Capturing the face of addiction and mental illness: CAMH Annual Report 2004

CAMH Annual Report

Antoine Derose with a photo-novella on post-traumatic stress disorder

Carlos, a young boy of about 10, is sitting on a washroom floor, head pressed down between his knees, which are drawn up tightly to his body. He has just run out of his classroom, frightened after hearing a loud fire-alarm bell. Carlos is the lead character in a new 14-page photo story booklet on post-traumatic stress disorder, produced by CAMH in partnership with Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

Available in French and English, this booklet, along with four others, has been created by CAMH to help promote a greater understanding and acceptance of people with substance use and mental health problems. These "photo-novellas," styled after comic books, are intended to complement and support CAMH's health promotion and prevention agenda across the province.

Antoine Derose, Project Consultant in Education and Health Promotion at CAMH, helped to develop these booklets. "We analyzed the information we received from six community focus groups that were helping us identify gaps in service in various communities. In this process, we discovered that there was a lack of knowledge about substance use and mental health problems and the services that are available for them, especially within the underserved French-speaking ethnoracial/ethnocultural groups," says Derose.

The focus groups recommended that CAMH produce linguistically and culturally sensitive educational material along with training that delivers the material to designated communities

• create material that is intellectually challenging, artistically interesting, humorous and conscious of the multiple identities of francophone youth from diverse ethnocultural/ethnoracial communities
  
• produce material specific to the needs of women and children. Women from marginalized groups often face collective trauma from sexism and racism and bear most of the burden of family survival and support.

Based on these recommendations, CAMH began an awareness campaign with TFO, the French language unit of TV Ontario, and published the photo-novellas in French and English. Others topics in the series include depression, drugs, alcohol and problem gambling.

As next steps, religious and community leaders identified by focus group participants as the best people to inform their communities will receive training on how to use the booklets. Plans are underway to translate the booklets into Arabic, Swahili, Lingala and Vietnamese.

And as for Carlos, we later learn he is frightened because the sound of the alarm evokes the terror he had felt previously in his war-torn country. The story depicts Carlos's reaction and the realistic response of teachers and classmates to his problem, with pictures relaying most of the story, along with brief dialogue and explanations. At the end of the booklets, the reader can learn more about post-traumatic stress disorder, its symptoms, methods of treating it and locations to get help.

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