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The Current Transcript for April 19, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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It's made me more connected with my family, it's made me more connected with reality. It's made me take a critical look at what I do in life and what I want to do, and it's made me a better person.

MATT GALLOWAY: When he was a teenager, it is very unlikely that Elias Thomas would have said that schizophrenia made him a better person. Now the twenty something puts his illness on his resume. In an hour, how the stigma around schizophrenia is changing and yet not changing quickly enough. Also this morning, do you have a nice long weekend break from being pulled in every direction at work where you feel like you're being asked to do more with less? Well, you're not alone.

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There's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now that this epidemic of busyness, I think, is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain. And maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it.

MG: Cal Newport says the answer to the burnout many of us are waiting through is deeper work and slower productivity. The workplace expert is here in 30 minutes to talk about how email made work worse and why working from home may not be the answer to all that stress. We begin, though, with the promise of carbon capture and storage, a climate saver or a lifeline for the oil industry. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Can carbon capture and storage help Canada reach net-zero emissions?

Guests: Rick Chalaturnyk, Emily Eaton

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Everyone deserves a great career where they feel proud of their work, where they can provide for their family. Here in B.C., you show the way forward with job creating projects like the plant down the road in Richmond. They use carbon capture to keep emissions out of the air and store them in cement permanently.

MG: That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiling the government's latest plan to meet its promised climate change targets. That plan includes carbon capture, utilisation and storage technology. For years, there have been questions raised about whether that technology is feasible on a large scale, large enough to make a meaningful difference in tackling the climate crisis. We'll try to answer some of those questions. Rick Chalaturnyk is a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Alberta and a leading researcher on carbon capture technology. Rick. Good morning.

RICK CHALATURNYK: Good morning.

MG: I think most people probably understand the basic concept of carbon capture. You're trying to take the carbon out of the air and then you safely store it somewhere. Give us, I mean, very briefly the basic explanation as to how that actually works.

RICK CHALATURNYK: So the whole yeah, the whole process is pretty much as you said, Matt, I mean, you you sort of use a series of technologies to apply to some emission source. And you know, there are multiple kinds, you know, you hear a lot about power plants and and others, but there are other other places obviously that emit CO2. And so you apply a technology to that and you you capture out of that emissions stream of CO2 and you it becomes a concentrated stream. So high concentration of CO2 typically, you know, I mean, 90, 95 and above percent CO2, you know, sort of high high concentration CO2 and then you transport it. There's a there's a multiple ways to transport it, and Canada typically is by by pipelines. So you you transport it and the you and the SE part of the U.S. have to do with what you do with the CO2 afterwards. So utilisation, you know, for it's in the United States. Its primary use has been for enhanced oil recovery, which I think we're chatting about this morning. But the major component, especially when it comes to issues around emissions reductions in the atmosphere, is the s part, which is the storage, which means taking the CO2 and injecting it very, very deep in the in the subsurface, you know, well beyond a kilometre more and ensuring that it's safely sequestered in the poorer spaces in the rocks very deep and it doesn't come out and doesn't come out. You do a lot of work to make sure that it doesn't come out as a lot of a lot of things that happen before you. You're given a licence to inject a molecule of CO2. A lot of stuff you have to do.

MG: Just to be clear, I mean, this does not capture the emissions from transportation or from the CO2 that's already in the sea.

RICK CHALATURNYK: But then and Darian is exactly where a lot of these applications is. CCS, CCUS really start to start to have an impact for us in a way is that I know there's been, you know, maybe quite rightly, you know, a lot of focus on on the fossil fuel side of the world. Again, you know, part of the conversations this morning. But I think really what what people hopefully will get a sense of after a bit is that secrecy also plays a significant role in a bunch of those other things that we need to worry about, like transportation. So, you know, I'm sure that you've heard about, you know, the conversations around hydrogen and so on, and people try and move to that for for reducing emissions in the transportation sector. Well, part of that hydrogen pathway includes CF. There's CO2 that's emitted when you're making hydrogen in order to actually get the reductions emissions reductions down for transportation. So for sequester plays a role way beyond just fossil fuels, right?

MG: Is there any evidence that this works at scale? This is the big issue. I mean, the technology has been promised and there's a lot that that that is riding on this. But are there examples to show that it actually works at scale?

RICK CHALATURNYK: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question because I think, you know, you read the, you know, the news and the literature and everything else. And so I've been working on it for 20 years and so on. And so, yeah, no, the question really is, is there is this really going to scale out it at that what they refer to as gigatons? So most of the times when people are talking about this, they're storing what, you know, caught a cold megatons of CO2 and that's what people are. We are working towards. And so is it possible? Yeah, absolutely. If you look at subsurface formations, the kind of work that's been done over the last 20, 25 years looking at, you know, appropriate deep formations that will this it has capacity that is measured in sort of hundreds hundreds of gigatons capacity capacity.

MG: But is there again? Are there examples of it actually working?

RICK CHALATURNYK: Yeah. Well, no, no project in the world has gotten two gigatons yet. No, nothing has. But if you take even the very first project that was ever done, this done in this way, which is a slave in project in the North Sea. You know, they're well into I don't know where they would be at today, and I'm going to guess a no, but you know, to 40 to 50 megatons, if not more. Even the Weyburn project, albeit it's CO2 where you are. It's been injecting CO2 for that reason for 1999. So it was 20 25 years. It's it's even stored in the neighbourhood of 40 megatons, I guess.

MG: I mean, the question is important in part that people may not understand the numbers, but the question is important because so much is riding on this. You heard the prime minister at the beginning talking about this. There are a lot and we'll get into this in a moment, but there are a lot of of big promises that are being made and people wonder whether the promises are actually based in reality.

RICK CHALATURNYK: Well, you know, I think I think I would, I would be I would be asking the same question. I think it's fair to ask the same question, those are those are big numbers, those are big targets. You know, the government of Canada, provincial jurisdictions, Paris agreements, we've all, you know, we've all heard this. Yeah, they're big targets. And for the most part, a lot of times. What would you hear in all of these sort of scenarios is that there's this secrecy thing at the end that it says, you know, yeah, no, we're good to go. We have, as you had just said, the capacity getting there is is still going to take some work. Absolutely. Most. Sort of organisations around the world that have sort of looked at this understand that there is going to be a bit of work to get to a gigaton of storage in order to actually take full advantage of CCUS.

MG: Well, let me bring in one of the people who's asking those questions. Her name is Emily Eaton. She's an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Regina. She's been studying that province's oil economy for 10 years plus. Emily, good morning to you.

EMILY EATON: Good morning, Matt, thanks for covering this issue.

MG: Well, thanks for being here. As part of the coverage, you were one of four hundred academics and climate scientists who wrote the federal government in January, raising concerns about tax incentives or carbon capture. You called the idea of banking on carbon capture a pipe dream. Why?

EMILY EATON: Well, that's right for us. You know, we're really concerned that the fossil fuel industry made $22 billion in 2021, and we really feel that if they need this technology to survive and compete in a declining market for oil, that they should really be paying for it themselves and that this shouldn't come from public money. And so fossil fuels as products, they emit about 80 to 90 percent of their total lifecycle emissions when they are consumed or burned or used. And so our concern with the federal government's plan to use carbon capture utilisation and storage to produce what they're calling net zero oil is that it's dangerous in two ways. And the first way I think you've already covered a little bit with your other guest that really the U.S. hasn't been proven at scale. It's dramatically underperforming in every existing carbon capture facility where it's not living up to its promises. And we're not sure that we can buy the promises of the the new promises that are being made by the oil and gas industry to produce zero or to produce net zero oil at some far off time in the future. And the other reason is because of that 80 to 90 percent of the total lifecycle emissions that I just mentioned that even if we could decarbonise the production of fossil fuels producing those fossil fuels at home, we can't decarbonise their consumption. In other words, they will go somewhere in the world and be burned in cars, vehicles, homes, power plants. And so those are the two main reasons that that we are sceptical about this approach of the federal government.

MG: Let me go back to the idea of whether this actually works at scale or not. Saskatchewan has one of the world's largest carbon capture and utilisation projects at White Cap Resource Site. There's also the Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage facility near Astrovan. How would you characterise the track record of those facilities when it comes to living up to the promise of carbon capture?

EMILY EATON: Yes. Well, we do have Boundary Dam three, that's carbon capture unit on a coal fired plants. And when the province invested $1.5 billion into retrofitting this plant for carbon capture, we were told that it would be capturing 90 percent of the emissions that were coming out of the power plant and no single year since it's been in operation, which is more than seven years now. Has it captured 90 percent of its emissions in most years, it's captured closer to 40 percent. In some years, it's captured even less than 40 percent. That carbon dioxide is captured and transported to the Weyburn oilfield. White Cap Resources is one of the companies that engages in enhanced oil recovery, so using the carbon as a flood in old oil fields to push out and boost new production of oil. So that's proceeding quite nicely. They are producing a lot of new oil using the captured carbon. But the reality is is that that facility on the coal fired plant is really dramatically underperforming. And, you know, there's been a series of maintenance operations and investigations into all of the problems that it seems to be continually underperforming. And now they actually have lowered their expectations because the oil industry doesn't want to take all of the carbon that it could potentially capture. So the carbon is a revenue stream, potentially that they're only going to produce enough of that they can sell.

MG: Rick Shelton OK, what do you make of that? In some ways that the goalposts have been moved because what's happening at Boundary Dam may not actually be delivering on the promised emission reductions. What should that tell you?

RICK CHALATURNYK: You know, I think Emily's Emily's right there. You know, projects of this size have have gone through learning curves. Any industrial operation at this size is going to go through through learning and learning curves. You know, I think always. Well, well, it may have been promoted. You know, much like Emily had talked about before, I think there was always an expectation that there were going to be significant learnings from Boundary Dam. Things happen at scale, anything at this scale. And so, you know, already significant learnings that have Boundary Dam have found their way into other projects, both both sort of in North America, Canada, you know, in particular, projects that are happening around Cement's and others in North America and even worldwide. So, you know, I think, you know, from the point of view of how it's improved by an understanding of how to actually operate these plants at scale. I mean, many studies have said that, you know, capital costs for for implementing something like Boundary Dam, today's costs are going to go down by 60 to 75 percent. And so, you know, I, you know, we're involved Boundary Dam. You know, people should understand as well that it's not just CO2 where you are. Boundary Dam has a dedicated injection well that injects CO2 into deep saline aquifers at 300 metres. And you know, in that part, the storage part that we chatted about is is operating extremely well. It has a monitoring programme that exists around it. It monitors the CO2 that's going into that deep subsurface. And so that project actually has has both components. It both has supply to CO2 where you are, but it also has pure storage. So. So you know, I think there's been much like Quest, you know, people have heard about Shell's Quest project. You know, part of the drive for those projects was to learn as much as possible from those projects to ensure that you know, anything that comes forward that might actually even be supported by, you know, the government investment tax credits and all this other stuff that we're hearing about and in a dollars per ton of CO2 are just going to get more efficient with time.

MG: Well, and there are people who say many researchers yourself amongst them who say that, that we have to get this right. Take a listen to Michael Wolinetz. He's a partner at Navias Research. They've been doing studies. They've never been able to come up with a scenario that did not involve some sort of carbon capture. Take a listen.

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Getting to net zero means that we have negated all greenhouse gas emissions that that Canada is emitting. And some of those emissions are very, very difficult to prevent. And in some cases, right now, the only technical solution we have is carbon capture and storage. In other cases, there is no technical solution. And so to negate those emissions, you may literally have to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere again using a carbon capture and storage technology.

MG: Emily Eaton, what do you make of that, that in some ways, this needs to work that we can't get to net zero without carbon capture performing at scale?

EMILY EATON: Yes, thanks for that. I do agree that carbon capture is probably some part of our path to net zero and there are differing opinions on that. But the thing that we really took exception to is that it's being used in the fossil fuel industry, so we have alternatives to fossil fuels. Those alternatives have been proven at scale and need to be built out really quickly. There are things that we don't have alternatives to yet, and those are probably appropriate places to consider the use of carbon capture technology and cement,

MG: for

EMILY EATON: example. But sure. And yet cement steel, some of those very difficult to decarbonise industries. But what we don't think we need is to use public money to support put an industry on life support. But the world has said that we need to move away from that. We need to switch off of fossil fuels if we have a hope of maintaining a habitable planet. And so to use this technology to prop up this industry, which has made a lot of money in Canada in the last several decades and continues to make a lot of money, we just don't think that we need to use public dollars to do that.

MG: And this is what the signatories to the letter to Steven Guilbeault said that the industry is using carbon capture and storage technology as a lifeline just to continue business as usual. Is that a fair assessment?

RICK CHALATURNYK: Oh, yeah. I don't know, I I think Emily's got great points in the letter, had great points. I don't think there should ever be a reluctance to be talking about a reduction in fossil fuels and moving forward towards a renewable energy future. I mean, I guess my opinion of this is a slightly different thing in that society. Our standards, our current way of life. It it it's dependent. It's so dependent. I mean, I can't I mean, you've seen reports of this stuff is so dependent on on the products that come from the fossil fuel industry, not just not just burning of fossil fuel in the cars. I mean, everything that we use on a day to day basis. And if if every report everywhere you look, people have said that, you know, yes, we have to make the transition, but the fossil fuel is going to be with us for two decades ish. Well, we make this transition. Then in my mind, what I see QC as is a way for us to manage the emissions streams from that part of the industry as we move towards that renewable future. I mean, that's how I see it. I don't see it as a, you know, shut off fossil fuels down and things so. So I just see that CCUS provides an opportunity for us to manage the emissions streams from that that component of our our industries that we, we know is going to be with us for a number of decades. Will we make this transition to renewables, Emily?

MG: Is that not a smart investment? If the transition is going to take some time, that money should go into helping ease that transition or manage that transition.

EMILY EATON: Definitely, money should go into easing that transition. We would hope that all of it would. But in order to make a transition, you have to have a peak and you have to have a managed decline. And so to the extent that CCUS technologies can find a place in this future, they should be used alongside a phase out of fossil fuels. Otherwise, they just risk propping up and locking in fossil fuel production into the future. And every major report that Rick has talked about suggests that fossil fuel there should be no new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, but fossil fuel production and use has to start declining today or yesterday. Decades ago, it needed to start declining, so we can't bank on continuing to produce the last drop of oil. Canadian oil is very emissions intensive. We can bring down the intensity of those emissions, but as the world transitions, I don't think it's a good bet to use public money to bank on Canadian oil being the last oil that is is bought across the world.

MG: In the meantime, and we just have a minute or so left. There are new projects that have been approved in or just approved a couple of weeks ago. The federal government has made carbon capture a big part of its plan. So can you actually, if the money goes out, can you make sure that the facilities actually deliver on what they promise? Can you find accountability in that?

EMILY EATON: Exactly. If the money does go out, I would hope that there are performance standards because as we have seen, you know, Rick has talked a lot about the sequestration being viable. But what we've seen in terms of the actual capturing of carbon by many of these companies across the world is they don't live up to expectations. So I would hate for there to be a bunch of money dumped into these companies and then to find that, you know, two years later, they did send it for permanent storage as the tax credit requires. But two years later, they switch to sending it to the oil field to push out more oil. So there does need to be. Now that we have this tax credit, there needs to be really strict accountability measures and performance standards to ensure that the carbon is actually being captured and stored appropriately.

MG: Appreciate talking to you both about this. We will speak more about it in future, certainly given the weight that's being invested in it. Thank you very much.

RICK CHALATURNYK: You're welcome.

EMILY EATON: Thanks for having us.

MG: Rick Chalaturnyk, a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Alberta. Emily Eaton, a professor of geography at the University of Regina at your CBC News is next, and we're going to talk about work and working better. It's coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

Cal Newport on how ‘slow productivity’ could reduce burnout in our working lives

Guest: Cal Newport

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to the current.

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MG: Still to come, how people with schizophrenia are speaking out against stigma and being helped by new treatments. That's in just under 30 minutes. But first work in progress.

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VOICE 1: Oh, my name is Wally Majd, I'm the national account person, and I love the four day world. It has a lot of advantages for me personally. Recently, a new dad, so I have a seven month old baby and it gives me more time with them. I go on Mondays now, which is my day off. I go with them to swim classes. It worked really well for me because I'm more focussed at work. I say I find and you know, when you know that you have only those four days to do your work, you're kind of come in and condensed. You're like, You know what? I'm doing this, this, this, this. But at the end, it translated on a better sales year. Definitely. Last year was a great success for me.

VOICE 2: I'm Karen Stevenson and the company controller. At first, I said to my boss, Is it going to be 10 hours a day? And he said, No, it's going to be four days, eight hours. We just have to find a way to work more efficiently. But now it's in motion for almost a year at work, smooth like we have it down pat.

MG: It was the response of employees to a four day workweek at a Toronto roofing business. We visited that office as part of our series Work in Progress, taking a look at how the pandemic is changing the way we work. The four day workweek is one tool being used to combat things like burnout and stress, but according to my next guest, will need a lot more to fix those problems. Cal Newport writes about work in technology and is a computer science professor, also a contributing writer for The New Yorker. And he promotes something called slow productivity, doing fewer things at a slower pace. Sounds delicious. Cal Newport. Good morning.

CAL NEWPORT: Morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. Why isn't the reduced workweek going to be enough to fix burnout?

CAL NEWPORT: I think it's a indirect approach to the real underlying problem, which is for most office workers, is the fact that they have too many obligations on their plate. So too many things that they have some obligation to complete. Be it a small task or a big project that's actually that overload that volume of past being overloaded, that is really driving the burnout, not the total hours of the work that they're asked to actually be at the office.

MG: And so if you have a shorter workweek, you're just cramming more into fewer days.

CAL NEWPORT: You know, it can indirectly help because if you know time is short, it can lead to pulling back some on how much work you put on people's plates. But it is indirect. Or I think we could get to the direct problem by actually saying how much is on our plate at a time and is it an appropriate amount?

MG: Tell me more about this, about the root causes of what people have called a burnout crisis. What do you see as the underlying issue that is leading so many people to feel fried at work, no matter what they're doing?

CAL NEWPORT: Well, if we look at this issue of having too much volume of tasks on your plate, we see a couple of problems that will arise. So one is this notion of our brain. The human brain is actually pretty good at making long-term plans for things that we want to accomplish. We've had this ability since the Palaeolithic, but when you have 700 unread email messages, when you have 45 tasks that are urgent, when you have 17 Zoom meetings in the next week, that planning portion of our brain short circuits. It can't actually keep up with that volume of things, it can't imagine how it's going to get everything on our plate done in time. And that can be really distressing and cause burnout. And then we just have the practical issue, that everything on your plate you're obligated to do brings with it some overhead. Some email, some meetings to co-ordinate. And so if you have too many things stacked up, that overhead itself can begin to dominate most of your schedule. And that's an incredibly frustrating place to be because you're spending most of your time then talking about work, and not actually doing it.

MG: Let me ask you about email specifically. Your latest book, A World Without Email talks about how communications technologies — email, but also things like Slack and Gchat — affect how we work and what work we actually do. How has email made work worse?

CAL NEWPORT: What happened is we spread email through the front office in the 1990s to solve a very specific problem. It was supposed to replace fax machines, was supposed to replace voicemail and it was supposed to replace memos. But once it arrived, it led to a new style of collaboration that I call the hyperactive hive mind, where everything gets worked out with these ad hoc, on demand, back-and-forth asynchronous messages. And the volume of these messages overwhelmed us. And now we've ended up having to check these inboxes or these chat channels constantly to keep up with these dozens of back-and-forth conversations all happening digitally. And this constant need to check these inboxes and channels all the time is something that the human brain can't handle well. It can't keep context-shifting, and so it became a real productivity issue.

MG: What happens if you come back from, say, a long weekend and you look at your email inbox and there's... you said, 700 and some emails, that's a low number for a lot of people. What goes on, do you think, in the average person's brain when they see that kind of email backlog?

CAL NEWPORT: Well, it's important to recognise how artificial and unusual that is for the history of the human species. We take sociality very important. We're a very social species. That's how we survived 100,000, 200,000 years ago. So when we see 700 unread messages, there's a deep part of our brain that says, There are 700 members of my tribe who needed me and I'm ignoring them. This is an emergency. If I fray those social connections, I'm going to starve during the next famine.' So there's this deep level in our human psyche that gets really uncomfortable with this idea that people constantly need us and we are ignoring them in the moment.

MG: Are you able to park that? I mean, do you ever declare email bankruptcy, for example, and just delete all the unread messages, start from zero? And have to, you know, put that anxiety out of your mind?

CAL NEWPORT: I mean, it's funny how much relief people talk about that providing them, which I think is telling. You know, I saw a tweet the other day where someone said that they deleted one email without reading it, and it gave them immense pleasure. I think that just talks to the degree to which there's a deeper part of our brain that is constantly under siege, by all of these messages. That's just not compatible with the way our brain works. We want to connect with people. We want to be dependable to people. We want to be there for our tribe members. We can't deal with 700 unread messages that will double to 1,400 if we don't get to it in the next couple of days.

MG: You also write, though, about autonomy. Why is a tournament at the centre of the conversation around how we work?

CAL NEWPORT: I think this is one of the most underreported but important dynamics in office work today, which is win wide scale knowledge work became a big thing starting in the mid century in the West and starting in the 1950s and 60s, people were grappling with understanding, how is this type of work going to be different than a factory? And there was a thinker named Peter Drucker, very important American English business consultant and thinker who coined the term knowledge work. And he said autonomy is what is different. You cannot break down making marketing copy or coming up with the new engineering formula into step by step like a assembly line. So knowledge workers, unlike people on the assembly line, need a lot of autonomy. And he was right about that and that was very influential. But we took it too far and we began giving people full autonomy and figuring out how to actually organise and execute their work as well. There was no system or tracking of how much is on your plate. Who should get this? Who's working on what that was all pushed through the individual as well? Productivity was made a 100 percent personal, and I think it's really in that context that we get things like inboxes that are overloaded and pass lists that are crushing us.

MG: And so tell me more about this. As I said, delicious sounding term slow productivity. What is that?

CAL NEWPORT: I mean, one way to think about it is if you want your employees to be happier, if you want better work done, if in the long term you want more work done. We have to avoid this overload of tasks on people's plates. We have to rethink how work unfolds so that people only have a small number of things to do at any one time. They do those things well, and when they're done, they pull something new on the plate to work on next. That is a much more natural way of working one thing at a time with attention and with quality. It's not up to you as an individual to organise and manage 500 different obligations. I think this slower approach to productivity is not only much more sustainable, but probably actually much more effective.

MG: Take me into a workplace and what would it look like if the workplace were governed by the philosophy of slow productivity?

CAL NEWPORT: So there is one sector that is already implementing ideas like this and that software development. So if you go into a standard software development team that's using a project management methodology known as agile. What you'll see and this is critical to how they do their work, is a poll based system of work instead of a push based system. So instead of anyone being able to push a task onto anyone else's plate at any time. Instead, they have a big board and they keep track of. Here's all the things that need to be done on this programme the features that need to be added, the bugs that need to be fixed, and they're not on anyone's plate. In particular, they're in a common store and then they have a set way of deciding, OK, what are you as an individual? What do you want to work on next and you pull the next thing over to your column? And then you work on that until you're done. And then you get together with your team and make a decision. What do I want to do now? And you pull another thing onto your plate so you're only ever working on one thing at a time. And you, as an individual are not responsible for keeping track of and being on top of everything else that needs to get done. Paul, instead of push and it makes a huge difference.

MG: Do you need to have a much larger workforce to be able to pull something like that off?

CAL NEWPORT: It doesn't actually change the throughput of work. So in other words, taking all of those things on the board and spreading them out to the individuals to keep track of on their own informally through email channels is actually probably going to slow down the rate at which they accomplish things. So it does not slow down the throughput of work. People are able to work more effectively. And you take all of the overhead of having to individually manage the tasks that you're waiting to work on. The email check ins, the Zoom meetings to check in, all of that goes away so you can actually execute more quickly on what you're doing. So the people get happier with the amount of work being done. Speeds up like if there's a way to get software programmes built faster. If there's a way to fix those bugs and add those features quicker, they'd be doing it. There's a reason why this has become an industry wide standard.

MG: You've written that in some ways there's a mismatch between our hustle culture and working less. Are we naturally wired to work in that way?

CAL NEWPORT: I think this low productivity vision is very well aligned with if we can use that terminology our wiring. We do know that humans get pretty quickly bored and disillusioned if they don't have something to do. But we also know from recent experience in particular that humans get quite stressed and anxious when they have more on their plate to do than they can imagine ever getting done. So a world in which you're working on a small number of things at a time, you're doing those things really well. You have autonomy on how you execute them. But you also have protection from people being able to, without restraint, push things onto your plate. I think that is going to be a world that's most compatible with the human and let's say, natural productivity instinct.

MG: There's also just. Concerned that people have around the idea of productivity itself, there's a great book that came out a few years ago by Jenny Odell called How to Do Nothing, which is essentially a screed against productivity, culture and this sense that we always have to be doing something that will be productive. Is there something? I mean, maybe it's generational, but is there something at the heart of productivity that's broken when we're trying to design a better way of work?

CAL NEWPORT: Well, I think Jenny's book, which I enjoy, I mean, and it actually came out the same month that one of my books, we ended up doing quite a bit of press together, so I got it out of that book quite well. I mean, I think her point is good that we want to be careful about encoding into our culture a industrial productivity metaphor that is a metaphor we're producing more per unit of time is better than producing less. I would say the place where I sometimes differ with Jenny, however, is that I think there are issues with office work that can't be resolved with this more industrial mindset, the sort of economic materialist mindset which says the reason why we're so overwhelmed that work is purely because maybe a manager or owner, a capital trying to exploit us. I actually think there's a lot more haphazard ness and randomness in how office work happens. I think it's the blind leading the blind. It's the autonomy culture. It's the hyperactive hive mind. Is everyone shooting emails to everyone else because we don't know how else things are going to get done. So I think we have a unique issue with office work, where it's not just this dialectic of employees versus managers, it's actually this vacuum. We do not have good, thoughtful structure in place for how should work be organised, how should we assign work, how much work should be on someone's plate? How do the actual mechanisms of work unfold? We don't have a lot of that and knowledge work, and in that chaos, in that vacuum, a lot of bad side effects have a rose can slow.

MG: Just last point on this can slow productivity apply outside of what you call knowledge work office work. If you are working in a factory, if you are working in the trades, can you apply that philosophy to your work and your work life?

CAL NEWPORT: I would separate those two examples. I think in the trades, for sure. I mean, one of the great examples you will see naturally occurring is low productivity is craftspeople who will focus intensely on. And building or constructing something at a high school level with real concentration. I once wrote a whole chapter in a book about someone who makes swords and clay and and what it looks like and how resonant it is. Just spending a day in that barn, just working on the sword factory. Work is different. I mean, I think factory work is this is a place where the actions are heavily prescribed. It's a place of discipline. It's it's there's all sorts of labour arguments that we've been having since the 19th century, which are really relevant. And that's a very difficult area. We've made a lot of progress on. But my main point is a lot of the things that made progress, let's say, at a factory in the 1930s, won't directly report over to the marketing project manager in the 2020s. There's new types of thinking like slow productivity won't be to solve that latter problem.

MG: How does where we work shape that? And we saw a big change in that in terms of a big spike for some in remote work during the pandemic.

CAL NEWPORT: I'm fascinated by remote work as a trend. It's I have a lot of predictions on and I did a lot of reporting on it. And I think what we try during the pandemic was okay. Unfortunately, it was a lot of working from home with a lot of other things happening at home because schools were closed and other sort of issues were going on. So we haven't really tried, let's say, optimise remote work, remote work in optimal conditions yet. I do think we'll see more of it. And I do think being able to free people from having to come to the same space every single day, letting them live other places in the country, other places in the world have more autonomy in how and when they work. I think ultimately that is going to be the future of knowledge work, but I think there's going to be some growing pains. I don't think we're going to get there next year. I think there's some obstacles in the path ahead.

MG: There's a neat example that you cite when you talk about where we work, and it is Maya Angelou talking about how she would rent out a hotel room in which she would work and write her poetry in here. She is talking about that process in an interview with George Plimpton in 1988.

Speaker 5: I keep a hotel room and every time I've ever lived in. And I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don't want anything in there. I will go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything. There are little milkmaids, but we do in the movie. Nothing. Nothing. I don't want it. I don't want to fly. Was cute and I don't want it. Nothing. I just want to feel.

MG: And so you say, inspired by Maya Angelou, we should embrace something called working from near home. What is that?

CAL NEWPORT: I'm fascinated by this reality that if you look at writers or the original work from home knowledge, they're doing knowledge workers, they don't go to an office. You see this trend again and again, like Maya Angelou, writers with perfectly good houses and really nice home offices. I presume going to a central locations that are objectively probably worst environments near their home to do their work. So it's like Maya Angelou going to bare walled hotels. I wrote about the author of Jaws, Peter Benchley, who wrote the book In The Town where I Grew Up. He left a very nice house to work in the back room of a furnace repair shop, which was incredibly noisy. But the reason why they do it is that when you're in your actual home, there are so many different cues and distractions that are relevant and salient to your mind that are going to push you into a non-work context. You're going to see the laundry piled in the hallway. You're going to see that To-Do list to pick up milk on the refrigerator door and is a noisy environment if you want to try to do difficult cognitive works. I'm a big advocate that remote work doesn't need to mean it probably shouldn't mean work from home. It should mean work that doesn't happen in a central office, but maybe in a location near your home that's dedicated to work and this is something that companies should pay for. I think it's going to be much cheaper than having a central office, and you're going to get a lot more satisfaction and high quality work out of your employees.

MG: You think companies should pay for this?

CAL NEWPORT: I think they should. I think you take the cost that would have otherwise gone into long term office leases and downtown Toronto or downtown Washington, D.C. And instead, you break that up into some sort of subsidy for and I'm not talking dice. It doesn't have to be nice. It could be a garden shed that's been renovated. It could be like in my town right now, I'm sitting in some Class B office space above a restaurant. It's not very expensive. It's not very nice, but it's not my house and it's a good place to come to concentrate. I think I think this is something that should be subsidised.

MG: Do you put much stake in the idea of workplace culture? One of the reasons why there is that, you know, the reeling back end of employees into the workplace if they have been working from home, is that people will say, Well, we miss the culture we miss. We miss people being around and the culture that that creates.

CAL NEWPORT: Well, I think if you had a workplace culture built around that office and then suddenly you said we're all going to work remotely like happened during the pandemic, that is going to create issues. So I think for remote work to function properly, you have to really rethink how work happens. It's not just the decision about location, it's a decision about how work as a whole unfolds. So for example, I did an interview with an entrepreneur named Chris Hurd, who thinks a lot about the future of remote work and the model he pushes is one in which, no, there's not a central office. People can live in lots of different places, but multiple times a year. Relevant teams do gather. They gather in person, but not at an office. It's at different places. Every time they do it. He has this vision where you're at hotels are resorts that are going to specialise in brainstorming sessions and work sessions and. And so he thought, yes, we're culture's important. People do need to get together on a regular basis, but this doesn't require. This is a skyscraper that everyone comes to every day. So I think there's a lot of this we're going to have to figure out to really make remote work sustainable.

MG: I want to go back to something we were just talking about, which is that there are sectors of work that don't have the privilege of slow work or remote work or working from near home. Whether you're talking about the trades, whether you're talking about people working in factories, do you worry that we could end up with a deeper divide in terms of the quality of people's working lives or how we see the quality of people's working lives that if you're able to do this, that's a good job. Whereas if you're able to if you if you have to keep going into the workplace, people will look at that work differently.

CAL NEWPORT: The place where I'm most worried about that divide would be within the sector of knowledge work itself. So if we keep doing what we're doing today, which is. In general, keeping work pretty haphazard and on the fly, just shooting emails back and forth and trying to figure things out. The ability to negotiate a better setup, right, don't have to come into this office where I can be more autonomous, where I can pull in task one at a time instead of being overwhelmed. That might be limited to just those who happen to have the leverage to make those demands. And then you're going to get a bifurcated workforce where you have the people who have to come in and they have to work under these worst conditions. We'll see other people not there. They're calling in from Santa Fe, they're pulling task as they're needed. They're much happier. So I think an incomplete transformation where some people use leverage and the disruption of the moment to change their situations, most people can't. That's not a great future. The future I want is where we rethink work from the ground up. So that's not something that you can argue for, like a benefit that these type of changes are just baked into how work unfolds.

MG: How much do you think of what was improvised over the course of the pandemic because of the urgency of the pandemic? How much of that is going to stick six 12 months down the road?

CAL NEWPORT: I think in the six to 12 month window, we're going to see a retreat. So in fact, we talk about, let's say, even the next few years, we're going to see a retreat towards returning to the office because I think a lot of the improvisation didn't work very well. A lot of what we did was just white knuckle bit of notice this we just said, Yeah, this is really hard to do this remotely. It's a lot of email, a lot of Zoom. But you know what? Everything is hard. There's a pandemic going on. So I think we're going to see a short term retreat of a lot of big organisations to the office. But longer term, five years out, six years out, that's what I think. We're going to see much bigger changes because there are companies that did start to figure this out during the pandemic, in particular start-ups that started during the pandemic that had to build remoteness into their day from day one. They're figuring out how to do this right and as they grow over the next three or four years, they're going to be much more successful than their more traditional competition and the ideas about what they're doing is going to spread. So I think the seeds have been planted for a different way of working. I just think it's going to take a little bit longer to reap than we might expect. There's going to be a temporary step back from where we were, but slightly longer term, a big change is going to blossom.

MG: Just about at a time. Do you really see a world without email?

CAL NEWPORT: Well, hopefully we see a world in which we don't have to answer email once every five minutes. That's what I need. I'm happy to send an email here and then. I don't want 700 messages though, waiting for me when I get back from a trip.

MG: You and me, both Cal Newport. Great to speak with you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Cal Newport is computer science professor at Georgetown University, contributing writer for The New Yorker, and his latest book is a World Without Email Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Your thoughts? Welcome. Email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. Email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. Coming up after your regional update,

SOUNDCLIP

Psychosis and schizophrenia are words that have been historically beat up, stepped on, banged against the wall. And while certainly I appreciate that many people want to change the language, in fact, what we need to do is pick it up off the floor.

MG: In 90 seconds, we'll hear from people diagnosed with schizophrenia about what that illness is actually like and why the public perception of it needs to change. It's happening, but not nearly fast enough. That's coming up in just a minute. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Stay with us.

Confronting the slowly changing stigma around schizophrenia

Guests: Ilyas Khamis, Faydra Aldridge, Dr. Sabina Abidi

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Some of the stuff, because some of it's confidential.

MG: Leslie McQuaig is almost done her masters.

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Yeah, I'm working on a master's degree in counselling psychology.

MG: Here she is at her desk

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And I'm one semester away from completing their degree.

MG: Harvard's Nova Scotia.

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It feels very good, actually. I worked really hard to get here. I've been through some challenging times, for sure. It's it feels like it's all paying off, all that hard work.

MG: And if you'd told Leslie a few years ago that this is where she'd be sitting today, she would have never believed you.

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I was not happy. I was a very angry person when I was first diagnosed with schizophrenia. I didn't know what my life would look like. I didn't know what my goals and dreams would look like. I just kind of thought I would collect CPP disability for the rest of my life and maybe volunteer somewhere. I just really thought I was stuck in a rut that I couldn't get out of.

MG: Leslie is part of a new generation of young people with schizophrenia who are living healthier lives than they ever thought they would.

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Yes, it took a lot of counselling and a lot of psychiatric visits, a lot of good medication, a lot of support.

MG: Leslie is doing something else. She once never thought she would speak publicly about an illness that she used to be ashamed of.

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Well, I still hear auditory hallucinations. I haven't gotten rid of those. It's like hearing a Radio 24-7, so it's like having noise in your ears, 24-7, and it's people speaking. Sometimes I like what they're speaking about. Sometimes I don't. But I can't turn it off. It is just stuck inside of my head. So when I'm engaged in my studying, I don't notice them. But if I was going to lay down in a quiet room, I would be haunted by them. That is kind of weird, to be honest. Experiencing it is. I'm very used to it now and I'm very able to move forward in life with it. They don't scare me anymore. If anything, they're kind of annoying.

MG: Leslie calls her hallucinations kind of annoying, but shedding the fear that surrounds schizophrenia is proving to be a tough job. In an effort to do just that, some organisations supporting people with the illness have removed the word schizophrenia from their names. And there's a lobby in the United States to have the name of the illness itself changed to let go of some of its baggage. There are about 360,000 Canadians who have schizophrenia. Ilyas Khamis is one of them. He's a 27 year old social work student at Ryerson University in Toronto. He's with me in studio. Good morning.

ILYAS KHAMIS: Morning.

MG: What's it like listening to Leslie and what she has been living through?

Speaker 3: It resonates with me a lot, actually, because I also felt that feeling of stuckness when I was first diagnosed. It took a long time to be able to process that, and I remember when I was taking like oral medications every day. It would just be a reminder of like, OK, I have this thing going on, like, I don't fully understand it. I don't know what this means for my life, and it's going to be there forever.

MG: What was going on in your life when you were first diagnosed?

ILYAS KHAMIS: So I was at university at the University of Ottawa, and I was actually into a lot of cannabis use and I was trying to manage like an addiction along with like prodromal symptoms of psychosis and a time university like degree programme.

MG: It's a lot going on.

ILYAS KHAMIS: Yeah, it was. It was intense. And at first I was trying to figure out ways to manage it. But back in like a month or two before November 2014, I actually stopped using cannabis. I stopped using substances, but I still had these weird things going on and I couldn't quite explain them. They didn't make sense to me, but the more I kind of got into it and the more time progressed towards that first hospitalisation in November 2014, the more intense they got and the more my reality just seemed out of my control.

MG: Do you mind me asking, you said weird things? How would you describe that?

ILYAS KHAMIS: One big thing was like the hallucinations of people's, person's voice, mostly, and it would tell me to kind of go around to different parks in Ottawa, and I needed to make it there by certain times. Otherwise, my family would be like murdered. Yeah, it was scary. And being able to process that at the time was not even within the scope of my abilities because this voice, I didn't know where it was coming from. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I knew for a fact that it was omnipotent, omnipresent and all knowing. So there was nothing I could do to fight against it. I tried to fight against it out, rebel. I'd be like, No, I'm not going to go, I'm going to stay here like you can't do anything. But then it would get stronger and stronger and stronger. And sometimes I'd miss the deadline, but I'd make it to the park and I'd start negotiating with it. Please, like I made it here, like, can you give me a break? And It'd be like, OK, you made it here this time, but now you have to get to this part by this time because you didn't make it like in time for the first one.

MG: And this is all before you'd had your diagnosis.

ILYAS KHAMIS: Yes, this was back before I was hospitalised for the first time, so I had a couple interactions with like the mental health system back in high school, just seeing like a therapist and an addictions worker. But I wasn't really engaged with it. I didn't think I really had a problem. I didn't really recognise things were changing as much as they were. It wasn't until I was hospitalised that time that I was told that I had psychosis NOS (not always specified) and was so not otherwise specified and was another almost a year before I got a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, which for me is schizophrenia and depression.

MG: Leslie talked about how she was angry when she got her diagnosis. What do you remember about how, how you responded to that?

ILYAS KHAMIS: There were two phases for me. Like I said, I was given psychosis NOS. And then schizoaffective disorder. And with psychosis NOS, I felt like no one knew what was going on. Like, do I still have hope after this? And I felt kind of like concern that the doctors didn't even know it was going on. Or at least I was what was going on in my head, like it was psychosis NOS (not otherwise specified). They didn't know what was happening. They didn't know what was going on like, how could I trust them if they couldn't tell me? And then back in September of 2015, I was hospitalised again. And at that point, I got a psychiatrist. I ended up seeing for another couple of years and he told me I had a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and that clicked in a way. I know a lot of people talk about like the baggage that comes along with schizophrenia. But for me, that stigma was also there, but there was also a sort of relief. It was like, OK, there's a reason I went through all this.

MG: You started to know more about what was going on.

ILYAS KHAMIS: Yeah, it was like I had all these unknowns. I didn't have the why. I didn't know why this was happening to me. I didn't know why I had to change all these things. And then I was told I had schizoaffective and I'm like, That's a pretty good why. That's a pretty good reason to change. That's a pretty good reason to start taking this seriously.

MG: Why do you think it is that people find schizophrenia, something that that is difficult for them to understand? They can be frightened by it. They can be confused by it. Why do you think that is?

ILYAS KHAMIS: I mean, there is a lot of baggage that comes with the word as well, like you were mentioning, like historically, the the way people with schizophrenia were treated was they were thrown in an asylum. And I mean, even at camp, at some point they're forced into forced labour. I mean, we don't have a very positive history with like mental illness in general. And it's only recently that things have started to change and people have been more comfortable talking about it because there are these examples of people living amazing lives who are very high achieving, who are very like, fluent in everything that they do. And I think that helps to combat a lot of the stigma because a lot of people's perceptions of someone with schizophrenia doesn't fit like Alan Sachs or as maybe John Wayne. And so I think like the more models we have of people coming with alternative discourses about schizophrenia and psychosis and mental illness in general, the more people will be able to build that shared reality where it's like, OK, like schizophrenia, it's sure it's hard and a lot of people have a hard time with it, but it's not a death sentence.

MG: What would surprise people, do you think about your illness? What's something that they might they might not know that would surprise them?

ILYAS KHAMIS: It's made me a better person. What do you mean? It's made me more connected with my family. It's made me more connected with reality. It's made me take a critical look at like what I do in life and what I want to do and like the ways I take care of myself. And it's kind of forced decisions on me that I might have pushed to the side otherwise. It's like I don't use pretty much any substances except for the occasional beer. And I think that without like psychosis or schizophrenia, that wouldn't have changed. I think that becoming closer to my family, I had a lot of disconnect with my family when I was in like the prodromal stages because I was using lots of substances and it was just hard for everyone. And so once I got the diagnosis, we all kind of came together. We were like, OK, like, this is happening. My parents were like, We're going to support you. My siblings were there to, like, just make me feel normal. And the people in my life now I know are there because of me and not because of, like, just the fact that I'll use with them.

MG: You put your illness on your resume.

ILYAS KHAMIS: As I do. Yeah, well, I was a peer support worker for a few years and that's my credentials. Like having the lived experience is like the reason why I'm able to connect with people.

MG: I guess I ask, in part because stigma in the family is one thing. Stigma in the workplace is kind of another layer of stigma. Do you know what I mean?

ILYAS KHAMIS: For sure. I mean, I work at the The Library at X Ryerson University, and I even like my experience with psychosis and addictions on my resume. For that, I mean, I've done a lot of talking about it, and I think that the way for people to realise that like conversations can be had and that this isn't like the end of someone's life is that we need to be honest about it and we need to be able to talk about it. We need to be able to not be ashamed of like, OK, I went through psychosis. I've had problems with addictions. I have schizophrenia. Like, there's a lot to me, and that doesn't mean that I'm not going to be a good worker. I can adjust to society or that I'm any other of the like prejudices or stigmas that there are in society. It just means that like, I have a unique experience and it gives me a unique perspective on reality and like, I want to be able to share that with you. And can you share yours with me?

MG: I'm really glad that you have. Can you stay with us? I want to bring a couple other voices into this conversation. Faydra Aldridge is the head of the BC Schizophrenia Society. She has a podcast about schizophrenia. She's in Vancouver. And Dr. Sabina Abidi is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Halifax. She heads the IWK Youth Psychosis Programme. Good morning to you, both.

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Good morning.

DR. SABINA ABIDI: Good morning.

MG: Dr. Abidi, we were hearing from the lies about what it was like to get the diagnosis from his perspective, when you're about to share that diagnosis. Tell me a little bit about about what you are thinking about.

DR. SABINA ABIDI: Without a doubt, the first thing that I think about is the stigma and the baggage, as we've already heard that the family brings in along with the young person with respect to the symptoms that they're presenting with the diagnosis, that they might have the fear. I mean, invariably the majority of the people that come to see me between the ages of zero and 20 are terrified that they will get a diagnosis of schizophrenia here in this clinic. And so the first thing I need to do is normalise together with the families. So I've often said to to residents and students, psychosis and schizophrenia are words that have been historically beat up, stepped on, banged against the wall, just, you know, come with the terrible connotation. And while certainly I appreciate that many people want to change the language, in fact, what we need to do is pick it up off the floor and normalise and talk more about it and use the language of schizophrenia psychosis more in a much more reasonable way so we can challenge the myths.

MG: Faydra, it's interesting because we talk a lot about stigma when it comes to mental illness, and there's a much greater, more open, honest conversation broadly about mental illness. Do you see that extending to schizophrenia specifically?

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Schizophrenia is a highly stigmatised illness. There is no question about that, especially with the you know what we just heard. And I just really have to commend the the two people that that spoke. And just thank you for sharing your stories and thank you for being open because the only way that we are going to start addressing the associated stigma is to talk about it. Let's be honest, let's let's say it what it is, and let's let's keep talking about it.

MG: Why do you think the stigma still sticks in particular to this?

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Yeah, I think there's many reasons. I think there's a lot of misconceptions. I think there's a lot of misconceptions as to what schizophrenia is. Let's face that media portrayal can still portray it as multiple personalities, which it's not. And I think the fact that there is, as you mentioned before, there is a lot of fear associated with this illness because violence can be a part of it. As we just heard, the psychosis and the voices can cause some people with schizophrenia or experiencing psychosis to do things. So violence is a piece of it. But the key is that untreated mental illness can lead to violence. But when people are treated, there are no more likely to be violent than the general public. So that's where the emphasis has to be, is on treatment and awareness.

MG: I mentioned earlier that there are some groups that are taking the word schizophrenia out of their titles at the beginning of the pandemic. The Schizophrenia Society of Ontario changed its name. It's now the Institute for Advancements in Mental Health. Mary Alberti is the head of that organisation. She said this new name is friendlier and more people are calling them for help, since that name change.

SOUNDCLIP

People would feel very uncomfortable calling us. And for a lot of people who are living with schizophrenia or we're not feeling well, but didn't really understand what their mental health issues were, they found the name a barrier to actually getting the support because of the stigma associated with it. We would have people saying, Please don't mail this anything that has a return address of the schizophrenia society on it because we feel very uncomfortable with that. Or even, you know, when we're calling people to make sure that our name doesn't appear on the on the call because that really impacted people. So that for us was very, very important because the main objective is to make sure people do get that help.

MG: Mary Alberti also told us that they had trouble getting donations with the old name and that the new name without the word schizophrenia in it has made that easier. Faydra, do you think that the word is a barrier?

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Absolutely not. I respect Mary's opinion. Mary is a colleague of mine and I, and I truly respect Mary and the decision that her organisation made. But by changing the name schizophrenia, I think we are adding to the stigma. We need to say it what it is, and schizophrenia is a severe and persistent mental illness. It's a chronic illness just like diabetes or Parkinson's or heart disease. Except this one, this illness is an illness of the brain. By changing the name that we are adding to the stigma because we are giving the impression that people should be, that they should be hiding. And there's multiple reasons. And I'm just going to give you a few reasons right now why I think we should be keeping the name schizophrenia. And number one is that change in the name just changes the label. The illness does not go away. The second reason is that the term schizophrenia conveys a huge, meaningful set of signs and symptoms and treatment options that are used throughout the world. And it's really important to have clinicians and researchers using the exact same terminology so that they can be working together to increase new treatments, improving the quality of life for people living with psychosis. So we need that common language between the experts. And the third reason is that as we have just been discussing, schizophrenia is one of the most serious mental illnesses there is, and substituting a name can minimise that condition. So if an individual, for example, is qualifying for disability payments or other forms of assistance, if there's confusion around the terminology that's being used or minimising that condition, then they may not get the support that they need. Because as you talked about, Matt's schizophrenia is not a rare illness. One out of 100 people have it.

MG: There's a lot of heart and what you're saying, and in part that is because of the work that you do. It's also because this is personal for you. Yes, it is. Your sister had schizophrenia, Carissa, how did that stigma

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: impact her life? Yes, my sister Krista passed away in March of 2019 because of schizophrenia. So, yes, from a personal perspective, I understand the implications associated with the illness and the effect that it has on the family. But I also understand it from a personal perspective. And my sister was living on the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. And living on the streets, and I do understand the associated stigma and what I would like to see is that within our culture, when people say that they have heart disease or Parkinson's, we as a society lean in, we say, What can we do to help you? What could we do to support you? When somebody has schizophrenia? People tend to back off, they back away. They don't want, whether because they're afraid that you're going to be contagious, whether it be because they're afraid of, you know, the violence piece, you know, just the unsure of what their next step or what their action is going to be. You know what their behaviour is. So there's lots of concerns potentially about their behaviour. Whatever the reason may be, we as a society back away from people experiencing psychosis, and what I would like to see is us leaning in to assist those individuals living with psychosis. Unfortunately, my sister was one of many that experience anosognosia and anosognosia is a big word, but it's a brain based inability to understand that you were ill and that you require treatment. And my sister was in that category, so she did not recognise the fact that she was ill and that she was experiencing psychosis.

MG: I'm sorry for what you went through.

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Thank you. But I'm not alone. You know, and that's why it's been very difficult for me to speak and about it. But we can't hide behind. We need people who are willing to jump in and lean in and, you know, to Mary's point about donations. She is absolutely correct. It is difficult getting donations for schizophrenia because there are some corporations that do not want to align themselves with a serious mental illness. And we need to change that.

MG: And Sabrina, is that what you talk about when when you when you mentioned the idea of taking the word up off the floor that the word has been thrown around, that this is whether it's treating it as Phaedra was saying, as though we treat other chronic illnesses like Parkinson's, but also just being able to say what it is, we're talking about 100 percent.

DR. SABINA ABIDI: I couldn't have said it better. That's exactly it. You just need to normalise this word and help individuals, young people, young adults dealing with the illness to recognise that the word doesn't define them. But what does define them is how they live with it, how they cope with it, how they overcome the obstacles and how they move forward. So again, speaking about this illness as we would speak about cancer or any other physical condition because it is the same.

MG: Are there treatments on the horizon that you find particularly hopeful?

DR. SABINA ABIDI: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, what we know about schizophrenia, again, it is a brain disease like any other physical condition. There are medications that are essential to help with the treatment of the symptoms. But while they might be the cornerstone they they are, they don't stand alone. So treatment for for the symptoms with which this illness presents includes education, capacity building, rehabilitation, social skills training, working with schools, working with universities. I could go on and on, but it's a it's a good shot of intervention that is required. We heard earlier that there are many people with this illness that actually continue to live with the hallucinations, for example, that the illness can with which the illness can present. It's interesting our understanding of this illness has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. I would say in the time that I've been in practise, certainly. And what we now know is that the symptoms of hallucinations for which this illness is most familiar, at least in the media and popular culture, are not necessarily the key. What we know is that if we help to also treat cognitive dysfunction, what we call decreased drive negative symptoms, the difficulty interacting with society because again, this is an illness that hits so young, we need to sort of focus on all of those things to help an individual enter recovery when they're able to do that. Things like the voices oftentimes are not the biggest issue because they they gain an ability to cope with them. So we're learning more and more. Every day, treatments, including medications, have increased and become better and better, which is amazing.

MG: Ilyas Khamis, We started with you and I want to end with you. You talked about. The sense of confusion that you were living with before the diagnosis and some of those fears that you had even in the moment of diagnosis, if you could go back to your younger self knowing where you are now. Great job then fiancee and all the the world's in front of you. What would you say to younger you?

ILYAS KHAMIS: So there's a lot I'd say, and I only hope younger me would actually listen. But one of the biggest lessons I've learnt is that trusting the people around me is a huge strength and being able to accept the help that's given and trust that there is science behind all this. As I like to say, like, I'm on a three month injection now for my anti-psychotic, and every time I get it, it's like there's there's science here, like there's a lot of innovation and like research and everything that went into this medication and to trust it. And I think early psychosis intervention is something that I was a part of as a as a client, and it took me a while to actually see how beneficial I can be because it's access to like an interdisciplinary team, there's more resources than like anyone else gets. And the wait times are next to nothing compared to like getting a psychiatrist in the community, trusting that all these supports are there for a reason. If you can commit yourself to the recovery that you want, so the life that you define is worth living and the path that you want to go, that there's hope and that there is light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. And it's not taking away from me to get help and to be on medications. It's actually supporting me to become the person I want to be to tell myself that there may be changes that you have to make, but the changes don't mean you're not you anymore.

MG: I'm really glad to have the chance to meet you. Thanks for coming in.

ILYAS KHAMIS: Thanks for having me.

MG: And Faydra, thank you very much.

FAYDRA ALDRIDGE: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

MG: And Dr. Abidi, thanks for the work that you're doing.

DR. SABINA ABIDI: Thank you. It's been a privilege.

MG: Ilyas Khamis was with me in Toronto. Phaedra Aldridge is the head of the BC Schizophrenia Society. She was in Vancouver. And Dr. Sabina OBD is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Halifax. That's The Current for this. Tuesday comes up next on CBC Radio one. Before we go, you just heard Elias talking about the people who are helping to reduce the stigma around schizophrenia by speaking openly about their diagnosis. And he, of course, is one of them. You may or may not know that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has been one of those people as well. Brian Wilson diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and has talked repeatedly about experiencing auditory hallucinations hallucinations. We'll leave you this morning with some of his best work with the Beach Boys. Don't worry, baby, I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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