When Queen’s University professor Dr. Heather Stuart was beginning in the field of mental-health stigma, some well-meaning colleagues were trying to talk her out of it. It wasn’t considered an important field and there was limited funding for research. She was told she would not be considered a real researcher.
Dr. Stuart was undeterred.
“I didn’t really care if I didn’t get lots of research funding. What mattered to me is that I'm working with people in the field who want to make a difference and I'm helping them,” says Dr. Stuart. “We're learning from each other, which I think is the epitome of knowledge exchange and translation. Getting into the weeds and developing programs is really what I think we need to do as academics. We have to get out of our offices and get into the communities that understand what's going on at the ground level.”
Dr. Stuart is now one of the world’s leading experts in mental-health stigma and has helped people across Canada and around the globe. A professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Department of Psychiatry and Rehabilitation Therapy at Queen’s, Dr. Stuart's main research interests are in the areas of psychiatric epidemiology and community mental-health research. She’s been the Bell Canada Chair in Mental Health and Anti-Stigma Research since 2012 and was named to the Order of Canada for her “commitment to advancing the mental health conversation” in 2018.
Those are impressive accomplishments, but her work is far from over. Progress has been made in mental health in the past decade, yet there is still a stigma.
Fortunately, people are more comfortable talking about their mental health, including celebrities and athletes such as Olympic gymnast Simon Biles and four-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion Naomi Osaka. Events such as Bell Let’s Talk Day encourage people to speak up and let everyone know it’s important to seek help.
“It is helpful when celebrities speak out and I think it may empower others to do it as well. But it’s important for the rest of us to step up to the plate and talk about our day-to-day experiences. We can’t put all of the responsibility on celebrities to solve the problem,” Dr. Stuart says. “If you look on YouTube and poke around on the web, you can find all kinds of personal testimonials about people’s stories and recoveries that you wouldn't have been able to see 10 or 15 years ago. That kind of message of hope and recovery is important for people.”
Dr. Stuart’s work and research isn’t just helping people in Canada – she works with experts around the world to fight stigma.
She was part of a project that examined stigma-related programs around the world related to schizophrenia. Dr. Stuart and her World Psychiatric Association colleagues published a book, Paradigms Lost, detailing the successes, mistakes, and lessons learned from these programs.
“It challenged the traditional public health-type intervention approaches that people were taking to stigma because we didn't think some of them worked and we had evidence to demonstrate it,” Dr. Stuart says.
Years later, when the publishers asked for a second edition, Dr. Stuart and her colleagues realized the field had changed so much, they couldn’t update the first edition. They needed to write a new book, which they called Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: Lessons Learned in the Fight Against the Stigma of Mental Illness.
“All of the paradigms that we tried to blow up had already been blown up and people are doing things differently now,” says Dr. Stuart. “We learned so much. It’s been a lot of work, but it's been something where I can see actual progression and impact.”
The journey isn’t over – there is still a lot to be learned. Dr. Stuart says it’s important to realize there is no one-cure-fits-all approach. Different cultural communities understand mental health and mental illnesses in different ways, and those unique needs have to be addressed.
“They have different histories, if you go back into their cultures, different ways of dealing with things,” Dr. Stuart says. “And we have to take that into consideration when we work with these communities.”
For people looking for mental-health resources, Dr. Stuart points to several helpful websites:
- Bell Let’s Talk
- Student Mental Health Network (for post-secondary students across Canada)
- Mental Health Commission of Canada
