Lisa Boivin paints stories about medical ethics beyond words

By Louise Kinross

Lisa Boivin is a member of the Deninu K'ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. She paints image-based stories that explore the gap between medical and land-based, Dene ethics. She is a bioethics specialist and graduate student at the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at U of T's Faculty of Medicine.

“Academics often want you to give an absolute, sweeping bioethical answer that fits into all circumstances, but there are certain land-based ethics that can’t be held in academic language,” she says. “So I translate them through painting. I situate my Dene experience and perspective in the paintings, and then I extract the story.”

Lisa is presenting the Town Hall session at the 12th Annual Bloorview Research Institute Symposium on Nov. 21. Her image above is called Holding Thunderbird.

BLOOM: Why did you study bioethics as an undergrad?

Lisa Boivin: I fell in love with the element of story—that ethics are held in the story of clinical narratives. As a bioethics student, we have all of this academic rhetoric around ethics. But I learned that the ethics are anchored in the story of the patient.

BLOOM: You mean that the most important ethics are found in a patient perspective?

Lisa Boivin: Yes. Clinical and personal hardship helped me to see ethics differently—things like informed consent. I had to read a lot of patient narratives to have a fundamental understanding of the sacred ceremony of informed consent.

BLOOM: What is the sacred ceremony of informed consent?

Lisa Boivin: It’s both parties coming together with complete understanding of one another’s situation, and a balance in decision-making. That’s something that’s hard to accomplish, for basic reasons. The patient isn’t a clinician, and doesn’t have the expertise that a doctor has in terms of the biology of what’s happening. But there’s also such a tremendous power imbalance between the two parties.

BLOOM: Can you describe your art?

Lisa Boivin: I came to know image-based storytelling through an inability to articulate academic thought from an Indigenous perspective. I’m not a classically-trained artist. I’ve only painted for three years. I’m a ‘60's scoop survivor from two generations of residential school survivors.

One of my professors asked me to write a paper on colonialism. I couldn’t do it. So I painted it. The paintings are born out of necessity, and are a way to communicate Indigenous perspectives to non-Indigenous colleagues. The one featured on the BRI symposium program is called Holding Thunderbird (see image above).

BLOOM: Can you describe what it means?

Lisa Boivin: From my teachings, Thunderbird is a very powerful being, the carrier of knowledge and the conduit between the creator and the people. Thunderbird is also the carrier of justice. With that responsibility comes great frustration.

I don't feel knowledgeable, I simply carry a knowledge that is unfolding in images I'm creating. I find myself frustrated often. Holding Thunderbird relates to me as a person who struggles in the academy.

BLOOM: In the academic world?

Lisa Boivin: Yes. The Thunderbird is me, and the woman holding Thunderbird is a professor. In the academy, I’m constantly expected to fit my Dene knowledge into a colonial format. That’s extremely oppressive and harmful to me.

BLOOM: Can you give an example?

Lisa Boivin: There are times when bioscience research clashes with Indigenous research methodologies.

BLOOM: And bioscience is always seen as supreme?

Lisa Boivin: Yes.

This painting was created to thank a professor who was helpful to me at a residency. The woman holding Thunderbird is the professor and all the flowers represent her knowledge. She’s keeping Thunderbird from flying away, and comforting Thunderbird.

She’s the first person that’s never asked me to change or do anything that would be harmful to the Indigenous knowledge in the images. That residency provided me with a healing, and a security I had never known.

For me, the painting represents the notion that we all have our own knowledge and our own knowledge systems. And for us to grow, we need support from people who have power in our lives. It can be a professor, a clinician, or a leader in our community. But the idea is someone holding space for us, as we are.

For this professor, I didn’t have to change or fit my knowledge into a colonial format. All I was expected to do was share my arts-based knowledge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to return to my academic program. And this was the reassurance I needed that I am knowledgeable, and that my knowledge has value.

BLOOM: This reminds me of how difficult it can be to talk about disability in a culture that doesn’t value it. It’s almost like I don’t have the words, sometimes, or I feel like I’m put on the defensive, in trying to convince people that there is value in a different way of living.

Lisa Boivin: This is the kind of damage that the medical model does to people with differences. What I’ve learned from my family is that an Indigenous perspective of wellness is much larger than the narrow perspective of the medical model. The medical model measures wellness as the absence of disease. From my Dene perspective, the measure of wellness is the ability to interact with the land.

My father had polio as an infant, and during his childhood he was seen as someone who was disabled. But when my father came home from residential school, he got on a dog sled. He became a champion dog racer and was no longer disabled. He didn’t consider himself disabled in any way. He just navigated the world differently.

I’m someone who has been diagnosed with a learning difference or cognitive disability. I have a different way of translating knowledge. I’m an image-based storyteller. There’s a reason I can’t interact with certain academic theories. The images came to life and were born out of necessity. If I could translate knowledge in an academic way, I would never have learned how to paint.

BLOOM: You said you only began painting three years ago?

Lisa Boivin: I had some artistic abilities as a child, but I stopped because I was bullied so much. I shrunk, and the art was gone.

I feel the beauty that is translated through my images comes from another place. It’s the ancestors coming through me. When I’m doing land-based activities, like anchoring bioethical theory or conceptions of wellness or rehabilitation in my painting, I’m no longer disabled. My mind is clear.

BLOOM: You spoke about your dad’s physical disability, and how through dog sledding, he was able. How do Indigenous people view intellectual disability or other types of disability?

Lisa Boivin: There are different Indigenous perspectives on disability and wellness. You’d have to take the time to research those. There is Navaho literature on autism and other intellectual disabilities.

Of course, any Indigenous person would want someone else to embrace a notion of wellness that will benefit them and their family.

Nothing would make me happier than if someone threw away the medical model that’s measuring who they are as a person.

Any Indigenous person would want people to embrace who they are, or to create their own idea of wellness. We have to snatch as much happiness as we can. My dad walked with a limp and had varying degrees of mobility, but that never affected his understanding of his wellness.

My wellness comes from an ability to interact with the land—to understand where I am in the world, and how I fit in and what my duties are. My duty is to be an image-based storyteller.

In the Navaho literature, they don’t present an idea of correcting behaviour. You are who you are, and you contribute where you can.

You move differently, you speak differently. The eight-year-old boy in me says: ‘You have a difference, you do different stuff.’

BLOOM: I love that. There’s no judgment in it.

Lisa Boivin: It really is that simple. Having a learning disability, my conception of disability in the past was that I was academically inferior. I had an inability to perform as well as other students.

An understanding of ‘doing different stuff’ has really helped me. In my graduate studies, I have come to know that my GPA is not an accurate measure of my knowledge. I don’t have great grades and my ideas are resisted constantly by my peers and many of my professors. But people seek me out to speak at their conferences and events.

In November, I'm keynoting The Ontario Psychiatric Outreach Program's conference and Woodsworth College's annual accessibility conference. I also did a centre talk and taught two arts-based workshops at St. Michael’s Hospital in the summer. That professional affirmation keeps me from giving in to the notion that I’m academically inferior to members of my cohort.

BLOOM: We did a narrative group for our inpatient nurses, and in addition to writing about their emotional experiences caring for children and families, they drew comics to help them see from different perspectives.

Lisa Boivin: In my arts-based workshop, I ask clinicians to create a visual narrative of themselves. Drawing yourself really expands the idea of practice. I ask them to draw who they are as an individual, how that influences their practice, what they want to contribute to their working community, and what they want to give to their patients. That’s a pretty big task to do in an hour! But it teaches people to be more reflective.

There’s something about drawing a piece of yourself where you have to capture a piece of your humanity. Within that humanity is vulnerability, but also an understanding of your responsibility as a clinician.

For me, I have my own image, and sometimes I have to go back to that image to remind myself to be better at what I do.

Being the frustrated Thunderbird that I am, there's a hawk feather in my self-portrait to remind me to speak gently and clearly. I also have a clipboard which represents consent. I’m always trying to build a place where clinicians can understand what consent it.

BLOOM: What do you hope to do in the future?

Lisa Boivin: I want to share information about Canada’s colonial history and how that creates clinical barriers between a clinician or therapist and a patient.

There are centuries of failed relationships between what would become Canadian institutions and Indigenous people. For hundreds of years, there’s broken promises, institutional racism and mistrust. And this still takes place in medicine today. I am horrified when I read stories in the media about Indigenous patients who die in ERs because they're seen as drunk or drug-seeking. When an Indigenous patient sees that in a media story, it influences how they interact with a doctor.

Medicine has also been used as an instrument to remove Indigenous children from their homes, because it's perceived that Indigenous parents can't look after their children. This was certainly the case for my father, who had over a dozen surgeries to correct his mobility impairment.

I’d like to promote an understanding of a wider notion of wellness. As we spoke of earlier, the medical model is very simplistic. It’s the presence or absence of disease. There are wider models of wellness.

For many Indigenous people, the ability to interact with the land is a measure of wellness. An Indigenous worldview includes the land, animals, community and nature. An ability to contribute to community is central to wellness, and that can be any contribution.

I’m a health-care educator and I will continue using arts-based practice to educate about colonialism and how that exists in medicine.

BLOOM: I think your ideas could be helpful to any patient, including non-Indigenous patients.

Lisa Boivin: Imposing a medical model—one standard or one measurement—on any group of people is really harmful.

For my first two years as an undergraduate student, I struggled. It wasn’t until I was able to understand certain concepts and put them into images that I was able to thrive.

Learn more about Lisa’s experience and insights in her Ted Talk: Painting the Path of Indigenous Resilience. In this video, she describes the image Sharing Bioethics below as the overlap between a traditional Dene circle of medicine and an academic circle of medicine. "We all hold circles of medicine," she says. The photo below is by Erin Howe at the University of Toronto.

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For this scientist, a healthy weight isn't a number

By Louise Kinross

Amy McPherson is a scientist at Holland Bloorview who is co-lead of our Centre for Leadership in Participation and Inclusion. Amy’s research looks at health promotion and obesity in children with disabilities. Eight years ago she packed up her life in Britain and moved to Toronto to become a scientist in our Bloorview Research Institute. “I’d been teaching psychology and sociology to medical and nursing students, and I wanted a new adventure that would focus on my research,” she says.

BLOOM: What led you into the field of children’s rehab?

Amy McPherson: In the U.K. I did my PhD in self-management in childhood asthma. My research has always looked at empowering kids to look after their health by giving them the knowledge and skills—but also the feeling of control over their health—so that they can manage a chronic condition.

When I saw a job opportunity in Participation and Inclusion here it encapsulated my philosophy of working with children with long-term conditions to help them participate and be as active as they want and can be. I did an interview on Skype and I came here for a meet-and-greet. Then I moved 3,000 miles.

BLOOM: Was that a hard decision?

Amy McPherson: It was a no-brainer. I was really drawn to the fact that no one here talked in terms of deficits in kids with disabilities. I met people who were committed to giving kids with disabilities a future that was as meaningful as any other kid’s future.

BLOOM: Can you describe your research?

Amy McPherson: When I first came I was interested in our Busy Bodies program, which promoted healthy eating, physical activity and feeling good. My office was embedded with clinicians in Therapeutic Recreation and Life Skills. That was a phenomenal opportunity to understand what went on in the hospital from a clinical perspective. I worked with therapeutic recreation specialists to understand what the kids in the program thought about health: ‘So you have a disability, what does that make health look like to you?’

It was a great introduction to rethinking my notions of what had been quite a medical approach to self-management, and looking at why participation matters. That was a springboard into looking at different aspects of health, wellness and happiness and working with kids with an existing condition to see what they want their health to look like.

BLOOM: Where does weight fit into that?

Amy McPherson: There’s a two to three times higher prevalence of obesity in kids with disabilities. That puts them at risk of the same secondary conditions that any child with obesity faces. But in addition, it can be harder for a child with a disability who is heavier to move around, do self-care and be independent. Different diagnoses also come with specific challenges that make it hard to manage weight.

BLOOM: How can we help clinicians and families address weight issues?

Amy McPherson: I’m very interested in how we talk about weight and weight management. Often kids get weighed and measured when they come in for regular checkups, yet we hear from clinicians that they have concerns about talking about the topic. This is true with kids in general and their families, as well as kids with disabilities. Doctors don’t feel confident and are worried they’ll ruin a relationship. It’s a hugely stigmatized issue and by doctors saying ‘I don’t want to offend anyone,’ they’re acknowledging the implicit stigma in society that higher weights are bad. We want to find ways to address weight and wellness that are not stigmatizing and judgmental, but supportive and positive.

BLOOM: How do you do that?

Amy McPherson: We’re doing something super cool. Working with Christine Provvidenza, we got Centre for Leadership funding to develop a knowledge translation casebook that is a practical handbook for health professionals about how you talk about weight. It will have things like sentence starters and scripts and simulations of positive and less-positive experiences. It will also have case studies and learning guides and will talk about what the evidence says.

One of the fun parts is that we’re working with families, youth, clinicians, researchers and students to co-develop the content for this handbook. It will be online and interactive. It’s for all children and parents, but will also have chapters addressing common challenges related to different disabilities.

BLOOM: What’s an example of neutral language?

Amy McPherson: The doctor could say: ‘Would it be okay if we talked about how you can feel healthy and energized?’ Or ‘Would you be interested in knowing more ways to stay healthy? How can I help?’

We want to encourage clinicians to have a conversation about wellness that suits the child. You may live in larger body, it doesn’t bother you and you have no medical complications. So we talk about what makes you feel well. Or, you might have a higher weight and a lot of medical complications and are distressed about it. So it may be appropriate to focus more on the weight and work together to reduce those health risks. But we need to always address it in a positive way. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and not everyone who weights over ‘x’ has to be subjected to a medical intervention. It’s not realistic and the evidence doesn’t support that.

Research shows that the vast majority of people who lose weight regain it. Physiologically our bodies will always try to put that weight back on, and it’s got nothing to do with will power. So what is sustainable for this person, and what does health and wellness mean to them? That’s hard for people to get their minds around, because we’re so used to saying ‘let’s fix this, let’s get the number down.’ But we’re setting up people to fail when we do that. There are physical ramifications to putting on and losing weight and it can also be incredibly damaging psychologically.

BLOOM: I’m assuming that one of the reasons doctors don’t like to talk about weight with children is that no one really knows what to recommend?

Amy McPherson: There’s very little evidence about how talking about the topic in different ways affects outcomes. In the future, we’d like to evaluate our knowledge translation casebook in different health settings to start to understand this area more.

BLOOM: What do you love about your work?

Amy McPherson: I love designing ways to figure out what’s really important to individuals and how we can support that person to work towards that. I’m a huge fan of strengths-based approaches. What are you really good at? What are your resources and strengths? How can we support you to thrive, whatever that means to you? I’ve worked on topics like incontinence, sexuality, weight management and wellness. We just received CIHR funding for a study on solution-focused coaching for kids on health promotion goals that they set for themselves. That’s for kids with spina bifida and cerebral palsy.

BLOOM: What’s the greatest challenge of your work?

Amy McPherson: The hardest thing is to break away from the idea that health is a number and it’s just a case of eating less and moving more.

BLOOM: What emotions come with this work?

Amy McPherson: A whole mix of emotions. It’s exciting to be part of a movement that’s enhancing the field. I’m very comfortable with an approach on wellness that is individualized and means something different to each person. It compliments with my own personal philosophy that rather than ‘How can we get you to live in a smaller body?’ the question should be ‘What do you find motivating?’ A person’s best weight has been described as whatever weight a person achieves while living the healthiest lifestyle they enjoy, which I think is a lot more feasible and positive for most people.

The work is also inherently frustrating because it’s complex, and you’re trying to figure out the best way to move forward without doing damage to anybody.

The stigma around kids with disabilities and people who live in bigger bodies makes me feel very sad. And when you have the two together, it’s an intersection of multiple stigma.

BLOOM: I would like us to do more research looking at how we can help children feel comfortable in their own skin. I’ve heard of kids with amputations who wore hot, heavy prostheses for years, even though they didn’t help functionally. And then when they feel more comfortable with their bodies, they abandon them. One woman with no arms in a BBC interview described it as being her ‘independence day.’

Amy McPherson: There are huge parallels between the stigma associated with size, and the stigma associated with other body differences. Difference is not emphasized enough. For example, very often the health benefits of things like being active and eating well are overshadowed by weight loss and unrealistic body ideals. Traditionally in rehabilitation, we haven’t been so good at looking at the big stuff that matters to youth with disabilities—beyond the physical, the function, the fix. We hear that our kids in school often don’t get health and sexuality education. I’ve heard of students with disabilities being told to leave the classroom during those sessions because they don’t need it. We can do so much better.

BLOOM: If you could go back and give yourself advice when you were just starting out in this work, what would it be?

Any McPherson: You’ve got to be really tenacious. It’s a bit of a roller coaster, but you need to stick with it and stick with high standards at all times. And collaborate. That’s where the fun is—in working with other scientists, clinicians and families to come up with, if not solutions, then approaches to the things that are really important to children and families.

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Why child disability research belongs in mainstream journals

By Louise Kinross

Children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to have obesity than their peers.

Yet when Holland Bloorview scientist Amy McPherson looked at a systematic review of studies about obesity prevention in kids, most excluded those with disabilities.

“If you’re testing a new way to get kids active, you may shy away from recruiting kids who physically struggle because that will affect the data,” Amy says. “It may be less likely to show your intervention can work. But if we exclude children with disabilities from these studies, how will we develop interventions for them?”

One way to raise awareness of pediatric rehab research, which is a young field, is to send papers to general medical and clinical journals, rather than just disability journals, Amy says. But it’s not easy to get a paper accepted.

Comments from expert reviewers, who assess the rigour of a paper, often reflect a lack of understanding about the unique challenges and opportunities of disability research.

“For example, a reviewer recently suggested a colleague exclude children who are not verbal from her study, instead of relying on parent reports,” Amy says. “But these are our patients. If we’re developing interventions, we can’t cherry pick patients. We can’t inform change if we don’t take diversity into account.”

A common reviewer criticism is that a study doesn’t use outcome measures that have been tested on children with disabilities. “But most measures are developed for typical kids,” Amy says. “When we try to develop ones for our kids, we’re told the numbers are too low. We’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Amy notes that reviewer comments sometimes reflect the expert’s own biases. For example, she submitted a paper on a study to evaluate the effectiveness of coaching to improve diet and physical activity in boys and men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

One reviewer said that to ask participants to identify a “preferred future,” which was one part of the intervention, was callous, because the condition is degenerative.

“We were enrolling kids aged 10 to 19, and people with Duchenne can live till their '30s these days. Health and wellness coaching is important for everyone, especially those with a disability. We want to empower clients to identify personally meaningful goals, hopes and aspirations for the future. Whatever it looks like, young people with disabilities have a life. They deserve to get the best possible care, and we do that through research.”

One way to gain acceptance into mainstream journals is to partner with a wide variety of clinicians and researchers across disciplines, Amy says.

Getting her national, call-to-action paper on weight in children with disabilities published in Childhood Obesity—a prominent, mainstream obesity journal—is an example.

“This paper was the result of efforts from people across many disciplines, life experiences and backgrounds,” Amy says. “Collaborations like this show the broader implications that disability research can have. For example, learning how to best support kids with a wide range of abilities to lead healthy lifestyles can be useful for those working with typically developing kids who benefit from a more individualized approach. It can also support doctors who may only see one or two kids with disabilities a year and wouldn’t routinely look at the rehabilitation literature."

Amy says we need to continue advocating within the broader science community to find common ground in research on children with and without disabilities.

“Sometimes when we submit a paper to a journal or present at a conference, we get responses that question the value of doing research in kids with disabilities. Our sample sizes are small. Our kids are a different population, but there are ways to include them, or to report the data differently. As researchers, we have a shared accountability to make a difference in the lives of children with and without disabilities.”

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Why is beauty essential for disabled children, but not adults?

By Louise Kinross

In 2006, Holland Bloorview broke the institutional mould when it opened the doors of an extraordinary building that would operate as a children’s hospital, but not look or feel like one.

Banks of windows and terraces flooded the building with natural light and connected kids with the surrounding ravine and neighbourhood, while the interior was designed with quality, home-like materials such as wood, glass, ceramic tile and limestone. Instead of in-your-face primary colours, there were warm accent colours of deep plum, granny-smith apple, ochre yellow and gentle blue.

Interspersed with this soothing environment were “islands of interest”—pieces of art, interactive exhibits, a huge saltwater aquarium of exotic fish and breathtaking views of the skyline and ravine.

I remember talking with lead designer Anne Carlyle, who explained that the way we design a building conveys a sense of respect—or lack of respect—for its inhabitants.

“In most hospitals, children experience such disconnection from the normal rhythms of life,” Anne said. “Because this site bridges the cityscape and the natural environment of a ravine—with extraordinary views of both—we had the opportunity to reinforce that connection. The whole hospital is about rehabilitation and enabling children and their families to live as well as possible and the design is symbolic of that. It’s full of natural light, life, places to visit and things to do.”

The design of the building was 10 years in the making. I remember early on thinking that the research linking built environments with people's physical, social and psychological health was a bit overblown.

Then I experienced what it was like to work in a beautiful building. It did feel different to have constant exposure to the outside ravine and sky and natural light and to the richness of the interior design. I must have sent half a dozen e-mails to architect Terry Montgomery to express my surprise at just how big a difference the building made.

And then I would always come back to what Anne had said: “These materials communicate a kind of respect for human life.” They say something about the value of the inhabitants.

And so it was from this vantage point that during my holiday I toured a number of day programs for adults with developmental and physical disabilities.

Two of these were located in an industrial area, one of which I visited. The building was a warehouse that was divided into three units with concrete walls. Because of its industrial setting, it was cut off from any of the regular rhythms of a neighbourhood with shops and parks and houses. There wasn’t anywhere you could walk to, unless it was to another warehouse or business.

There wasn’t any natural light inside. There wasn’t anything of beauty, made intentionally for the people who attended the program.

There were hard-working staff making the best of a very difficult situation.

What message did this building communicate to the people who were transported away from residential communities and into that isolated industrial area everyday? What did it say about how these people are valued by the culture at large?

My understanding is that it’s very challenging to get a government-funded spot in one of these programs. The latest trend is for spaces to be offered for a fee to families. The fees seemed to range from $60 to $80 a day, with one program being $100 a day. At one program I visited, I was told that to the daily fee of $55, an additional fee of $200 would be added for an adult who required one-to-one support. Do the math on that annually, and you may be surprised to realize that for a similar amount of money you could easily send another child to university.

Universities are mini-communities, with everything from residences, parks and community centres to libraries and pubs.

Most are situated on lush, rolling campuses draped in vegetation. Buildings are a mix of traditional and modern. The former emulate Gothic stone cathedrals with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, marble floors and brass chandeliers. They convey a sense of history, wealth and exclusivity.

In short, they communicate a sense of respect and worth for the students who walk their halls.

Many young adults with a range of disabilities will walk or roll those halls as well, of course.

But for others who won't do post-secondary education or work, it's disturbing to see how quickly we rob them of their value. How quickly we remove them from the mainstream and warehouse them. And ask their families to pay good money for it.

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