeps them out of the hospital, keeps them out of incarceration and keeps them, you know, out of the system as much as possible.

Scott, if there was one thing you could ask, or perhaps I should say demand of healthcare leaders from government, from industry to improve mental health care in Canada. What do you think it would be?

For me when I think about, you know, working with the government around mental health It’s we don’t have, we, I wouldn’t have a demand. That’s not because that’s not our approach at the Dr. Peter Centre because the demand would be pitting us against someone.

So ours would be how can we work with you? How can we work with you to achieve outcomes that we both want?

For me, there’s, there’s really, it’s very simple, it’s very common sense and it’s really not complicated.

One is we have to approach this from a very holistic manner. We can’t have a mental health silo all on its own, a substance use silo all on its own, HIV silo. You know, we’re working with people that have a lot of these things together and yet we don’t approach it in a holistic manner.

So I think number one is we, the Dr. Peter Centre is quite brilliant in that and I don’t take the credit for that. It was there long before me. But we approach working with people in a very holistic way that allows a sense of belonging and a sense of peace and actually achieves better health outcomes.

So that would be one thing. 

The other is we need leadership, we need leadership from the sector. So from the not for profit sector itself, and we need leadership for the government. And by leadership, the way that I would define it in this context would be to create a future that would not otherwise exist. Because when I think about that, you know, we think about where our future is going with overdose with mental illness. It’s not a pretty picture if I think in that way of where I think it’s realistic, quote unquote gonna go, it’s really depressing and I couldn’t work in this field.

So as a leader, I’ve got to create a future that would not otherwise exist. And that’s what we need from our government to take those creative chances to work with organizations that are entrepreneurial, that are thinking about things in a different way. And to really approach it in a holistic manner that does not stigmatize, that does not shame. And that brings people together rather than pitting people and or pitting organizations apart.

You’re inspiring to me, Scott and, and the Dr. Peter Centre’s as well.

And as I think about these gaps that we have in our system, helping people to feel like they belong, that they’re loved, that they have a place in our society is really powerful, more important than the medicine that we might give that is often not taken is just humanizing people.

So thank you for what you do.

My pleasure. 

——————

Dr. Diane McIntosh: Being a board member of the Dr. Peter Centre has allowed me to witness its impact first hand. The Dr. Peter Centre was established with a mission to provide care and support for individuals living with HIV/AIDS, challenging the stigma that permeates the disease and those who are infected. Close to 30 years after opening its doors, I believe the Centre continues to deliver on the goal it set for itself all those years ago.

The Centre’s holistic approach prioritizes individual autonomy, respect and empowerment. I think it’s a powerful model.

The focus on trust, safety, love these simple things that can be expressed with a smile, a meal, just a warm welcoming place to be. These are foundational aspects of supporting an individual to live their best life. I see powerful lessons for our mental health care system at the Dr. Peter Centre for the marginalized, the scared, the lonely.

We need our leaders to fight for a future that really doesn’t yet exist. To do so, we need to paint a picture of what good looks like and that’s what the Dr. Peter Centre does. 

Then we all need to steer towards it until next time.

Thank you for listening.

The Wicked Mind podcast is a series of unique conversations with individuals that share experiences and perspectives on mental health care.

Together, We will uncover ideas that inspire action.

Please make sure you subscribe, share and comment and if you have a topic or guest suggestion, please reach out to me at DrDianeMcintosh.com.

Scott Elliot

Executive Director,
Dr. Peter AIDS Centre

Scott Elliott is the Executive Director of the Dr. Peter AIDS Centre, an internationally renowned Centre whose mission is to provide care and support for individuals with HIV/AIDS. 

The centre’s holistic approach, which prioritizes the individual, autonomy, respect, and empowerment, is a powerful model, with a lot that we can take to inspire innovative thinking to improve mental healthcare.

Scott Elliot

Executive Director,
Dr. Peter AIDS Centre

Scott Elliott is the Executive Director of the Dr. Peter AIDS Centre, an internationally renowned Centre whose mission is to provide care and support for individuals with HIV/AIDS. 

The centre’s holistic approach, which prioritizes the individual, autonomy, respect, and empowerment, is a powerful model, with a lot that we can take to inspire innovative thinking to improve mental healthcare.

Listen now on your favourite podcast platform:

Scott Elliott

Executive Director,
Dr. Peter AIDS Centre

Scott Elliott is the Executive Director of the Dr. Peter AIDS Centre, an internationally renowned Centre whose mission is to provide care and support for individuals with HIV/AIDS. 

The centre’s holistic approach, which prioritizes the individual, autonomy, respect, and empowerment, is a powerful model, with a lot that we can take to inspire innovative thinking to improve mental healthcare. Thoughts on destigmatizing mental health issues too. 

Listen now on your favourite podcast platform:

ABOUT

WICKED MIND

Hosted by respected psychiatrist, author, and educator Dr. Diane McIntoshWicked Mind is a podcast for everyone. Whether you’re directly impacted by mental illness, care for people who are, make or implement policy, build technology, or you’re just an interested bystander, you’ll leave with fresh insights.

There is a reason to hope, and there’s always a path ahead. But, it starts with a recognition that there’s an urgent need for change.

This is, Wicked Mind.

More Episodes

From trauma to change with
Stéphane Grenier

Founder & Lead Innovator,
Mental Health Innovations Consulting

Leadership in action with
Louise Bradley

Past president & CEO,
Mental Health Commission of Canada

It’s time for mental health care to catch up with Sue Paish

CEO,
Digital Technology Supercluster

Peeling the Onion: The ongoing battle to de-stigmatize HIV/AIDS and what we can learn for mental health with Scott Elliot

Executive Director,
Dr. Peter AIDS Centre

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