Events
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker Series
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker Series
Experiential Science Talks
Experiential Science Talks
Special Seminars
Special Seminars
Upcoming
Guest Speaker
Date
Talk Title
Location & Time
Institution
Series
Irnes Zeljkovic
May 29, 2025
Finding My Voice: Self-Advocacy Through Trauma and Communication
Virtual
10 – 11am EST
PEPP – London, Ontario
Experiential Science Talks
*This seminar will be held in English. Questions may be asked in both official languages – the moderator will translate accordingly.
Past events
Vegas Hodgins, Irnes Zeljkovic & Chantal Murthy
Lived Experience Panel at the Discourse Satellite Meeting in Chicago
Special Seminar
Three Lived Experience Experts will share their perspectives at the upcoming Discourse Satellite Meeting in Chicago. Join the riveting discussion! View full bios here: Blurbs LE speakers with QR
*This seminar was held in English.
Casie Fariello & Liz Reitman
The Complexity of the Parent Journey – How Deeper Understanding and Robust Parent Support Systems are Essential for Youth Mental Health
Experiential Science Talks
Casie Fariello, Co-Founder & CEO
Casie Fariello is the Co-Founder of Other Parents Like Me (OPLM), bringing over 26 years of experience in the airline industry and a passion for mental health advocacy. After retiring from United Airlines, Casie launched OPLM to provide resources and support for parents navigating mental health challenges with their children. A trained group leader in the Invitation to Change model and Peer Recovery Specialist, Casie is completing her CRAFT certification. She’s also a Parent Coach with The Partnership to End Addiction. Casie’s mission is to create a compassionate, nationwide community where families can find support, resilience, and connection.
Liz Reitman, Co-Founder & CMO
Liz Reitman is the Co-Founder and CMO of Other Parents Like Me (OPLM), bringing over 27 years of experience in art direction and creative communications. She is also the Founder and Creative Director of reitdesign, where her work has won over 100 awards. Liz holds a BFA from the University of Michigan and has completed advanced business programs at Yale and NYU Stern. She’s actively involved in community efforts, including mentoring and pro bono work. After facing personal struggles with her son’s substance use disorder, Liz co-founded OPLM with Casie Fariello in 2022 to support parents navigating similar challenges.
Research abounds on the important role parents play in their children’s mental health. And yet, the field is emerging at best in its understanding of the complexity of the parent experience and the system of supports that fosters the parental evolution our youth need. Other Parents Like Me (OPLM) is an expansive online community for parents of teens and young adults struggling with mental health challenges, founded by Liz Reitman and Casie Fariello in response to the struggles they encountered in their own parenting journeys. OPLM provides a unique and essential vantage-point from which to deeply understand parents’ struggles and needs. This presentation will:
· Highlight the lived experience of OPLM Co-Founders and what led them to found OPLM
· Explore the journey of parental transformation and growth of OPLM parent members navigating their children’s mental health challenges
· Share insights into the factors that promote parental growth and the obstacles that hinder it
· Highlight the key pillars of support parents need to help their children thrive
· Suggest future research directions to unpack parental experiences and support needs.
*This seminar will be held in English. Questions may be asked in both official languages.
BLOOM program
BLOOM Annual Event
Special Seminar
Mykaell Blais
Trans and non-binary youth: what is their reality?
Experiential Science Talks
Mykaell Blais, B.Ed., is General Manager of Trans Mauricie Centre-du-Québec. He holds a bachelor’s degree in special education. Mykaell has also received several training courses on sexual and gender diversity, including those offered by the INSPQ, Fondation Émergence, the DSPG Research Chair at UQAM and many other organizations. His approach is based on scientific knowledge and his knowledge of the realities of trans and non-binary people, but also on his own lived experience, which he does not hesitate to share in order to humanize theoretical content.
*This seminar was held in French.
Eric Weissman
Constellations of Possibility – converting substance use disorder into lived experience scholarship
Experiential Science Talks
Dr. Eric Weissman, PhD, has been developing and applying a lived-experience form of scholarship to the study of homelessness, housing, and mental health since he recovered from episodic homelessness and a substance use disorder in 1996. He lived for a short time at Dignity Village, Oregon, the first legal emergency transitional campground in U.S. history, and the main site for his award-winning dissertation fieldwork completed at Concordia University in Montreal in 2013. His work is a form of community-based critical and pragmatic ethnography that asks stakeholders in housing, homelessness, mental health, and addictions, “How do you see the world, and how might you change it?”
Dr. Weissman has led community-based research on housing policies for vulnerable populations, published two books, and frequently presents internationally. Recently, he collaborated on a CIHR-funded study on COVID-19’s impact on homelessness-sector frontline workers, resulting in several publications. He is the Principal Investigator for a Canada-wide study on post-secondary student homelessness, funded by the Making the Shift Social Innovation Lab, and serves on committees focused on affordable housing and harm reduction.
*This seminar was held in English.
Paul Arnold
Genomics of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: The Path to Personalized Medicine
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Arnold, MD, PhD is the inaugural Director of The Mathison Centre for Mental Health & Education and the Alberta Innovates Translational Health Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health at the University of Calgary. He is a Professor with the Departments of Psychiatry, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary and a child and adolescent psychiatrist practicing at Alberta Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on how genetic and environmental risk factors interact to influence the development of child onset neuropsychiatric disorders, and on early interventions in child and adolescent mental health. Dr. Arnold has extensive experience leading large programs integrating research and innovation with clinical care. Two key examples of his leadership include working with Alberta Health Services to: 1) Develop a new, research-intensive community-based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Centre in Calgary, and 2) Transform mental health services for emerging adults (age 16-24) in the Calgary zone.
Jibran Khokhar
Vaping, Edibles and Adolescent Brain: What We Found in Translation
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Khokhar completed his undergraduate training at Queen’s University, and his Ph.D. in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto and CAMH, under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Tyndale. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Dartmouth College with Dr. Alan GreenDr. Khokhar held a CIHR Post-doctoral Fellowship as well as NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Dr. Khokhar was recently hired as an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Translational Neuropsychopharmacology in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Schulich School of Medicine at Western University. Since starting his independent research group the lab has published 53 papers and received nearly $6 million in funding from federal and industry sources. Dr. Khokhar research revolves around establishing the behavioural and neural correlates of various types of vulnerabilities to substance use, starting from genetic risk to effects on development. He is also very interested in the pharmacokinetics of various routes of drug exposure, and has established tools and methods to study emerging routes of administration such as vaping and edibles.
Chelsea Cuffaro
Goodbye Borderline Personality Disorder, Hello Emotion Regulation Disorder
Experiential Science Talks
Biography: Chelsea is a dedicated mental health advocate who strives to amplify the voices of those who are often misunderstood or struggle in silence. Her profound ability to deeply connect with others and meet them where they are in their journey arises from her own lived experience with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Currently, she is the Lived Experience Coordinator at the Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health in Montreal and a graduate student in Counselling Psychology at McGill University. She aspires to become a clinician-researcher to address the systemic barriers to accessing care and the unmet needs of youth.
Description of talk: Should the label of BPD change? Are the misconceptions associated with the diagnosis inherently tied to the name of the disorder itself? Is BPD really treatment resistant? Is there a better label to describe the symptoms? This CEYMH experiential science talk will discuss the stigma and misconceptions associated with BPD through the lens of Chelsea’s lived experience and her journey to recovery and offer guidance for future considerations.
*This seminar was held in English.
Beatriz Luna, PhD
Maturation of brain mechanisms underlying the transition from adolescence to adulthood cognitive
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Beatriz Luna, PhD is the Distinguished Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics as well of Professor of Psychology, BioEngineering, and Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the founder and Director of the Laboratory for Neurocognitive Development, a founder and past president of the Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Scientific Director of the Magnetic Resonance Research Center. Dr. Luna uses multimodal neuroimaging to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms that support the normative transition from adolescence to adulthood when lifetime trajectories are determined to inform aberrant trajectories such as in mental illness. She has received numerous awards including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring, and the Flux Huttenlocher Award for pioneering work in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Her research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health and has informed US Supreme Court briefs regarding extended sentencing in the juvenile justice system. Her extensive media history also includes a cover story in National Geographic and a PBS Special with Alan Alda – “Brains on Trial”.
In this talk, she will present the findings from a collection of her studies that provide evidence for Driven Dual Systems model that proposes that by adolescence there is availability of adult level executive processes, but they are driven by increased reward reactivity to gain new experiences needed to specialize and establish adult trajectories. She will start by presenting behavioral and neuroimaging studies (fMRI, MEG, EEG) that characterize the shape of cognitive development and the brain mechanisms that support its optimization into adulthood. Importantly, new evidence using MRSI will be presented reflecting plasticity through adolescence in prefrontal cortex. Next, she will present findings regarding the maturation of the reward/motivation system including neuroimaging approaches that measure dopamine function (PET, striatal tissue iron) and interactions with the executive system including inhibitory control and executive function. She will finish with a broad model of adolescent neurocognitive development and implications to psychopathology.
Laetitia Satam,
Joshua Bell,
& Eden Agulnik
Advancing Adolescents: AI Applications in Youth Mental Health
Experiential Science Talks
Laetitia Satam (she/her) began advocating for youth mental health, and today sits on the Board of Directors for Kids Help Phone, the largest provider of e-mental health services Canada, and also co-chairs the Mood Disorders Society of Canada’s National Youth Advisory Council. As a second year nutrition student, she is passionate about holistic health practices in supporting mental health, and loves cooking in her free time!
Joshua Bell is a mental health and suicide prevention advocate from Ontario working to ensure not only increased knowledge but also better public policy for mental health in Canada. Active in his community on many levels, he also sits on the National Advisory Councils of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada and the National Initiative for Eating Disorders among others.
Eden Agulnik has a passion for neurology and psychology and at the same time when she isn’t working with the Highschool Subcommittee through MDSC/NYAC she tutors, is an active listener, gynmastics coach, works as an Intake Volunteer, writing workshop faciliator and works at the hospital!
Heart-brain connections in relation to youth bipolar disorder: Is it time to take clinical action?
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Goldstein is a child-adolescent psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at the University of Toronto. He holds the RBC Investments Chair in Children’s Mental Health and Developmental Psychopathology at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where he is Director of the Centre for Youth Bipolar Disorder. Dr. Goldstein’s efforts focus on bipolar disorder in youth. His team seeks to generate insights regarding the link between bipolar disorder and cardiovascular disorders, and to identify and implement innovative prevention and treatment strategies that focus simultaneously on physical and mental health. Dr. Goldstein has authored over 300 scientific articles, and has received national and international awards for his research.
Shannon Stewart, PhD
Creating Integrated and Trauma-Informed Systems of Care for Children and Youth
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Stewart is a Professor at the Faculty of Education and a Professor within the Department of Psychiatry at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She is an Associate Scientist at the Children’s Health Research Institute and Associate Scientist at the Lawson Health Research Institute. Dr. Stewart is an interRAI fellow, lead developer and international lead of the interRAI Child and Youth suite of instruments and has published extensively in the area of children’s mental health. She has received numerous grants, developed several instruments and has over 200 peer-reviewed papers and care planning protocols.
Andreea Diacosnescu, PhD
The lifespan of bipolar disorder: From treatment naive to treatment resistant
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
As an Independent Scientist at the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics and CAMH, Dr. Andreea Oliviana Diaconescu leads the Cognitive Network Modeling team, leveraging her extensive expertise in computational psychiatry. She also holds an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where she is a member of the Department of Psychology, the Institute for Medical Science, and the Max Planck-University of Toronto Centre for Neural Science and Technology. Dr. Diaconescu’s research is centered on the clinical validation of computational models of aberrant belief formation for predicting psychosis risk and treatment response in help-seeking youth populations using behavioural tasks, electrophysiology and neuroimaging methods. Her significant contributions to the field have been acknowledged with numerous awards, including the W. B. Templeton Award and the Novartis Foundation Medical-Biological Research Award. Her research is currently supported by the CIHR, NSERC, the Discovery Fund, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Marie-Eve Laroche
How to live a normal life while wearing a label?
Experiential Science Talks
Marie-Ève has been facing mental health challenges since the age of 21. It took four years before she received her current diagnosis of bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. In 2021, Marie-Ève completed her training as a peer support worker at the Université de Montréal, following which she worked for a year at the Quebec Schizophrenia Society. With a background in dietetics, she holds a certificate in education and is currently completing her mental health certificate with the goal of obtaining a bachelor’s degree through cumulative studies. She considers herself recovered for the past 4 years and wants to share her experience with as many people as possible to instill hope for a better life despite this illness.
Should we seek normality when living with a mental health disorder? At what point should we disclose it? Is my diagnosis a strength or a hindrance to my freedom? This conference will unveil the lived experience of a person with a mental illness who has asked all these questions and will attempt to answer them in the light of their experiential knowledge.
Manpreet K. Singh, MD, MS
The lifespan of bipolar disorder: From treatment naive to treatment resistant
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Singh is a Professor and Director of the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program and the Pediatric Emotion And Resilience Lab (PEARL) in California. Her research focuses on investigating the origins and pathways for developing major mood disorders during childhood. She is also interested in processes that protect and preserve function after symptom onset. Taking a translational medicine approach, Dr. Singh’s patient-oriented research focuses on meeting patient unmet needs through research that aims to accelerate understanding of and treatment in individuals with or at high risk for lifelong mood disorders. She applies cutting edge research strategies to optimize existing therapeutic targets through innovations in trial design, investigations of placebo response, and pursuit of novel therapeutic targets through reverse and forward translation, fast-fail clinical trials, and direct modulation of key brain regions using transcranial magnetic stimulation and real-time neurofeedback. She is also investigating the comparative effectiveness and safety of existing pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for youth with and at risk for major mood disorders, such as antidepressants, family focused psychotherapy, and mindfulness meditation to reduce mood symptoms and family stress.
Martin Gignac, Md, FRCP(C)
Comorbidities in ADHD: Conduct and oppositional defiance among youth
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Martin Gignac is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Forensic Psychiatrist. He obtained his medical degree from McGill University in 1998 and completed his training in psychiatry at the Université de Montréal in 2003. He completed a fellowship in pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital, an affiliate of Boston’s Harvard Medical School in the United States in 2003-2005. He has since been working as child and adolescent psychiatrist in the field of severe dysruptive disorders (ADHD, ODD, CD, SUD) at the Intitut Philippe-Pinel in Montreal. He was appointed as the Head of the child and adolescent psychiatry division of the Psychiatry Department at McGill University and the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the McGill University Health Center, Montreal Child Hospital between 2019-2023. In addition, he is the Chair of the CADDRA Board since 2019. He he has has been speaking at national and international conference, involved in several studies and published articles and book chapters in the field of pediatric psychopharmacology.
Kelly L. Klump, PhD
Critical roles for puberty and ovarian hormones in the development of eating disorder: Evidence from human and animal models
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Kelly L. Klump is an MSU Foundation Endowed Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on genetic and biological risk factors for eating disorders using both human and animal models. Dr. Klump has published over 285 papers and has received a number of NIH grants to support her work. She has been honored with several awards including the David Shakow Award for Early Career Contributions to Clinical Psychology from the American Psychological Association and the Leadership Award in Research from the Academy for Eating Disorders. Dr. Klump was the 2007-2008 President of the Academy for Eating Disorders, the largest international professional organization dedicated to the treatment, research, and prevention of eating disorders.
Charles-Albert Morin
Hope in psychiatry: From the elusive to the tangible*
Experiential Science Talks
Charles-Albert completed undergraduate studies in political science at the Université de Montréal. As an activist, he actively works to speak out about mental illness. As a patient partner and peer helper, he uses his experience to improve care and help people living with mental health issues.
Charles-Albert is a member of the scientific committee for the 2022-2026 inter-ministerial action plan on mental health and has testified before parliamentary committee about medical aid in dying.
Seminar description: In peer helping circles, hope is often said to be a recovery tool that peer helpers must use to improve patients’ well-being. However, the literature indicates that there are ways of using this powerful tool that are more effective than others if hope is considered as an object of study.
Having experienced many difficulties with a hope that fluctuated at times, in this presentation, Charles-Albert will explore avenues of reflection concerning the use of hope as a therapeutic tool. He will also outline the opportunities for interdisciplinary research on hope that lie ahead.
*The seminar was held in French.
Cheryl Corcoran, MD
Computational analysis of language and face expression across stages of schizophrenia
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Cheryl Corcoran is Associate Professor and Program Leader in Psychosis Risk at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research focus has been on clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, including quantification of behaviour.
Outi Linnaranta, MD, PhD
Clinical correlates of circadian rhythm in bipolar disorder
Special Seminar
Outi Linnaranta, MD, PhD, is a Clinical Psychiatrist and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry. She has worked in detecting phenotypes that would be clinically useful predictors of outcome in severe mental illness, be that symptom profiles, biomarkers, culturally sensitive tools, or objective psychophysiological monitoring. Over the past three years, she has coordinated implementation of the Finnish Mental Health Strategy as the Medical Director.
In this presentation, she will summarize main results from her work at Douglas Institute, done in collaboration with Dr. Florian Storch, Dr. Serge Beaulieu and Dr. Howard Steiger. After developing dimensional measures to describe regularity of sleep and eating rhythms, they showed an association between dysregulated sleep and eating in both bipolar disorders and eating disorders. Further correlates of dysregulated rhythms were mood and suicidal ideation.
Iris Sommer, MD, PhD
Optimal treatment for women with psychosis
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Iris Sommer studied medicine in Amsterdam and Public Health in Maastricht. She obtained her PhD cum laude at University Utrecht in 2004 on brain imaging in schizophrenia. In 2011, Sommer was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the University Medical Centre Utrecht, where she initiated the Voices Clinic. Since 2016, she is visting professor at the Norwegian Center of Excellence, university of Bergen, department of medical and biological psychology. Currently, she is professor of cognitive aspects of neurological and psychiatric disorders at the Departments of Neuroscience in UMCG. She received a Veni, Clinical Fellowship, Vidi and TOP grant from ZonMW and recently a large grant to study effects of antipsychotic maintenance treatment in early psychosis.
Margaret Hahn, PhD
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Treating the brain, and minding the body
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Hahn is a clinician-scientist at the CAMH (Schizophrenia Division), whose research interests lie in translational work focused on the complex interplay schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSDs), and cardiometabolic comorbidities. She currently leads several clinical trials examining novel intervention strategies for metabolic comorbidity. Dr. Hahn’s work also focuses on elucidating mechanisms underlying the intrinsic metabolic risk observed in first episode psychosis, and whether disruptions in brain bioenergetic pathways could explain the ‘premorbid’ metabolic phenotype in a subset of individuals with SSDs. She likewise oversees a basic science laboratory which conducts cutting edge research examining brain-mediated mechanisms underlying the high rates of obesity and diabetes in psychosis. From a clinical standpoint, Dr. Hahn is actively engaged to translate research knowledge into patient care, including contribution to national clinical practice guidelines. At CAMH, she leads the Mental Health and Metabolic Clinic, one of the world’s first clinics to simultaneously address mental and physical health.
Rudolf Uher, MD, PhD
Early identification of risk for major mood and psychotic disorders in youth
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
This inaugural guest seminar in the Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker series was preceded by introductory remarks from the Director of the Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, and special felicitations of Dr. Ashok Malla, an authority in the field of Youth Mental Health.
Major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and psychosis typically have an onset in late adolescence or early adulthood and continue affecting an individual’s life for decades. Effective prevention of these disorders may depend on how well and how early we can identify individuals at risk. In this talk, Dr. Uher will explore how accurately and how long before onset we can predict who will develop one of these disorders. He will examine family history, molecular genetic information, and early manifestations of psychopathology as potential early indicators of risk in a cohort of children and youth.
Hashwin Ganesh
Systemic inflammation in psychotic illnesses: a case of chicken-and-egg
Experiential Science Talks
This was the inaugural talk in a series inviting people to talk about their first-hand experience with mental illness. These talks are meant to provide an alternate perspective to diagnosis and treatment and allow for the open discussion on possible future research directions, different approaches to mental illness as well as on the improvement of current psychological practices.
For our first talk of this series, we invited Hashwin Ganesh, a trained neuroscientist now working in business, to speak about his experience with psychosis. Before his diagnosis, Hashwin remembers having significant sleeping problems, irritability, and stomach issues, all of which impacted his daily life. After undergoing several tests and scans, he found himself to be on several treatment plans, each targeting one symptom at a time, none of which improved his quality of life.
Frustrated, Hashwin took his health into his own hands, and started to look at all of his test results on his own to try and make sense of his condition. He noticed a consistent pattern of inflammation behind his physical symptoms and started researching the link between inflammation and psychosis. This is where the question of the chicken and the egg was discussed: Is inflammation what is causing psychosis, or is psychosis or a predisposition to psychosis causing the inflammation?
There is little knowledge on the link between the two, and Hashwin urged researchers to explore this question, as it could significantly impact early intervention and treatment for many individuals impacted by psychosis.