While we know that people with mental illness and addiction often face stigma in Canadian society, we may be surprised to learn that they face it within healthcare environments as well.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) launched a free online course called Understanding Stigma, designed to help healthcare providers and frontline clinicians develop strategies to improve care for people with mental health and addiction problems.

This self-directed course is available in both official languages and consists of three modules that focus on raising awareness, the impacts of stigma, and challenging stigma and discrimination.

Understanding Stigma is being hosted on CAMH’s website, making it easily accessible to healthcare providers and frontline clinicians Canada-wide. We invite all members from the healthcare sector to complete this free online course, designed to complement their strategies in understanding stigma.

Quick Facts

• The stigmatization of people living with mental health and addiction problems is all too common in Canada, including within healthcare environments. People with lived experiences of mental health and addiction problems often report feeling devalued, dismissed and dehumanized by many of the healthcare professionals with whom they come into contact.
• The MHCC and CAMH partnered to develop a web platform to help market and promote efforts to enlist healthcare provider participation.
• The MHCC will facilitate the evaluation of the online course, as it has done for other healthcare provider programs in the past.
• Research with healthcare providers suggests that stigma can manifest in subtle and largely unintended ways.
• The course provides scenarios, interactive questions, personal stories and quizzes intended to help change the attitudes and behaviours of healthcare providers toward people seeking help.

Read the full announcement

Learn more or register here!