Health Display reveals communication with medical professionals has profound impact on people with disease

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BRUCE BARTLETT
TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL

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SAINT JOHN - A travelling exhibition at the Open Door Club, 157 Duke St., shines a light on what it is like to live with schizophrenia.

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Cindy Wilson/Telegraph-Journal

Danny Jardine, who operates the Open Door Club, with an exhibit on what it is like to live with schizophrenia.

Called Hearing (Our) Voices, Dilemmas of Care and Control, it was created by a group of people with schizophrenia who became co-researchers with Barbara Schneider, a professor at the University of Calgary.

"She actually involved mental health consumers in the process of researching and putting together the exhibit, the book and the video," said Danny Jardine, who operates the Open Door Club, helping the mentally ill with employment and housing issues.

The booklets, exhibition panels and the video are on display this week and will move on to Charlottetown next week, he said.

The exhibition shows how communication with medical professionals, and housing issues have a profound impact on people dealing with schizophrenia. The research shows that when medical professionals are willing to explain the illness and the treatments, it makes it easier for the patients to develop the trust to participate. It also shows that having a safe place to live, with some sense of dignity and control, helps people to cope better.

"It shows how your actions can help or hinder people sometimes," Jardine said.

The 2002 movie A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly and directed by Ron Howard, helped to create a greater understanding of the disease. Crowe's role was based on the real-life experience of John Nash, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who suffered from schizophrenic delusions but learned to manage them and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his revolutionary work on game theory.

Michael Park, manager of long-term mental health in the Saint John region, who was at the opening of exhibit, said Canada is the only country in the western world without a housing policy for people with mental illnesses.

"Even the Americans under George Bush had one," he said.

The exhibit is very powerful, Park said, because it shows the personal experiences of people suffering from schizophrenia.

The exhibit continues the rest of the week.