RCMP under fire for lack of mental health help for officers - Manitoba - CBC News
"Ontario still talking about legislation to protect First Responders. Fir. Police .EMS. Corrections ,Nurses,SocialWorkers ,Residential Workers and Students still unaware that they are entering into High Stress Careers with No Safety Net. Paul Murphy"
Friday 29 May 2015
Workplace deaths climb in Ontario
Workplace
deaths climb in Ontario
Published
On Mon Jul 11 2011
Tony Van
Alphen Business Reporter
Workplace
deaths have jumped 16 per cent in Ontario during the last year despite a
government push for better job safety and prompting one labour leader to brand
the situation “a national disgrace.”
Ontario
statistics show 377 workers died on
the job or from occupational disease in fiscal 2010-11 that ended March 31, an
increase of 53 from the previous year.
A
breakdown of the figures from the Ministry of Labour and Workplace Safety and
Insurance Board reveals that job fatalities alone climbed by 11 in the latest
year or 15 per cent to 84.
At the
same time, the data indicates that lost time injury and illness rates have
continued to fall in the last decade. Those key rates dropped almost seven per cent to 4.16 accident claims receiving approval for
compensation per 100 full-time equivalent workers in the latest year.
Sid Ryan,
president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, said the Christmas Eve 2009
deaths of four immigrant tradesmen should have jolted employers into paying
extra attention to workplace safety but it hasn’t stopped the carnage.
The four
workers fell 13 storeys and died when a scaffold collapsed at an apartment
building in suburban Etobicoke.
“Every
year, it’s still 80 or more workers in our province who die,” he said. “It’s a
national disgrace. Shouldn’t we as a society place more value on a human life?
Yet, it’s regarded as the cost of doing business.”
Ryan said
police have the authority to lay charges for negligence in on-the-job deaths
that can mean jail time under the Criminal Code but they have not exercised
that power enough.
Police
charged Metron Construction Corp. and three men including the company’s owner
in the scaffold deaths but their case has not reached trial.
“We say
‘kill a worker, go to jail,’ ” said Ryan, who represents about 700,000 workers
in affiliated unions. “We are only going to see a drop in fatalities when we
start to see CEOs or front line supervisors go to jail as a result of workers
getting killed.
“Until
CEOs start to pay as much attention to health and safety as they do the bottom
line, then, and only then, will we see a decline in the number of deaths?”
Labour
Minister Charles Sousa and WSIB chairman Steve Mahoney could not be reached for
comment on Monday. But Wayne De L’Orme, co-ordinator for the ministry’s
industrial health and safety program, said although the decline in injury rates
is encouraging and follows a downward trend over several years, the number of
fatalities is “unacceptable to everyone.”
“People
and government take fatalities very seriously,” he said. “There really are no
excuses. It makes us redouble our efforts.”
De L’Orme
said ministry staff examined the latest annual fatality statistics but could
not find any specific reason for the increase.
“It was
an all-around bad year,’ he said.
While
workplace fatalities are up, De L’Orme also noted that incident rates for
serious injuries have declined.
“I don’t
want to minimize the number of deaths in the last year but sometimes the
difference between a serious injury and a fatality is the width of a piece of
paper,” he said.
The
scaffold tragedy has sparked enforcement blitzes in many industrial sectors
including the construction and mining industries during the last year. It also
led to a review of the province’s occupational health and safety system in 2010
and new legislation.
The
Liberal government passed the most significant changes to the Occupational
Health and Safety Act in three decades this year by moving control of accident
prevention from the safety board to the labour ministry and making sure all
workers and managers receive proper education about their rights and
responsibilities.
De L’Orme
said the ministry is also paying more attention to tackling employers in the
“underground economy” who may exploit immigrant workers and put their safety in
danger.
Ryan
added that while statistics indicate a decline in injury rates that lead to
time off the job, the numbers could actually be worse because of accidents in
the underground economy that companies and workers never report.
Furthermore,
he said about one third of Ontario’s workforce including the banking and
insurance sectors are not under the WSIB so their accident numbers would not
appear in the statistics.
Tuesday 26 May 2015
The case for publicly funded therapy - The Globe and Mail
The case for publicly funded therapy - The Globe and Mail
Ontario still does not have presumptive legislation to protect First Responders. I worked for a transfer agency and when I became ill there was little , or nothing in place.
Ontario still does not have presumptive legislation to protect First Responders. I worked for a transfer agency and when I became ill there was little , or nothing in place.
Monday 25 May 2015
EXCLUSIVE: Kebabs make soldiers too fat to fight: Army serving bad fast-food to troops | UK | News | Daily Express
EXCLUSIVE: Kebabs make soldiers too fat to fight: Army serving bad fast-food to troops | UK | News | Daily Express
Professional fighting men and women are struggling to address obesity.
Professional fighting men and women are struggling to address obesity.
Mentally ill and ‘out' but not yet embraced
Mentally ill and ‘out' but not yet embraced
Mentally ill and ‘out' but not yet embraced
erin anderssen
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 13, 2012 5:15PM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012 11:19AM EST
erin anderssen
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 13, 2012 5:15PM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012 11:19AM EST
Michael Kimber's
blog began about two years ago, as a love letter to the girl who stuck with him
through his lowest days. In Colony of Losers, he writes how one morning in
November, 2009, at the age of 25, he woke up in his Halifax apartment stricken
by anxiety so severe he could hardly get out of bed, how his parents paid for a
therapist when he was put on a six-month waiting list, how in his wide-ranging
search for a cure he tried mood-boosting almonds, happy-themed YouTube videos,
mindful mediation and finally antidepressants.
More related to this story
More related to this story
How the taboo against reporting on suicide met its end
One-quarter of hospitalized psychiatric patients restrained
One-quarter of hospitalized psychiatric patients restrained
Breakdown: an in-depth report on Canada's mental health
crisis
And at the end of all this, he started writing a blog. On
March 28, 2010, he lost his not-dream job as a “search engine optimizer,” and
nearly the girl as well, but the medication had started to work, and he was
sleeping again. This was the day, as he puts it, when he realized, “No one
could save me. I had to save myself.”
By June, he was writing openly about his experience with
anxiety and depression. Today, his irreverent, expletive-splattered blog is
verging on one million hits and, now living in Toronto and working for a
documentary film company, he has signed with a literary agent.
He also receives 3 a.m. e-mails from people hoping he will
talk them out of committing suicide. Strangers, learning of his blog, spill
their darkest secrets as carelessly as wine at a party – or throw unsolicited
advice in his face. He has even heard from a former teacher who kept her own
bout with mental illness secret for fear of losing her job. He knows others who
haven't told even their own families.
By “coming out,” as Mr. Kimber calls it, he is daring people
to judge, hoping to force understanding through confession – he is the modern
incarnation of the early mental-health advocates who began coming out
themselves in the 1980s, when the closet was crowded. Like those early voices,
storytellers such as Mr. Kimber may be the best hope of reducing the enduring
stigma that people with mental illness are afflicted with.
Not much else appears to be working. Stigma is a term bandied
around so often that it has taken on the quality of an incurable disease in its
own right.
In 1963, Canadian psychiatrist Erving Goffman wrote a classic
definition of stigma, calling it the “spoiled identity” that disqualifies an
individual from full social acceptance. There are undeniable issues that develop
from a diagnosis of mental illness, especially when symptoms are acute and
untreated: People suffering from depression and anxiety have, unsurprisingly,
higher rates of absenteeism from work, are more likely to self-medicate with
drugs and alcohol. In the manic stage, people with bipolar disorder often
behave erratically, experience delusions, or make reckless financial decisions.
When Vincent Li beheaded a stranger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba in 2008, his
diagnosis of schizophrenia – and the media frenzy his gruesome act generated –
only heightened a public fear of people suffering with psychosis.
But part of the tragedy is that the stigma itself prevents
people from seeking out the treatment they need. Yet the longer treatment is
delayed – and the more isolated people feel – the harder recovery becomes, a
problem made worse by growing waiting lists and bed shortages for psychiatric
patients. In Vincent Li's case, for instance, his ex-wife reportedly refused to
get help for him, in part, out of concern about how he would be treated, and a
lack of understanding about his illness.
Studies in Canada and internationally have shown that
attitudes and behaviour toward people suffering from depression and bipolar
disorder, and, especially, schizophrenia, have barely budged in the past
decade.
In some cases, public awareness efforts may have even
entrenched certain misconceptions – stressing the genetic and biological causes
of mental illness has also shored up the false belief that that it cannot be
successfully treated, and that even patients in recovery cannot be competent
employees or reliable tenants. The term “mental illness” has become a
misleading catch-all for a range of complex and very different illnesses and
disorders. And the most pernicious misconception of all shows little sign of
retreat: that the majority of people with mental illness are prone to violence.
In fact, they are far more likely to be victims of violence,
or a danger to themselves. And while people with untreated schizophrenia have a
higher risk of violence than the population as a whole, these cases are
extremely rare, and crimes against strangers are even more so.
Facts aside, and even though one in five Canadians will
experience a mental illness, our phobias are firmly entrenched: In a 2008
national survey commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association, one in four
Canadians said they would be fearful about being around someone with a serious
mental illness. More than half said they would be unlikely to marry someone (or
hire a lawyer, child-care provider or financial planner, family doctor, or even
a landscaper) with a mental illness.
“There is really very little evidence that there has been a
change in the attitudes toward people with mental illness,” says Ross Norman, a
University of Western Ontario psychology professor who studies the nature of
stigma. Research on stigma, in general, has suggested that it originates from a
sense that the individual is personally responsible for his or her situation –
so in the past decade, for instance, anti-stigma campaigns have stressed the
biological and hereditary factors behind mental illness. Subsequent research
shows that while people believed the science, it didn't do much to change their
attitudes, and if anything it shored up the belief that mental illness was an
intractable and unpredictable condition, that, as Dr. Ross puts it, “there was
something wrong with their brains.”
That's where people like Mr. Kimber, and other well-spoken,
professional people come in, Dr. Ross suggests, by countering stereotypes and
creating positive role models. “It's probably one of the best ways of making a
difference,” he says.
People within Canada's mental-health community, including
patients themselves and family members who had watched loved ones become lost
in the system, began speaking out in the 1980s. Many went on to play key roles
in the organizations that now advocate for better treatment and funding. Among
those early spokespeople was June Conway Beeby, in Kingston, Ont., who began
telling the tragic story of her son who committed suicide in 1981 after a long
history with schizophrenia.
“I wasn't going to hide what happened to Matthew,” she says.
“I wanted people to know that he had a terrible illness, and how we received
very poor treatment, very little treatment at all, in fact.” Friends and family
assumed that her son had been on drugs, that he was the victim of a deal gone
wrong. People stopped talking when she passed by at work, or they avoided her
completely. “I can make sure the world knows what happened to my precious boy,”
she thought, and she began giving speeches and speaking out in the media. She
didn't spare the details: She found her son in his apartment, lying in a pool
of blood with dinner knives plunged through his eyes where he had pounded them
into his brain. “Now you know where my efforts come from,” she says.
For her, the stigma is slow in changing – the education
campaigns often miss the point.
“Prevention is a mug's game,” she says. By her reasoning, the
surest way to fight stigma is to improve access to treatment and hospital beds,
especially for more severe cases of mental illness. Every act of violence
highlighted in the media, she points out, sets back any effort to educate the
public. “Why wouldn't they feel stigma and fear?”
Political correctness can teach the right language, but how
deeply does it change attitudes?
For a decades, Andrea Schluter, now a 47-year-old natural
history painter in Vancouver, tried to keep her depression quiet. A graduate
student in wildlife biology, she knew all too well what her peers in the field
thought: “They equated depression with cowardice, particularly if you were
suicidal.”
In the 1990s, she was admitted to hospital in a manic state,
and felt she had to write about it publicly: “I recall the realization that I
had been thrown, violently, into another world,” she explains. “And I knew,
with every cell in my body carrying the genetic set-up for this sickness of the
mind, that I would need to find a way to live in that world.”
She wrote a then-rare article for The Globe and Mail's Facts
and Arguments page, boldly describing the reactions, both insulting and
carelessly hurtful, of the people around her. “I just thought, ‘Hang the
consequences,' ” she says. “I couldn't believe how unenlightened people were.”
Her outspoken approach led to a job speaking about workplace
accommodation from a first-person perspective.
She feels any stigma about her disease less today. Her fierce
openness forces people either to accept her or slip out of her life, she says.
But once in a while, she realizes her friends may not be as enlightened as she
hopes. She recalls a conversation at a dinner party, in which a friend was
critical about a new transition house for psychiatric patients being built
nearby: What kind of “mentals” would this bring to the neighbourhood? Ms.
Schluter pointed out that she herself had stayed in this kind of housing in the
past, and, when the woman refused to back down, she left the party.
“I guess she was so irate, she wasn't picking up on what I
was saying,” she recalls “There were at least eight other friends in this group
sitting around that table. And nobody spoke up.”
Meanwhile, as Mr. Kimber's blog continues to draw attention,
he is using it as a vehicle to urge other people to share their stories. As he
writes, “You have to make the effort to make the world understand. We don't
need any more inspiring stories about instant cures and celebrities defeating
all the obstacles. We need to redefine what a happy ending is.”
Erin Anderssen is a Globe and Mail feature writer.
Related Links:
Michael Kimber's blog, Colony of Losers
A video telling Michael Kimber's story: The Cure Visual Poem
Another Michael Kimber video: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever
You Are
From ‘evil' to ‘mentally ill' in the media
Newspaper stories don't toss around the word “evil” any more
to describe people who commit crimes. Instead, as a McGill researcher has found
in analyzing five years of Canadian media coverage, readers are more likely to
see the phrase “mentally ill” linked to a crime story, especially the most
sensational ones.
“In the old days, we would have said an evil person was on
the loose, and now people just say a mentally ill person is on the loose,” says
Robert Whitley, a psychiatrist at the Douglas Mental Health University
Institute. “The moral language has been replaced with this medical language.
Now [people with a mental illness] seem to be a shorthand way to describe any
person or event that is shocking or depraved.”
Dr. Whitley led a team of researchers who analyzed nearly
9,000 articles from Canadian newspapers, as well as television news. He says
the research, which is yet to be published, found that only 12 per cent of the
stories took an optimistic or positive tone about mental health. Another 29 per
cent used derogatory language to refer to people with a mental illness; Dr.
Whitley cites an editorial on courthouse security, for instance, that referred
to “the mentally ill” as “nasty characters.” Nearly 40 per cent of the print
stories related to violence and criminality, and treatment or recovery was
discussed in less than 20 per cent.
But Dr. Whitley says the most surprising finding was the lack
of voices in the stories – both in print and TV. Three-quarters of the articles
did not quote a mental-health expert, and 84 per cent didn't include a comment
from a person with a mental illness. “You wouldn't write an article about
hockey without interviewing a player or manager or Don Cherry,” he observed.
If the media are the main source of information about mental
illness, Dr. Whitley suggests, then current coverage feeds into many persistent
misconceptions.
“There is still a skepticism that people with mental illness
can be rational and good at their jobs and be a good parent.”
Saturday 23 May 2015
Military Suicide Prevention | Stop Soldier SuicideStop Soldier Suicide
Military Suicide Prevention | Stop Soldier SuicideStop Soldier Suicide
Ontario is still talking about creating workplace policies that protect first responders.
Ontario is still talking about creating workplace policies that protect first responders.
Thursday 21 May 2015
The latest on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace: Ontario Ministry of Labour releases report from its Roundtable on Traumatic Mental Stress - Lexology
The latest on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace: Ontario Ministry of Labour releases report from its Roundtable on Traumatic Mental Stress - Lexology
Ontario still talking about this , while workers continue to deal and cope with mental illness and have to fight a system that is non- sympathetic. Answer, educate students going into high risk fields in the hope to allow students to make informed decisions. Paul Murphy- Ontario Injured Worker from a Youth Jail in Ontario.
Ontario still talking about this , while workers continue to deal and cope with mental illness and have to fight a system that is non- sympathetic. Answer, educate students going into high risk fields in the hope to allow students to make informed decisions. Paul Murphy- Ontario Injured Worker from a Youth Jail in Ontario.
Nova Scotia First Responder PTSD Mental Health Compensation Private Members Bill
BILL NO. 11
(as introduced)
2nd Session, 62nd General AssemblyNova Scotia
63 Elizabeth II, 2014
Private Member's Bill
Workers' Compensation Act
(amended)
The Honourable Dave Wilson
Sackville–Cobequid
First Reading: October 1, 2014
(Explanatory Note)
Second Reading:
Third Reading:
![[home]](http://nslegislature.ca/legc/images/n-home.gif)
![[bills]](http://nslegislature.ca/legc/images/n-top.gif)
Explanatory Note
An Act to Amend Chapter 10
of the Acts of 1994-95,
the Workers' Compensation Act
1 This Act may be cited as the Workers' Compensation for Emergency Responders with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Act.
2 Chapter 10 of the Acts of 1994-95, the
Workers' Compensation Act, is amended by adding immediately after
Section 35A the following Section:
- 35B (1) In this Section,
- (i) an agent, as defined in the Children and Family Services Act,
(2) Notwithstanding any other provision of
this Act but subject to subsection (6), in respect of emergency
responders to whom this Section applies, post-traumatic stress disorder
is an accident for the purpose of this Act regardless of whether the
disorder is recognized or diagnosed at the time of or after an acute
reaction to a traumatic event.
(3) Where a worker who is or has been an
emergency responder suffers an accident that is post-traumatic stress
disorder, the accident is presumed to be an occupational disease, the
dominant cause of which is the employment as an emergency responder,
unless the contrary is proven.
(4) Subsection 83(2) does not apply with
respect to a worker who learned before this Section came into force that
the emergency responder suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
This page and its contents published by the Office of the Legislative Counsel, Nova Scotia House of Assembly, and © 2014 Crown in right of Nova Scotia. Created October 1, 2014. Send comments to legc.office@gov.ns.ca.
Wednesday 20 May 2015
College rolls out student mental-health and wellness strategy - Tbnewswatch.com Thunder Bay News
College rolls out student mental-health and wellness strategy - Tbnewswatch.com Thunder Bay News
Great to see this being rolled out . Maybe this could help with passing Bill 2 . First Responder Legislation in Ontario.
Great to see this being rolled out . Maybe this could help with passing Bill 2 . First Responder Legislation in Ontario.
Friday 15 May 2015
Thursday 14 May 2015
U.S. Army vet shot self to death in Phoenix: Cops | Owen Sound Sun Times
U.S. Army vet shot self to death in Phoenix: Cops | Owen Sound Sun Times
Ontario continues to talk about PTSD and I wonder what would happen if students began getting educated regarding mental health and inherent risk. Paul Murphy
Ontario continues to talk about PTSD and I wonder what would happen if students began getting educated regarding mental health and inherent risk. Paul Murphy
Friday 8 May 2015
Obese students far less likely to finish high school, Swedish study says - LA Times
Obese students far less likely to finish high school, Swedish study says - LA Times
Canada has given 4.5 million dollars to research Weight Loss Surgery. When do we beging funding prevention ?
Canada has given 4.5 million dollars to research Weight Loss Surgery. When do we beging funding prevention ?
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