Former Sports Reporter Tom Shand Now Fights for Better Services for the Mentally Ill as Chair of AAMIMH

As a Queen's University undergrad student in the 1970s, Tom Shand's extracurricular activities revolved around his first love: sports.

1 March 2018

As a Queen's University undergrad student in the 1970s, Tom Shand's extracurricular activities revolved around his first love: sports.
He was sports editor of the student newspaper, The Queen's Journal, and sports director of the campus radio station, 101.9 FM, where he often did play-by-play commentaries for the school's hockey team.
After earning a degree in geography and economics, Shand landed a newspaper job in Portage la Prairie, Man., where he covered everything from murder trials to Pierre Trudeau's 1980 election victory.
But he still had the sports itch, so when an opening came up in the Edmonton Sun's sports department, Shand jumped at it.
He soon found himself writing about a young hockey phenom named Wayne Gretzky, who went on to lead the Edmonton Oilers to four Stanley Cup wins while setting a string of NHL scoring records.
Still, Shand wasn't happy. He felt his life lacked balance, and he didn't always feel healthy. He'd find himself watching mindless daytime TV shows while waiting for his evening shift to start. "Ironically, as a sports reporter, you could never play any sports except golf because you worked every night," he says.
Eventually, a disagreement with an editor prompted him to pull the plug on his newspaper career. He went to work in the nonprofit sector, using his communications skills in a public relations role for such organizations as the Alberta Lung Association and Canadian Diabetes Association.
That soon expanded to include fund development activities for various nonprofits including the Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation in Prince George, B.C.; the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation in Edmonton; and the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), Alberta Division, where he was named Executive Director in 2006.
"The CMHA was looking for someone with a different kind of background than the usual Executive Director. Although I had no experience in mental health - aside from some projects within the hospitals I had been working for - they hired me, and I really became fascinated by the people in the mental health field. They really had a passion for it," he says.
"Now it may seem odd to an accountant or an engineer for somebody to go off in a totally different field a couple of times in their career, as I've done. But you're still dealing largely with relationships, as I did when I was a journalist," he says.
"In the fund development field, I'd meet with premiers or ministers, and other times I'd meet with a person who was benefiting from a new MRI. No matter who it was, it's all about communications."
While he was still at the CMHA, Shand was named Chair of the Alberta Alliance on Mental Illness & Mental Health (AAMIMH), a post he held for six years before he was appointed Executive Director in mid-2016. That opened a new door for him, into the world of mental health advocacy and policy development.
The Alliance doesn't provide mental health services. It represents various professional, not-for-profit and family or consumer organizations, all seeking to develop common positions on mental health and mental illness, while identifying gaps in services and opportunities for research. As such, it is often consulted by government.
"We respectfully critique the government. That's our advocacy role. We also have a consultation role, where we'll add our voice and that's largely where we participated in the discussions on issues like medical assistance and dying, and the marijuana debate," he says.
The Alliance currently has 15 member organizations, including the Alberta Psychiatric Association (APA), the Psychologists' Association of Alberta (PAA), the Alberta College of Social Workers (ACSW), the College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Alberta (CRPNA), the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta (SSA), and others.
"Basically, what we try to do is move the mental health needle forward. We don't feel that it's currently equitable in terms of funding or treatment relative to the severity and immensity of the mental health problems we see, or ultimately, to the benefits society receives if people with mental illnesses are treated," says Shand.
"Mental health is also underfunded relative to other conditions that have a significant impact on peoples' health, such as heart disease, cancer, lung disease, or orthopedics."
One of the big challenges in attempting to quantify the overall societal cost of mental illness - or the economic benefits of intervention and treatment - is that many of the costs, and the consequences for individual human lives, occur outside the health system.
"To paraphrase (former) Senator Michael Kirby, who served as Chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, two-thirds of mental health isn't in health. It's in the social determinants of health. That includes issues like employment, housing and justice - areas where a person who isn't in good mental health is subject to suffering," says Shand.
"For example, one of the issues being dealt with by AHS is when someone (with a mental illness) is picked up by police and taken to a hospital emergency ward. Unless your life is at risk or someone is being threatened, you'll be one of the last people treated," he explains.
"As a result, police don't like dropping you off because they end up having to stay with you for hours. So they'll often take you to jail instead. Well,
people who have a mental health breakdown or who cause a public disturbance don't need jail, and they don't need to clog up our court system. They need treatment. But there just isn't enough good treatment available for people who are clearly diagnosed with a major mental health illness like schizophrenia."
On the positive side, the Alliance has scored some successes as well.
"We helped keep Alberta Hospital Edmonton (AHE) open during the Stephen Duckett period, when he was the head of AHS, and we also helped with the introduction of Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) when Dave Hancock was Minister of Health," he says.
"To do that, we worked collaboratively to bring people together to form a consolidated voice on the issue. Then we worked with the government to influence the legislation. We also worked with AHS, the Mental Health Patient Advocate and others to go out and talk to community, explaining what it was about, and how it would impact people."
The Alliance is now providing input on potential changes to the Mental Health Amendments Act, he adds. "They're still working on it but there is agreement that the Community Treatments Orders have been largely successful, and have helped the families of people living with mental illness to have some peace of mind that their loved one is getting treatment."
The Alliance has plenty of other issues on its plate too and is now immersed in mapping out a three-year plan to prioritize its efforts.
"There's a recognized lack of support for mental health therapy or mental health counselling. So should we put our emphasis there, or on other specific issues? How much time do we spend on the collaboration role of bringing people with mental health illness into the mental health research arena? These are some of the questions we're asking," he says.
"We've also been asked by Dr. Xin-Min Li, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, to travel with his group to China. He sees a role for us because China is interested in how to involve the community more in supporting mental health. This is one of the trends at the U of A, to pursue that type of engagement and make their research more beneficial to the community. So certainly, Dr. Li, Dr. Andy Greenshaw and others have been instrumental in engaging us."
Partly as a result of its ties with the Department of Psychiatry, the Alliance has gotten involved in national programs such as CRISM (Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse) and CDRIN (Canadian Depression Research and Intervention), says Shand.
As for his own personal career plans, he says it's hard to see beyond the next 12 months or so.
"I've got a contract that expires when our current grant with Alberta Health expires in April of 2019. Beyond that, who knows, it's hard to tell what the future will look like," he says.
"People have often asked us, after having a Progressive Conservative government in Alberta for so long, how has working with the NDP government impacted us. Well, this may not be what people expect to hear, but I haven't felt that in our field the impact has been that different, from a mental health perspective," he adds.
"A lot of the same leadership within the departments is still there. So we're dealing with many of the same people as before. We had lots of ministers and deputy ministers changing under the PC government too. In my view, in terms of mental health issues, that kind of change is far more significant than this latest change of government."