What Family Caregivers Should Know about Mental Health and Addiction Risk in Children and Teens
September 17, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
[Download MP3] [itunes] [Bookmark Episode]
Guest Information
Episode Description
Caroline Brereton is Chief Executive Officer of the www.mh.ccac-ont.ca, Mississauga Halton Community Care Access Centre. Shauna Johnston is a mental health and addictions nurse with the Centre. They talk about their careers, family caregiving experience, and work with addiction risk and mental health problems for children and adolescents. They explain the challenges and the effects that are created for students, schools, and families and family caregivers by addiction risks and mental health problems, which in some ways differ from addictions risks. They describe the ways in which the services they provide help all those involved with the challenges created by students’ addiction risk and mental health problems. They explain the things they would like to do and see done to improve ways for overcoming the challenges and reducing their effects. They share their messages for the students, schools, students, families and family caregivers the Community Care Access Centre helps.
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.
