Health committee  Mr. Chair and members of the standing committee, it is a privilege to address you this afternoon. My name is Travis Salway and I'm an epidemiologist and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, where I study how stigma and stress affect the health of

Health committee  That's a great question. Historically, mental health professionals, including psychologists and psychiatrists, practised versions of conversion therapy. Homosexuality was, up until the late 1960s, considered a mental illness. There are some roots of it in the mental health profe

Health committee  That's correct.

Health committee  Yes, that happens in some cases.

Health committee  I think the most typical scenario would be a minor who's living under guardianship. Their parent or guardian might be concerned when their child expresses a form of distress or starts questioning their gender or their sexuality. At that point you might imagine—given what we've ta

Health committee  Yes. The countries I am aware of that have done this are Malta and Taiwan. The risk in leaving it to provinces to regulate for the health care provider communities is that it pushes this practice into settings that are outside of medical practices. It could be in individuals' h

Health committee  To be honest, I'm not prepared to answer that, but I would say that there are organizations and individuals in Canada working directly with survivors of conversion therapy, most notably including Generous Space, which is a national organization based here in Ontario. They would b

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. Of course, suicide in particular and other mental health topics as well are stigmatized for everyone. There is a reluctance to open up. There is a reluctance to confront it head-on. You might imagine that for folks like sexual and gender minorities who have a hi

Health committee  Yes. The way to deal with that is to have that training led by organizations with strong histories of doing good work with queer communities. You're right, though. We need both approaches. It won't reach everyone, so we need a general suicide prevention approach—a universal prev

Health committee  Yes I have, absolutely. Tristan alluded to this when he talked about the effects of intersections of multiple social positions. Since my work has mostly focused on suicide, I'll comment on one that really stands out. That is the experience of indigenous Canadians, who also exp

Health committee  I do not, and the reason is the practice itself is very hard to categorize as one of those offences that you mentioned. Very often, the practice is a little subtler in how it's initiated, but in a way, it's more pernicious because it goes on, sometimes for years, sometimes for mo

Health committee  I would agree with everything that Dr. Abramovich said. I think we need more education about providing sexual and gender-affirming care at multiple levels, so I think it can begin in the schools so people can have an early general sense of the power and the sense of self-confiden

Health committee  That's beyond my area of expertise, but the earlier the better.

Health committee  Absolutely, I think as we move forward we need online and offline approaches. I think that's the best way to reach the maximum number of people. I have experience working in a crisis centre, and there we found a very different type of person will reach out online for support. I t

Health committee  One research model that Greg alluded to as well is the syndemic theory. Syndemic theory suggests that the reason we see multiple health problems arise in the same population—and you mentioned substance use, but we could also talk about anxiety, or many of the other health issues