Part 2: Systemic Barriers and Community Empowerment: A Conversation with Dr. Ingrid Waldron

This episode is hosted by Dr. Anna Gunz, with guest Dr. Ingrid Waldron (Part 2) 

Episode Summary:  

•  A discussion of Bill C-226, which was Canada’s first environmental justice law. The bill was co-developed by Dr. Waldron and aimed to provide structural solutions to environmental racism.
• The mechanisms through which health can be impacted by environmental racism are discussed. Environmental factors such as poor air quality and climate change can contribute to various health issues, especially in marginalized communities.
• Dr. Waldron stresses the need for a holistic approach to health and describes how many Indigenous and African perspectives emphasize the interconnectedness of nature and health.
• There is a discussion about the need for healthcare professionals to be more aware of environmental and structural determinants of health. The lack of connection between environmental health, climate change, and mental health in medical and public health training is a major gap.
• Dr. Waldron talks about her upcoming book, which explores the intersection of race, mental health, and colonial history. The book addresses the misdiagnosis of Black individuals in psychiatric settings and the stigma surrounding mental health in Black communities.

Recording Date: 2024-11-22

Episode Production & Management Team:  

Jakob Wilk, Emma Cornell, Abby Walker, Olivia D'Andrea Brooks, Emily Douglas, Danielle Pineda 

Show Artwork:   

Laney Beaulieu

Transcript

Anna Gunz
That's incredible. Again. Like I can think of about four questions out of what you've just said. I think the first of all, I just a reflection when you're talking about community based research, in a way, it's really like connecting and resource it. You're a resource. So there's this very reciprocal keys and and enabling. And I think that's one interest just to even go to Bill see 2 to 6.

Anna Gunz
How can communities. So now that it has passed which is phenomenal, how can communities use that bill to support the work that they need to do for environmental justice? Perspective.

Ingrid Waldron
Yeah. So, Bill C 2 to 6, which was a private member's bill, which is now, law. So we have our first environmental justice law in Canada was co-developed, as I said earlier, with me and Lenore Zann, and then it was sponsored later by Elizabeth May because Lenore Zann lost her seat. When we had the snap election in 2021, she lost her seat, to a conservative, in Nova Scotia.

Ingrid Waldron
So the bill was then sponsored by Elizabeth May. And then on June 20th of 2024, this year, it received royal assent, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. And people off, as people often ask me, like, what can that bill do? What can that law do for communities? I think, well, first of all, I'm not spearheading the national environmental justice strategy, that accompanies the bill that's mentioned in the bill.

Ingrid Waldron
The Department of Environment and Climate Change is the national environmental justice strategy that's mentioned in the bill. And that is going to involve consultation with impacted communities, communities impacted by environmental racism across the country. So they're leading it. But I think how it helps communities is this is the first time ever, that the department has ever done this type of work, has ever done consultations across, across Canada with impacted communities.

Ingrid Waldron
So that's the first. And when we think of the, the definitions, the five principles of environmental racism, one of them is that the communities are never heard. The communities that are impacted are never heard. This is now an opportunity, for the first time, for the government to hear the concerns of community members. So that's important. The second reason that the bill is important and could be helpful to communities is because it addresses another aspect of the definition of environmental racism is that the communities that are most impacted never have a seat at the table.

Ingrid Waldron
They're never involved in decision making and policymaking. That is one of the, tenets of environmental racism, the national strategy whereby the government will consult with communities. In addition, to having their voices heard, community members will have an opportunity, I would say, to build that national strategy. And that national strategy is a policy. So they will be reaching out to communities to hear their concerns.

Ingrid Waldron
But we've all heard their concerns. What we want is action

Anna Gunz
For sure.

Ingrid Waldron
I believe that some of the questions that they plan to pose to community members are, what are your suggestions for building this national, environmental justice strategy? Those suggestions, to me, allow community members to be, co developers in this national environmental justice strategy, an opportunity that they've never had.

Ingrid Waldron
So I think for those reasons, I see this being very helpful for community. I mean, there's another aspect of the bill which is about financial compensation. I won't use the word reparations. I know people get, people don't like that term, but basically it's to provide financial compensation to communities that have lost out in some way. So I think the bill looks back, the bill looks back, and the bill looks forward.

Ingrid Waldron
There's an intention to intervene on current cases of environmental racism and also prevention to prevent future cases because they're learning from community members about what has happened and perhaps what should not have happened. And I'm hoping that they will learn from, learn from those experiences to put in place approaches that will prevent future cases of environmental racism.

Ingrid Waldron
For all of those reasons, I think the bill will be helpful, for communities.

Anna Gunz
Yeah. So communities can make the bell work for them as well. I. I think the other thing that struck me when you were. Well, I think the other thing that struck me when you were speaking about environmental racism is, you know, when when you have you because you said that, you felt that there was a lot of, resistance and doubt and, you know, probably undermining some of the this initially and it, you know, occurs to me there's there's two things that you're talking about that are very hard to speak about for people to acknowledge based on bias or education, other things.

Anna Gunz
And one of them was racism. And the other thing is the environment. And I think this is something that, you know, in our work and trying to sort of move together, move forward. What I've realized is more and more is there's this missing in Western perspectives. The environment is just not part of health. And, you know, in the in the medical system, which is why I love seeing patients in our clinic, you know, people who have concerns or are wondering, so in the medical system there is, but also in communities and especially when you see the word climate change, there's this dichotomy with people who are getting really afraid of their water or their

Anna Gunz
air, but deny this existence of climate change. And then there's the politicizing of, you know, these other pieces and people are getting pulled to to actual misinformation around water and air. And I even think about my you know, I, I've never lived anywhere where I thought and I didn't I wasn't born in this country. So even moving from where I was to here, I've never lived anywhere where I thought the water was just safe for me to walk in even, not even let alone drink it.

Anna Gunz
Right. And it only occurred to me a few years ago how twisted that is, that we would even think that that it would be normal for us to think it's dangerous, that the air is usually polluted. So you know that you have to really go elsewhere if you're lucky enough to get clean air, and then even then, it's probably not going to be clean.

Anna Gunz
I just, I never, I just that was just the way it was. And, and I think now, you know, having the privilege of having a vehicle that's, that is electric versus one. And now if I'm near one that has, you know, you know, combustion engine, I'm like, whoa, I smell it. I, you know, I, I, one of my areas of medicines, transport, medicine.

Anna Gunz
So, you know, walking into the bases, where, you know, our, you know, the medics I work with are and, and, you know, the air or even on an airplane, the air that you breathe. I notice it now because it's not part of my every day. I don't I don't smell gasoline all the time, so I don't expect it.

Anna Gunz
And therefore, you know, I know it. I think the other piece is that, you know, as I learned about the health effects, even as a physician of the wide disseminated health effects that we have from heat, and air pollution, you know, affecting mental health that like, you know, with air quality, you know, we've had, you know, decades of data and it's, you know, associated with early onset schizophrenia and youth, in multiple cohorts, early onset schizophrenia, question of autism and, depression and possibly ADHD, maybe not anxiety.

Anna Gunz
There's less of the single, but you know, there's constantly data, cerebral palsy as well as all of these other health outcomes, stroke, heart attacks, etc.. And, you know, you can take that, you know, the epidemiology and you can add that environmental racism piece. But it's I think, you know, when people are learning this, even when I learned this, wow.

Anna Gunz
You know, it really is we can't see it. And it's a bit intangible because it's at the population level or even the other way. How important how how enriched we are when we are connected with nature in some way. You know, our mental health, our physical health, our blood pressure, our glycemic control or sugar control if we have diabetes.

Anna Gunz
And I you know, I remember looking into this literature and being like, wow. And because there's this intangible piece of it's almost it's with environmental racism, it's this, it's this multilayered education in and you know, with that all said, I wonder about how, you know, the some of the work I, I feel in climate change, in health, I've done a lot of, work and asking people and really wondering what their priorities are and what they're worried about, with their health and one of the places and we really want to do a lot of work around adaptation, empowering people with the health and figuring out how, you know, there's medications that needs to

Anna Gunz
be changed. How do we link with community groups and community organizations so that we can, you know, protect our communal health and, and lean in when we're having heat wave or, you know, air quality ways and people who have complex health conditions, you know, racialised communities, indigenous groups. But, you know, in my purview with children, children everywhere, across all of these identities are not really being brought to the table.

Anna Gunz
They're they're in these institutions that they don't have control about going to, like, schools and, you know, maybe job and summer jobs in summer camp. And we're not having conversations about how to protect that health, which I realize I don't want to get on a bit of a tangent, but I think the where I'm coming to is how do we balance listening to community, but also bringing in education so they can use that, that actually, when we're talking about heat, it's not just being hot and having heat stroke where kids go to the emergency room, more seniors go to the emergency, more, more people get admitted to hospital.

Anna Gunz
More people have pneumonia. And so this is why it's really important that we lean in and tackle this issue. How do you balance listening and also supporting with education so that these decisions and these actions can be, you know, even more enriched in communities that might not have that? Not and there are very community, they're very educated communities.

Anna Gunz
And I think more of more Western, you know, communities where that knowledge doesn't exist or that that relationship with environment and health, which is, you know, like as in non-Indigenous communities, where that relationship is a little bit has been severed more, yeah.

Ingrid Waldron
enough, the health effects of environmental racism were dismissed, by the folks that I met with at Nova Scotia Department of Environment. When I said I met with them a few times at the end of 2014, beginning at the end of 2014, there was a dismissive ness, and at that time, I had yet to write my book and I had yet to really publish it.

Ingrid Waldron
But I was new to it all. And they wanted evidence, you

Anna Gunz
Is.

Ingrid Waldron
were health effects. And, I didn't have that evidence. Well, there's evidence that in Canada over the past 20 years that indicate that because we have environmental researchers and environmental sociology, environmental science, who talked about the health effects in Canada, but they were very dismissive.

Ingrid Waldron
Also, I want to point out that what you're talking about also speaks to the holistic understandings that indigenous people have

Anna Gunz
Very.

Ingrid Waldron
wellbeing. You know, when we talk about indigenous epistemology, epistemology, indigenous ways of knowing, that's precisely it, that they have a much more holistic understanding, understanding the connections between the environment, between plants, animals, health. You know, when they say, you desecrate my land, you desecrate us as people?

Ingrid Waldron
Because it's part of who we are. We don't make those separations in Western society. We separate the body from the mind. And now, you know, in Western society, mindfulness, healing and meditation and yoga are popular, but they're not Western modalities. So we have a lot to learn from both, I would say indigenous ways of knowing, but also African ways of knowing, which people don't often talk about in terms of African epistemology is very similar to indigenous epistemology.

Ingrid Waldron
It's that it's that holistic understanding of the world. So that's what's missing. And that's what I would say is missing in environmental assessments, which is that process that's used to decide where a hazardous project goes in communities. They're not thinking about the social determinants of health or the structural determinants of health, or the impact on health in indigenous communities.

Ingrid Waldron
If you put a pipeline there because in your Western ideology, those things are separate, there's no understanding that environment, environmental issues, environmental degradation is going to impact on anybody's health. And that's certainly and that comes with teaching. And I you know, I certainly teach my students about that. And I think in medical schools in terms of training, in terms of the health professions, all of that needs to be taught.

Ingrid Waldron
And, you know, I taught for a bit in nursing when I was at Dalhousie. I'm not a nurse by any means. But, you know, they wanted a sociologist. So here I am, and I put a lot of time trying to impress upon nursing students the importance of thinking about environmental issues. And I got some pushback because my nursing students didn't understand what this had to do with nursing.

Ingrid Waldron
You know, I was teaching them the structural determinants of health, environmental determinants of health, environmental racism. And they didn't understand why Ingrid Waldron was hired. Well, I pushed back. It got easier later on. But I can understand why it seemed to come out of the blue for them. You know, they wanted to know about the technical skills

Anna Gunz
Grim.

Ingrid Waldron
that's the most important. I'm not going to deny that. But I also think nurses and health professionals need to understand environmental issues. Because more and more we're realizing through research, that environmental determinants have increasingly the most bearing on our health and well-being and what we eat and what we're putting into our mouths. We're seeing that every day now, in terms of how I educate communities around the health effects, I have an example right now that's starting to happen that I'm very excited about.

Ingrid Waldron
So I mentioned earlier, I'm doing a climate change project in black communities in Nova Scotia. I've been communicating with Nova Scotia Health, for maybe for the past month about having them do an online doing a series of online presentations, to the African Nova Scotian folks. Who participated in workshops that I held in the summer of this year in June and August, I completed 13 workshops in different African Nova Scotian communities.

Ingrid Waldron
And last year I held 12 workshops in African Nova Scotian communities for a total of 25, African Nova Scotian communities, for a total of over 200 participants. So I was speaking with Nova Scotia Health about doing a presentation in February that looks at the health impacts of, of climate change. I am also going to reach out to someone at Nova Scotia Health to talk about Lyme disease, because that was

Ingrid Waldron
that was an issue that was much discussed during the workshops, on climate change with African Nova Scotians this year and last year, Lyme disease was a big issue.

Ingrid Waldron
So I'm also going to have someone talk about the connections between, climate change and Lyme disease and also how to address it. And then I'm also planning to connect with, some other folks at Nova Scotia Health about climate anxiety, the mental health impacts of climate change and climate anxiety. So I'm very excited about this connection. I had connections with Nova Scotia Health around environmental racism, and I lived in Nova Scotia.

Ingrid Waldron
So I already had that connection. But I'm happy that they now seem to have an initiative, which I don't think was there when I was living there. That didn't exist. An initiative on climate change and health. So I'm certainly planning to kind of nurture

Ingrid Waldron
Scotia Health and the partnerships, so that they can bring the health issues into light.

Ingrid Waldron
I think more and certainly the workshop participants highlighted the health issues.

Ingrid Waldron
So I just wish that, more scholars can do that. I think with environmental racism and climate change, once again, I think people are in their silos. And climate, environment and health are often taught by professors independently, in independent ways, once again sticking within their silos.

Ingrid Waldron
And that government departments also don't bring those two issues together health and environmental health and climate change. So I'm really excited about the fact that Nova Scotia Health is doing that work.

Anna Gunz
Yeah. And I think it's. I think the other piece is that now communities and public, like they're starting to bring in, you know, there's these interdisciplinary groups around some sort of issue, whether it's food or housing in a community around climate change and the breathing and health. But at the level of public health. And I still think that there's and then there's health care providers and people who are working at the individual levels and there's not there's a lot of knowledge that needs to be, you know, that needs to be spread to capacity.

Anna Gunz
But I what I try to do more is transcend, like link in to these where you're talking about public health, because public health is responsible for health messaging. And then beyond that, it's, you know, the the actual individuals and communities. And so I feel like this public like public health gets brought in now, which is phenomenal. But we're not bringing in, you know, the individual allies health that then actually like the so link in with these community organizations to help, you know, promote health.

Anna Gunz
You know, if I have a very vulnerable like a person who's very high risk and he, you know, our senior who you know, what community organization can check on them and support them. So, yeah.

Ingrid Waldron
shared with us that they don't even have health clinics.

Anna Gunz
Yeah.

Ingrid Waldron
health clinics are not open all day.

Anna Gunz
Right.

Ingrid Waldron
physicians access in clinics are very difficult for them. And they talked about the elderly having unique and specific problems. So you're right about that in rural and African Nova Scotian communities that are 99% rural, you know that their communities, they're in rural, isolated communities, access to physicians, access to medical care is a challenge.

Ingrid Waldron
So you're right. This the extent to which Nova Scotia Health can address that, those on the ground issues, we'll see. But you're right in pointing out that that that that yeah, there is the public health aspect. But we we need individuals to address individual experiences with health that can be a challenge.

Anna Gunz
And as health care providers, we need to. This is where we need to respond and be creative and different. You know, it's. This isn't working. And so how can how can we do this differently?

Ingrid Waldron
But what do you say the reason why it's not working is goes back to what I said earlier. The training,

Anna Gunz
Yeah, I think some of it yeah I, I think some of the training I think some of it's demand and also health care providers aren't well and I have a good friend who, who does a lot of work, in actual on the continent of Africa, and in multiple cultures, countries, looking at health care providers, frontline health care providers, and these are, Lesley Gittings and she does and so she's done this project, and I think now they've done the second phase where they're working with frontline HIV providers of children and youth, and how do they support their health and mental health and, and, you know, and it's the same here.

Anna Gunz
And so as more people burn out and I think the way that even the system is, the way physicians and nurses and nurse practitioners, there's a lot of policy pieces. But even with clinics and people just not having access and as continuing to try and provide care in similar models and, there is a certain amount of flexibility that is in afforded just also because of policy and the way that the, the provincial governments have mandated and how you the way that you can and cannot provide health and health care and also inequity and payment structures so that, you know, I think a lot of physicians I don't want to speak.

Anna Gunz
I know I would be happy to work, just pay to salary and, you know, go to a facility. And that's where I work. Instead of having to be an independent business person and having to manage all of this and pay all of these people, like, I just want to be a doctor. And so I think there's a lot of other pieces that the people don't realize get in the way, and our extra burdens or the fact that if you want massage therapy or physiotherapy or you have a sick note, so if you have insurance, the insurance needs this.

Anna Gunz
If your employer needs a signal, it's so difficult to get in to see your doctor. What if you don't have a doctor? How do you get regular screening if you don't have a family doctor? How are women getting parts and referrals from another? If, like all of this, put on the burden of people who are already sort of overstretched and can't take on more, when realistically we just we need to if the system so that we can provide better care.

Anna Gunz
There's a lot of health care providers who want to do that. That's why they came here. And it's the barriers that allow them practice and actually help people that ends up, and then their well-being affected, and they're being affected by the same environmental issues and sort of how and how do you reach people in areas that are underpopulated?

Anna Gunz
You know, there's there's a lot and but, but I, you know, that's what I love is change and difference and open mindedness and allowing people to also be more to participate more in their health and the caregiving journey, in the hospital and out of hospitals, enabling seniors to stay in their homes and stay active, enabling families with sort of the complex health care needs to to care for them.

Anna Gunz
As as all of these other issues are happening and stay in their community, even remote communities. If thinking of our are the families we care for in remote indigenous communities who don't have consistent power, and how do you how do you keep your child who has technology dependent in those communities? There's so much that that we need to do better, and these are the conversations that we need to have.

Anna Gunz
But as you point out with government, because a lot of what we do, you know, there's legislation or policy or funding, you know, there are definitely many examples over the years of initiatives that people have wanted, but they have not been able to do so. For example, in Ontario, virtual care, we're only allowed to do that, you know, from a billing perspective in the pandemic.

Anna Gunz
And that was almost repealed, even though, you know, I think of a, someone I know well who was a big advocate for children with disabilities, and he advocated for years to try and allow to facilitate virtual care because of the labor and cost and even the health effects that their child had, you know, bundle it to go to these multiple appointments.

Anna Gunz
Anyway, it's it's a whole other area. And I don't want to take too much of a tangent, but, you know, to sort of pause and pivot somewhat. I feel like that might be an interesting segue if you want to take a break. I'm happy with that as well. But an interesting segue into your your new book, which is a very excited to read,

Anna Gunz
around, you know, because I, I see the link, I see the connection, but, but yeah, the work that you

Anna Gunz
that you're about to release.

Anna Gunz
I know I've tried to order it and I haven't built order yet, but, the, the new book coming out.

Ingrid Waldron
Yeah. It's not. It's. It's not me straying away from environmental racism because I don't come at environmental racism independent of health. So I center myself as a health researcher. And environmental racism and climate change for me are health issues. So I think some people might maybe expected me to do a second, a follow up book on environmental racism.

Ingrid Waldron
And maybe that will come someday. I'll do another book. But right now I feel like I've said all I need to say about environmental

Anna Gunz
Yeah.

Ingrid Waldron
passed, and that's interesting. So maybe there's a follow up book, but I'm essentially a health researcher and as I mentioned, my PhD and my postdoc were both on black woman's mental health.

Ingrid Waldron
Mental health is my first love, and I never got a chance to publish my PhD time. Just passed, you know, and I always said I would do it and I never did. So some aspects of this book come from the work I did during my PhD, particularly the historical parts of it. So I am looking at the enlightenment, colonialism, a time when ideologies and perceptions of black people were forged, and how those ideologies and perceptions of the black body informed psychiatric diagnoses.

Ingrid Waldron
And they certainly did, because black people tended to be, and certainly I would say today as well, over-diagnosed or misdiagnosed with certain illnesses such as schizophrenia. And one of the things that I argue and other scholars in Britain and United States have argued is that, the diagnosis, the over-diagnosis of schizophrenia in black men has everything to do with the perceptions of black manhood and black masculinity as something to be feared, as something that is aggressive, and pathological.

Ingrid Waldron
And schizophrenia is an illness that is also seen in many ways and has been portrayed in popular culture as to be feared. People with schizophrenia to be the most pathological illness one can get, as dangerous. And I think of the movie with Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that I looked at when I was very young.

Ingrid Waldron
And I think, yeah, I think he has schizophrenia. And typically at that time and maybe even today, people with schizophrenia are portrayed in that way as scary to be afraid of and to me, and as highly pathological. In the book, I also talk about how white women tend to be over-diagnosed with affective disorders like depression, bipolar, or black woman under-diagnosed with those illnesses.

Ingrid Waldron
So I want to look. So what I'm looking at is in the book, at least in the first part of the book, The Social Construction of Blackness and how the social construction of blackness collides with the social construction of mental illness. And while what I argue might upset some psychiatrists, I believe that psychiatrist psychiatry is problematic. I think labeling is problematic.

Ingrid Waldron
And I believe that ideologies about people, about race, often come to inform the ways in which we assess and diagnose and treat people within psychiatry. That might upset some psychiatrist. But this is why I truly believe lots of people have issues with labeling. I have issues with labeling, but I have issues with the racial underpinnings of labeling.

Ingrid Waldron
So in terms of that first part of the book, I'm looking at colonization, I'm looking at slavery, I'm looking at the enlightenment era, which is often referred to as the Age of Reason, and have ideologies about black people, influence their diagnosis. I'm also talking about racial trauma and intergenerational racial trauma and how that gets stored in the body for black people causing illness, mental illness in many ways, and even physical illness.

Ingrid Waldron
When we talk about trauma, you know, we often talk about sexual abuse and war, but we don't also talk about race as traumatic. It's taken Canadians and Canadian institutions like the Canadian Mental Health Association a long time to validate race as a valid structural determinant of health. And in 2018, the Canadian

Ingrid Waldron
Canadian Medical Association I don't get I don't think I had that right. Finally validated racism as a structural determinants of health. I didn't need them to tell me that, but but anyway, their draft report, they said racism and structural determinants of health in Canada. So I talk a little bit about that and how that was kind of a landmark, position paper or a draft paper that they, that they put together.

Ingrid Waldron
So I'm talking a lot that in the book about the structural determinants of health, some of those upstream factors like poverty and income and security and the ways in which inequality and racism are embedded within our social structures, such as education, urban planning, labor, employment, environmental racism, and other social structures, how they come to be embedded within our social structures and have an impact on the mental health and well-being of black communities who don't fare very well, within those social structures and much of that contributes to trauma, to racial trauma.

Ingrid Waldron
In black communities, specifically. I also kind of bring in some of my studies, original research that I've done over the past few years on black women's mental health issues in Halifax, black youth, mental health issues in Halifax, and black youth mental health issues in Hamilton. So some of the recent studies I've done, where, black individuals are talking about their perceptions about mental illness and how they feel mental illness should be treated based on those perceptions and there's a kind of diverse array of opinions that black people have about mental illness and how it's and how it comes about.

Ingrid Waldron
A lot of black people, I would say, believe that. I mean, black people have these kind of very strong beliefs about mental illness, which contributes to the taboo and stigma around mental illness in black communities, that many communities have this trouble and stigma. But I, I feel it stronger in black communities. There's this idea that I think comes from Africa, actually, that if you have a mental illness, then the bad and evil spirits have gotten you, that you've done something bad in your family, you've done something malevolent, and now the evil spirits are punishing you.

Ingrid Waldron
So that means that the only way you can address your mental illness is through prayer and praying very hard, or through a faith healer, or through other methods that are certainly non-Western methods. There's also this notion in black communities that if you have a mental illness, you are weak. Some black people will say, that's white people stuff.

Ingrid Waldron
We don't get that. We don't get mental illness. White people get it. We're too strong. So if you seek out a psychiatrist or a mental health professional of any kind, you are weak. Pull up your bootstraps. Get on with it. Stop complaining. Those ideas that you are to be blamed. You've done something malevolent. You're being punished by the gods that are weak.

Ingrid Waldron
Perpetuate the stigma and the taboo around Mendoza black communities, which often means that they underutilized mental health services or they don't seek them out at all. Because there is this belief in the community that you can do it. You don't need that. And that's harmful. It's also harmful because mental health professionals assume that black people are strong.

Ingrid Waldron
There's a notion, I would say in society that black people are not just physically strong, but that we are mentally strong and that we can take it. And that ideology, that perception that mental health professionals and other professionals, I would say doctors in general, have then often means that we don't get the care that we need. So I talk a lot about that in the book in terms of the people that I spoke with.

Ingrid Waldron
Many of them talked about these beliefs. They said that some of those beliefs influenced them because it comes from family and it also comes from their culture. So I spoke to people in all these studies. They were from, you know, different African countries, probably primarily Nigeria, Caribbean countries and Canadian born black people who shared similar, ideas about mental illness.

Ingrid Waldron
But what I also found is that black people are starting to, partake in multiple forms of self-healing and coping and health seeking despite that. So, you know, people talked about mindfulness, healing. They talked about, spiritual baths and yoga. And they also talked about seeing their GP and seeing a psychiatrist. I think over the years, because I did this work for my PhD way back in 2002.

Ingrid Waldron
And what I'm seeing is that black people are partaking in what we call alternative healing methods, increasingly. But I think what remains full proof for many black people would be spirituality

Ingrid Waldron
churchgoing and, prayer. I think that remains strong despite the other methods that they might, use, to address health issues. I think spirituality, religion, church faith remains the strength the strongest coping method, for black people.

Ingrid Waldron
So in my book, you know that second part of the book, I explore all of that, and in the final part of the book, I talk about suggestions, suggestions for mental health professionals, for health professionals in general, in terms of how trauma, racial trauma, can be addressed. And I talk about things like training medical schools. Well, you know, what are they learning?

Ingrid Waldron
What are students in medical schools learning that they need to learn more about cultural competency, structural competency, about upstream factors that impact on mental health. So the training needs to be different. I talk about research. Much of it comes from research. You know, research sometimes is the root of much of this. So researchers need to start talking more about race as a determinant of health.

Ingrid Waldron
I talked about I talked about funding streams, whether I'm a Sherk or CIA air, that I think things have gotten better. I'm seeing changes. There's a stream this year that came out on structural determinants of health. I was like, wow, I was blown away. But I think there needs to be funding streams for black researchers, but also for research on black health.

Ingrid Waldron
That needs to happen. I talk about community based initiatives. I don't want to take the onus off of the health system at all because they're responsible, for focusing on black health more and addressing black health issues. But there are great initiatives that originate in community in black communities, because black communities are seeing a gap in the health system, so they're taking it upon themselves to create initiatives.

Ingrid Waldron
Once again, I think that's important, but I don't want to take the onus of the responsibility off of the health system. They need to do that work. But I wanted to highlight the fact that there are community initiatives that come up that are addressing these issues. I talk about mental health policy. Mental health policy. Policy of any kind is the root of the problems that we see.

Ingrid Waldron
We have decision makers, policy makers who get the opportunity and privilege to make policy. And those policies then influence programing and services and clinical services. So mental health policy and needs to acknowledge racism as a public health issue and racial trauma as a valid mental health issue. And then I talk about the mental health system as a whole.

Ingrid Waldron
So that final chapter is about what can we do? How can this be addressed from a very holistic perspective, from the training and medical schools and the health professions to research, to funding streams, to community based initiatives, to mental health policy, and to the mental health system as a whole. So I wanted to be to to wanted it to be very holistic in terms of how I highlighted what needs to be done.

Ingrid Waldron
So I'm very excited about what book. And I say to people, I said, this is the book I always wanted to write. I just, you know, I did my PhD, I was planning to publish it. Like many people plan to publish their PhD thesis, and life got in the way. And, I finally doing it.

Anna Gunz
I know about five people who feel that way about their PhD. So there you go. But I though I do. I mean, I think that there's this piece of spiritual health, too, right? Like, it's mental, physical, emotional and spiritual are all importance. And even in the way that policy I, I know someone who's a spiritual healer and how do they you know, when people come, you know, you give an offering and but like, you know, from a it balances all these questions around, you know, we need more in my view, spiritual healers coming in not just from our major religions, but a more, you know, how do we facilitate spiritual healing within the health care