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The Current Transcript for May 7, 2019

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: I'm the first one to arrive and I'm going up the stairs and she says go into the guestroom and get, get naked. Take off all your clothes and wait here. I'm like Oh my God.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's the start of Sarah Edmondson's initiation ceremony into NXIVM, a group that billed itself for years as a self-help organization, but which no less authority than the FBI is calling a cult. This week NXIVM's longtime leader, Keith Raniere, will go on trial. One question that is unlikely to be addressed in court is why anyone ends up joining a cult in the first place. We start today with more on life inside NXIVM and look at how cults lure people in from someone who's been in one. And then as the climate changes, something that much of this country stands on is turning to liquid, the permafrost. Now you might think, given that name, it's permanently frozen. That is not the case. When it suddenly melts, as it is right now, the effects can be devastating and dramatic.

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VOICE: This is the craziest thing. I've never seen anything like it. This hillside right here is about to go.

MG: Coming up in half an hour, the mayors of Iqaluit, Nunavut and Churchill, Manitoba will join me to talk about what a permafrost melt means for their communities. And after that the director Penny Lane has taken up well a spiritual subject let's say for her new documentary film, a darkly spiritual one.

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VOICE: The goal of the film was not to convert people to Satanism, but let's stop assuming that we know what Satanism is based on television specials from the 1980s.

MG: So no more devil horns and heavy metal music played backwards then. In an hour, I'll be joined by the director of Hail Satan? and a real life Satanist too. I'm Matt Galloway, in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is The Current.

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'A reaffirmation of what we know': Grim UN biodiversity report unsurprising to many scientists, First Nations

Guests: Stuart Pimm, Sally Otto, Eli Enns

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VOICE: We're losing species at historical rates. Potentially 500,000 to a million species are threatened with loss. We've lost much of our native forests, much of our native wetlands and effectively biodiversity needs to be considered as an equally important issue as climate change. It's not just an environmental issue. It is an economic issue, a development issue, a security issue, a social, moral and ethical issue. The time for action clearly is now.

MG: Up to a million species at risk of being lost. It's a thought that's hard to wrap your head around, but that's just one of the statistics in a new report on Biodiversity from the United Nations. You just heard Sir Robert Watson. He chairs the UN organization behind this alarming report, warning the world that nature is in vastly more danger from humans today than at any time in the history of our species. The group is calling for "transformative changes," at the local and global level. What exactly does that mean and how exactly do we get there? I'm joined by a panel of experts who have devoted their lives to figuring that out. Stuart Pimm is a Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, also chair of Saving Species, a non-governmental organization dedicated to preserving habitat and biodiversity hotspots. We reached him in Duke, North Carolina. Sally Otto is a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia. She sits on the Federal Species at Risk Advisory Committee and she is in Vancouver. And Nan Eli Enns is a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation on Vancouver Island and the chief problem solver for the Iisaak Olam Foundation, a biological and cultural diversity conservancy based in Victoria, British Columbia. We've reached him today in Montreal. Hello to you all.

ELI ENNS: Good morning.

STUART PIMM: Good morning.

SALLY OTTO: Good morning.

MG: Eli Enns, we'll start with you. Were you as unsettled as so many of us were by this report that warns about the planet's biodiversity and a bleak outlook?

EE: No our elders have been talking to us about extinction for many years now and my uncle Joe David sang a song of sacred urgency to me years ago and that sacred urgency has stayed in my heart since then. So this report is a reaffirmation of what we know.

MG: And in some ways us catching up with with what you're already thinking about. Stuart Pimm I want to ask you, if you take a look at the places around the world that face a threat to biodiversity, what stands out to you? What are those places on the map?

SP: Well first of all, I totally agree with your previous speaker. This is something that we've known for a long time. I think the importance of this report is it puts it in a global context. It's clear that there are a number of foci for losing species around the world. We know that large areas of Canada are at risk. We should also keep an eye on the world's tropical moist forests and what we're doing to them when we consume palm oil in our hair shampoo, we're contributing to the loss of forests in Indonesia and the orangutans and tigers and all the other wildlife that occur there.

MG: You were just in China and Myanmar, what did you see there?

SP: The difference between China and Myanmar is really striking. China has actually stopped its deforestation, realizing that deforestation caused enormous economic harm and loss of life. Myanmar has not learned that lesson. And as I looked across the border, the forests were just simply going up in smoke. There were hundreds of fires as people were burning the forests to grow crops on soils that on steep mountain slopes would simply wash away the next time it rained. A human catastrophe unfolding before my very eyes.

MG: Sally Otto, what have you seen here in Canada? What are some of the species that would be at greatest risk here?

SO: We are seeing hundreds of species facing a risk of extinction. Over 500 are listed at the federal level and this includes here on the west coast, many people have watched in horror as the killer whales continue to decline. The numbers in southern resident population and the signs of starvation are continuing. Other species at risk include the Eulachon in the Fraser River Valley. This is really important fish species, a candle fish to First Nations in this area. Over 98 percent declines. I could keep going, you don't want me to go through the whole 500 list, but it's from coast to coast, animals, plants, pretty much all habitats are affected.

MG: If this is happening in slow motion or not so slow motion and we know that this is going on, what do you think Sally the impact of a report like the one that came out yesterday is when it puts a fine point on it and it uses a number like a million species? What's the impact of that?

SO: I think the impact is huge because as Eli has said many of us have been living and watching these declines. The scientific literature has been very clear, but this report summarizes 15,000 articles and really comes up with a number and describes the declines across all tax at a global level. Even perhaps more importantly it contains 132 government nations as members and they approve this report. So from now on there is global recognition of the scale of the impacts on species that we have been knowing as scientists, but I think it means that public acknowledgement.

MG: Eli, as you mentioned, you and your community have been living this for a long time. Tell me just briefly about the end of a canoe trip that you took about 10 years ago after your father's death. What happened then?

EE: Yeah we went fishing early in the morning and on the way back from fishing, coming back we stopped by some small island rock out and my uncle Joe asked me to take the bucket and go get some seabird eggs. And growing up in the city, this isn't something that I had practiced and so I took the opportunity. I was quite glad to, but what I found when I got onto this island was quite unexpected. It was one of the most beautiful and intimate experiences I've ever had and it really transformed my mourning stage for my late father. I was truly in the home of these seabirds and they were alarmed at my presence and I didn't know what I was looking for at first. And what I found was these beautiful little nests with broken eggs. I was kind of glad to see that the eggs had already hatched or something else had gotten to them first. So I went back to the boat, feeling quite disturbed. The birds were flying around my head and squawking at me. And when I got back to the boat what I discovered my uncle doing changed my feeling completely. And he was practicing something that our ancestors had known for thousands of years. A principle of our economy, our Indigenous economy that had created abundance forever as long as we can remember and this is the law of reciprocity. Joe was cleaning the fish that we had caught that morning and he was throwing the guts of the fish up onto the lower banks of the rocks and the seabirds were coming down to get the energy. And so this is law of reciprocity governed our economy and Levi always says whenever you take something from the environment, you have to give something back. We were there to take eggs and we could leave something some energy for those seabirds. And so Joe told me to climb up to the higher rocks and I did and at that point I did find some seabird eggs and I didn't take all of them though. The ones I took only a few of the ones that I found and left the rest and that's an important teaching also from our economy, which is you only take what you need.

MG: Stuart, if you listen to that story, you mentioned palm oil and the presence of palm oil and so many of the things that we consume on a daily basis. How does that jar up against that idea of taking just what you need with what we're doing as a species when it comes to the consumption of something like palm oil?

SP: I think that story resonates very powerfully indeed. What's at stake here is the kind of planet that we leave to our children and our grandchildren. It's about intergenerational equity. We want to ensure that our kids have the same wonderful planet as we do and the reality is that we're not doing that by actions both locally and globally as when we facilitate the destruction of forests in faraway places of the world like Southeast Asia. We're depriving our children and grandchildren generations to come of the extraordinary animals and plants that live there and often we don't know that we're doing that. So while I think they have to be you know they have to be local solutions, we need to you know to bring back species in Canada with the United States and elsewhere, there are some global issues here and I think this report and its comprehensiveness tells us that this is something that we of all nations need to meet to tackle.

MG: Sally if you take a look at that issue of the way that Stuart framed it, intergenerational equity, for a lot of people they might think of this as a long game. That this is going to be generations down the road. What's Canada going to look like say in the short term in five to ten years, if we aren't dealing with the pace of these extinctions?

SO: Well we're watching currently as populations are declining and blipping out. Here in British Columbia we lost to caribou herds over the last year, the Purcell and Selkirk. It's like having your light bulbs blinking out in your house. All the lights aren't gone yet. We still have a few, but we're not replacing them and we're watching as one light goes after the next. And so even over our lifetimes where we've been watching this and witnessing it and it's not going to be very long before our world is much bleaker than the one into which we were born.

MG: Is the system that we have in place in this country, the Species at Risk Act, Is that working Sally, to try and if not stop this then slow it down?

SO: No we really need a transformational change here in Canada as well as globally. The reason it's not been working is that the federal government can only, the law that the federal government has only acts on federal lands and waters and then that's about 4 percent of the provincial territory. So we need to get better coordination. Here in British Columbia there is no law that protects species at risk. So we continue to see declines and the measures taken to stop those declines are simply too little and too late.

MG: Are you worried about what's happening here in Ontario where the current Ontario government is making changes to Wildlife Protection Act?

SO: Yes indeed. It's going in the wrong direction. We need to be strengthening and really building a resolve and a vision that is in Eli's words reciprocal. That we don't continue to expand and extract wherever we want. In this report, they note that over 75 percent of terrestrial land has already been impacted by humans. And that has been our tendency over the last century. Expand, expand, expand. Well the declines that we're seeing in species are really nature's way of telling us this has to stop. We have to limit our expansion and really reduce our footprint on this planet.

MG: Eli the UN report found that habitats tend to do better when Indigenous groups manage the land. Is there an example of that here in Canada that you think is working?

EE: Yes.www.meares35.ca.

MG: What's that?

EE: We're celebrating the 35 year anniversary of the Meares Island Tribal Park. This is an example of an Indigenous protected and conserved area. And I want to draw a really important distinction there. This isn't about protecting nature per se. It's about creating better relationships with our ecosystems. And really repatriating the world economy is related to the word ecosystems and ecology. This is about the wise and prudent management of the house. In creating an inspirational and elegant alternative to the status quo.

MG: And it's worked?

EE: It's been working. Yeah, I mean it's not perfect, but certainly we've seen a lot of progress in 35 years.

MG: Stuart where else is this working? I mean in the work that you do at Saving Species, how are you trying to preserve that land and preserve what's on that land?

SP: One of the things that's obvious, if you go to something like Google Earth and look at satellite imagery of the Amazon is you can see where the Indigenous reserves are in the Amazon because they still have forest. So the idea that by empowering Indigenous groups around the world to protect their heritage, also protects the forest, also protects the biodiversity is a story that applies internationally.

MG: And this is practically that you're buying land, right? I mean that's what you're doing?

SP: Well in the case of Indigenous groups, frankly, it's letting the people manage the land, which many of us believe is theirs to start off with. But what my group does at Saving Species is very simple. We help local groups. We don't buy land ourselves, but we aid local groups in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Indonesia to buy up degraded land and reforest it to we talk about CPR: Connect, Protect, Restore ecosystems and that's a very cost effective way of undoing the damage that we've caused by our actions to date.

MG: How do you do that in the face of the enormous economic pressure to develop that land to extract those resources? Because you can imagine that those would be two kind of immovable forces plowing into each other.

SP: You know it is true that there is land that is so expensive that we're not going to be able to buy it. That clear that rich agricultural land, we're not going to stop agriculture there. But the tragedy, the awful tragedy about so much of the world is that we've destroyed our forests and replaced them with land that really isn't very good. Land that's at best really poor grazing land. So buying out that opportunity cost is actually not that expensive. I think it's important that we stop doing foolish things and we can do that and we could do that cheaply.

MG: In the last couple of minutes that we have, that issue of intergenerational equity something that's really powerful. You want to leave a better place for your children and grandchildren. This is a bleak report. There's bad news that's in it. What is it that gives you hope? I'll start with you Stuart.

SP: Well there's good news in this report too. We do know what's involved. We know that we have to manage our fisheries better. We have to manage the oceans better. And Canada has more examples of that than just about anywhere else. We understand that keeping land in its original condition is good for everybody. It's good for people, it's good for the economy. So I wouldn't want people to go away thinking that this report is all doom and gloom. It does point to some very promising ways forward.

MG: Sally to you. Where do you find optimism in the face of a report like this?

SO: Here in Canada I find optimism in just the large number of people that care about nature and really want to reverse these trends. Polls show upwards of 97-98 percent of Canadians want to protect nature and want to protect species at risk. The government invested $1.3 billion last year and that's really transforming what we can do. It's allowing us to act more on the ground and work with Indigenous partners to have more and more protected and conserve areas across the country. So here in Canada, buying up landing and making those connections between key areas where species can live that we really have a lot of opportunities there now and I think that Canada is facing these issues, but I have hope that with the public support, we can act.

MG: Eli, last couple of seconds to you. Are you optimistic?

EE: Yes I am.

MG: And why?

EE: Well I'm here in Montreal at the first North American Conference on biocultural diversity, which is co-hosted by the UN secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity and UNESCO. And it's great to see people coming together from scientific backgrounds, Indigenous peoples government, understanding the connection between cultural linguistic diversity and biological diversity. And there's a young person that's at the conference, Kia Blaney. She gives me hope. She hasn't given up yet. I certainly have not given up. And if we are, if we know who we are, if we believe in ourselves and we're bold for future generations, I think we can turn this around.

MG: We'll take that hope with us. Thank you all of you for talking to us this morning.

SP: Thank you.

SO: Thank you.

EE: Thank you.

MG: Stuart Pimm, Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, chair of the NGO, Saving Species. Sally Otto, Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. She sits on the Federal Species at Risk Advisory Committee. And Nan Eli Enns, member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation on Vancouver Island and the chief problem solver for Iisaak Olam, a biological and cultural conservancy. The CBC News is next and then Heather B. Armstrong on depression and the experimental treatment that she took that nearly killed her, but gave her her life back. That's coming up on The Current.

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This woman went to the brink of death — and back — to treat her depression

Guests: Heather B. Armstrong, Daniel Blumberger

MG: Hello. I'm Matt Galloway, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, more growing pains for inclusive education. The idea of bringing all students together in the same classroom, no matter how they learn, is popular across this country. Has been for a long time in New Brunswick, however word that that province will start paying closer attention to the number of students sent home from class has sparked a new round of conversations about the challenges of truly being inclusive. That's coming up in half an hour. But first, coming back from the brink.

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VOICE: If I get out, I have to be a person again, have to put on clothes, put lotion on my legs, eat a bowl of cereal at least. Take care of this terrible body that refuses to take care of me back. I'm so tired of talking about my depression as someone else, a ghost that haunts me and I am afraid of the seance, afraid of what it might want for me. My depression doesn't ask for much, but when it does, it's something I cannot give and that's the joke. It's just me asking for something I cannot give. I asked to come back to my body and it's only me saying no. When people ask me how I am they might as well be asking where I've gone. I'm driving down a dirt road. No headlights when it curves. I will not know, just drive on into the field. My own voice playing on the radio telling me there is no place for me here.

MG: That's Reagan Myers reading her poem, "Depression is Funny Like That." The so-called black dog of depression is all too familiar for many people, including my next guest. Heather B. Armstrong is a writer, probably best known for her mommy blog Dooce. Lately she's been writing about living with depression and signing up for an experimental new form of treatment to help tackle it. It's a treatment that took her right to the edge of brain death and back. Her new book is called The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live. We've reached Heather B. Armstrong in Austin, Texas. Heather, hi.

HEATHER ARMSTRONG: Hi. How are you?

MG: I'm great. Thanks. What was it like listening to that poem? What were you thinking?

HA: I'm trying not to cry. Actually that sunk very deep into my heart and pulled my soul right out. Yeah that was incredible.

MG: What was it that affected you so strongly about it?

HA: Part of it was the sound of her voice. You can hear in her voice the pain of it all. I think that for me the visceral sound of the pain and going down a road leading nowhere really struck with me.

MG: How familiar did it seem to you? I mean in the context of how depression played out in your daily life.

HA: I feel like depression is a demon in our heads and it lies to us and it is like it transforms our brains and makes our brains believe things that are not true about ourselves. We understand you know the truth about the world, but about ourselves, we believe these lies that our brain is telling us. That we don't belong here, that we're taking up space, that we're making your life miserable and we're going down a road that leads nowhere and where we don't belong.

MG: You write in the book that it, depression, robs us of the ability to think of anything, but the worst possible outcomes Yeah.

HA: Yeah. We believe that when we get into these depressive episodes, we think well there's no point in getting dressed, there's no point in showering because today is just going to end badly and I'm going to fail at everything that I do. I'm going to fail at being a mother. I'm going to fail at helping my children do their basic activities. And it makes us believe that we are that disabled.

MG: So in a life as a mom with a couple of young daughters, what was that like for you?

HA: I talk about being the valedictorian and I make fun of it because I was the valedictorian in high school. I had I attended college on a full scholarship and I always wanted to be the best at what I was doing. It was a part of sort of my identity and making my mom happy. And when I was raising my two girls alone, I mean I was a single mom working a full time job and I felt completely inadequate and terrible about myself that I wasn't being the mom that I was supposed to be. And because I knew that my kids could feel how sad I was and that destroyed me, but there wasn't anything I could do about the sadness and I wasn't the valedictorian of like meeting their emotional needs and it was devastating.

MG: And is that what you mean by the idea of the valedictorian of being dead?

HA: Yes. So that actually comes from I was the third of three patients in a clinical trial to go under anesthesia Propofol. Propofol has never been used this way before and they would take our brain down to a point where it would exhibit what's called burst suppression where it exhibits no activity and then a burst and then no activity in the reverse for about 15 minutes or so. And I was the third patient and they hadn't yet really perfected the trial. So when they gave me that Propofol I went down so hard and so fast that it felt like it took three people to get the breathing tube into him into my body fast enough because I stopped breathing. And the doctor was just like shocked. And my mother watched the whole thing and she was just like don't you know who you're dealing with? If you're going to make her dead, she's gonna be the best at being dead.

MG: Before you had, I want to talk about this treatment. Before you had the treatment, what was your state of mind in terms of you trying to cope with the depression that you had? What sort of treatment were you undergoing and why was that not satisfactory?

HA: I avoided all help. I mean I had talk therapy every week but that only goes so far in terms of helping a brain that is as addled as mine was.

MG: What do you think kept you alive at that point? I mean you write in the book about how you wanted to die. You didn't obviously. What was it that kept you alive?

HA: I can say for certain that my two kids and I chose to have two children. That was a choice that I made and I was not going to renege on that choice. And I was there for them, my two two beautiful beautiful girls. They are absolutely the reason that I am still alive. I stay alive because I am their mother. I'm their mother and there was no way that I was going to leave them. And as bad as I felt about being sad, I felt stronger about you know I'm going to make sure that they have what they need as children because I'm their mother.

MG: How was this experimental treatment presented to you? How did you find out that this was an option for you?

HA: I had a really really bad episode one evening while my kids were away with their father in New York and I called my mother in a very very terrible state and she made me stay on the phone and she drove the 40 minutes to my house. When she got there she said you're calling your psychiatrist tomorrow and I had avoided any help and I have avoided seeing my psychiatrist because I was afraid of losing custody of my kids. That was the one thing that really kept me from getting any help and I knew that if I sat in front of him that he was going to see. And so she made me call him the next morning and a couple of weeks later I was sitting across from him and I didn't say a word and he just looked at me and he shook his head in utter I wouldn't say disgust. But he was so mad at me so mad because the longer he let a depressive episode go on the harder it is to climb out. And he said I'm really really angry that you haven't come in sooner but. And then he got really giddy because here was this perfect candidate this perfect absolutely perfect candidate to prove that this study would work. He's like I've got an idea and I want you to consider it. And he called his colleague right then and he said Do you have a room in the study. And he told me what it was about. And I mean there was a tiny part of me that was worried but he's like There's no side effects. There's no memory loss. There's no migraines. Like this is you're going to go to sleep, you're going to wake up. He's like you could die, but you're not going to die.

MG: So describe what the treatment was. What did he present to you?

HA: So he's like what they're trying to do is recreate the effects of electro convulsive therapy. And they believe, there are some scientists who believe that when in ECT, when the brain is shocked into a seizure, the seizure actually flatlines the brain for a few minutes and into a burst suppression state. And they believe that burst suppression is what heals the brain. And so what they did is they used anesthesia to take me down to that burst suppression state, without the shocking, without seizure and they kept me there for 15 to 18 minutes at a time and then they would bring me back up out of the anesthesia and I did that ten times in a matter of three weeks.

MG: And you've described this as an attempt in some ways to reset the computer, right?

HA: Yes. Have you tried turning it on and off again.

MG: It's essentially have you tried turning your brain on and off.

HA: Exactly. When anybody knows that when you're using your computer and all the apps are crashing, you have to start your computer over again and sometimes you have to start it like two or three or four times and in ECT you do like anywhere from like 10 to 15 treatments just to make sure that you've rebooted it completely. And what they're trying to do with this therapy is sort of like rewire some circuitry that has become ill or has become damaged because of stress because of life. And I really do believe that my circuitry was healed.

MG: Initially they gave you fentanyl as part of this procedure. What happened when they did that?

HA: So fentanyl is the opioid. It's kind of like a dangerous word to say even and so they administered the fentanyl before the Propofol and they told me that you know it's going to prevent your headache. And immediately I had a hallucination, where the entire room began melting and everybody turned into monsters. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. I thought I was going to die. I really thought I was going to die and then my mom saw the look of horror on my face as I was going down. This is the first treatment and she sees the look on my face like I'm going to die.

MG: And they realize that what you're allergic to fentanyl?

HA: Yeah I'm allergic to it. Like I'm one of the very few people who have like wild wild unbearable hallucinations when I use it.

MG: What do you remember aside from that terrifying moment? What do you remember about this treatment and because essentially they're trying to flatten brain activity.

HA: Right.

MG: Is there anything you remember about that?

HA: So every time that I went under I mean I would try to resist the anesthesia. I thought it was fun to try to resist it as if anybody could resist it. I remember always looking at my mother's face and then I would sink into just a black nothingness. Nothing. I only had one dream and that was the first time I came out of anesthesia. But that that's what I remember as coming out of that first time and being panicked that I wasn't going to get my cross therapy and a lesson which was one of the things that made my life miserable. And I remember like just the doctors standing around and everybody sort of hovering around me.

MG: And do you know what was going on? I mean you're out and you're not experiencing anything, but what was happening in your brain to reset that computer, as you put it?

HA: So what they think is when you get down to that burst suppression state there's something about quieting all of those circuits. There's something about relieving those circuits of their duty that gives them the possibility of healing and rewiring and getting back together. And for me it was almost like a cord that had gotten pulled out of a socket and it finally got plugged back in.

MG: What was it like when they plugged it back in? When you woke up, what did you feel like?

HA: Well whenever I woke up, they took me down very, like Propofol has never been used this way. I mean they took me down as far as you can go.

MG: You call it the drug that killed Michael Jackson. I mean that's, there's a lot of humour that runs through this book. It doesn't sound funny, but there's a lot of humour that runs through this book and that's kind of one of the ways that you sort of normalize the situation in some way.

HA: Yeah well everybody I told about this was like wait a minute you're during the Michael Jackson drug? And I was like yes, it was the Michael Jackson drug, but Michael Jackson didn't have an anesthesiologist administering it to him. And I would wake up and I would be completely I had no idea where I was. That was saying crazy things. I was berating people. Just imagine a very angry angry drunk or you know a clumsy one. And I was drowsy was very drowsy from the anesthesia because there were so much they had given me. But after the fifth treatment I didn't feel drowsy, which was the first clue to me that something had happened. And the next morning I woke up and didn't feel anxious.

MG: And what did that feel like to not feel anxious?

HA: So I say I was like Dorthy opening the door into Oz and seeing colour for the first time. It really was like that. Like colour was brighter and more vibrant. Sound was more like it echoed in every molecule of my body. The smell of the air, the colour of the sky, everything was just so much more intense and lovely and joyous that I knew something marvelous had happened.

MG: Did you feel, I mean by the end of those 10 treatments, you said halfway through you started to feel different. By the end of it was there a measurable difference in terms of where you began and how you ended up?

HA: Yeah I mean I think you know I pulled the doctor aside like right before the sixth treatment and I was like you know is this going to reverse what happened last time? I was really worried about that. I was like I really don't want to go back to life before you know that last treatment because everything has been so amazing since then and he's like oh no no no. Like if anything you only get better. And I honestly believe that there's a part of this whole process of this treatment where yes the treatments got me better and an absolutely like the fifth treatment is what did it but I believe that spending that kind of time with my family in growing to have that relationship with my mom or my stepfather and the time that we spent together through those those final five treatments really really added to the quality of my life and the quality and the meaning of life.

MG: What did it mean cause your mom's there watching you go through all of this. What did it mean to her to see you change like this? In such I mean I say terrifying way, but it's you know watching your daughter essentially be rendered almost brain dead and then brought back to life again and again would be a terrifying thing. What did it mean for her?

HA: It was I mean it was absolutely terrifying for her. She said that she wants to write her own book about the terror that she experienced every time. She probably experienced more pain than I did through this whole process. I can't imagine watching my child go through all of this. And in fact my sister who doesn't experience depression but has children who do came to see one of the treatments and my mother said that she cried for the entire process because she could see my mother there watching me in there my sister was as a mother of you know depressed kids in here I was lying there giving them hope and it was like this like familial like connection that we all sort of forged in that moment together and I was out, but I felt it. My mother doesn't experience depression but she's such a proponent for mental health because of what I've been through.

MG: I hope she writes that book that would be quite something. You mentioned that you were the third of the people who have gone through this treatment. Do you know whether it's worked with others?

HA: Yes. So the first ten have completed and of the ten, six of us had positive effects, which is a huge success for a study of this kind and of its size. And then after three months, five of us were still feeling better. So the doctor's a really really shy and very humble man and he said he got a little excited talking about the results, but he's like you know I'm a scientist. I have to like be very skeptical, but he's like this is really really encouraging.

MG: And how do you feel now?

HA: I feel incredible. I'm a little tired because I don't know what city I'm in. I think I'm in Austin.

MG: You could hear a big smile in your voice. I mean when you talk about how you feel.

HA: Yeah I mean only because I don't feel like I did then. I'm so ecstatic that I don't feel like I did then. I don't feel that helplessness that it literally consumed me every moment of my day. And I know how people feel. I know what people are going through every single moment of their day. And it's heartbreaking to feel that other people are out there who don't have access to something like this.

MG: Do you wake up worrying that it might come back one day, the depression?

HA: I don't.

MG: You don't.

HA: I don't. I absolutely don't. I'm on a regimen of medication that really works. And they emphasize this when you finish treatment that you have to stay on your medication and my psychiatrist is forcing me to come see him every three months. And I really do feel like the treatment gave me the ability to understand like I have to be aware of triggers in my life. I have to approach life differently. I have to think about life differently and there was no way before the treatment that my brain could wrap itself around that.

MG: What do you mean you think of life differently and approach life differently?Give me an example of that.

HA: When my daughter who is nine now, when my daughter is throwing a fit about the fact that you know when she sits down to play piano, that's the only time in her life that her legs hurt. And she complains about her legs hurting. You know I can sit and laugh about it now and like really really laugh about it. In the moment I can you know remain calm and you know assure her that her legs are going to stop hurting and she can continue practicing piano.

MG: Whereas before?

HA: Whereas before I would leave the room in tears. I would like completely lose my mind and go hide in the bathroom. And she was playing in front of judges recently actually. My boyfriend like turned to me in the middle of it and he's like do you think her legs are going to start hurting? I was like I hope they do. I hope the judges hear her legs hurting.

MG: You write at the end of the book about why you wrote the book and about why you wanted people to hear this story and you say we would do anything not feel this way. Why was it important for you to tell this story? I mean for yourself, but for other people as well.

HA: It's so important for me to tell this story. After the first treatment, after what happened, after the colour and the light and the sound, after the music, I knew that I couldn't you know I've written a blog for 18 years, I'm a blogger. And I knew that it couldn't be a blog post and it couldn't be like a magazine article. It had to be something that people could hold in their hands and give to other people because I needed to not only bring attention to this study, I wanted to like make sure that somewhere somehow this book gets into the hands of somebody who might have the money to funnel into this study and I wanted to honour the team that dedicated their time to save my life. But I also wanted to put words to the feeling of depression and the feeling of anxiety and what it does to our brains and how we're incapable of we can't stop it from happening. And for people who don't know how to explain it to other people so that they could hold it up and say I know you don't believe me but this is what I'm feeling. This right here what she says in this paragraph is exactly what's happening in my brain right now. And that has actually been some of the feedback that I've gotten is like you know thank you for doing this because I was unable to tell my husband like this is what it felt like.

MG: And that people will believe them.

HA: Right. And people will believe them.

MG: Do you recognize the person that you were before you had this treatment?

HA: I do. I do. I was a very. I was a very lonely hopeless hopeless helpless Heather. I was Heather, but I was helpless and I've seen her before. Not this bad before, but I've seen her before. I've seen her in childhood. I've seen her in college and I saw her again and I have so, I think back to that Heather and I so desperately want to hug her and hold her and rub her head and tell her it's going to be okay.

MG: It's quite a story. Heather, it's great to talk to you about this. Thank you.

HA: Thank you so much.

MG: Heather B. Armstrong is the author of The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live. She was in Austin, Texas. We're going to continue this conversation in our next half hour. The treatment that Heather had was radical and extraordinary. There are some real advances in treating depression that are being worked on here in Canada and you'll hear about those coming up in just a few moments time. And then after that, how to make inclusive education really work for everyone. Is something like that possible? What's happening in New Brunswick right now is interesting in part because they're measuring keeping close eyes on when students are sent home from school because the goal of inclusive education perhaps is falling short. You'll hear about that coming up in just a moment as well. My name is Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. In our last half hour, I was speaking with the author, Heather B. Armstrong. She volunteered for a radical pilot project to treat her depression. She says it's been a success for her. This was an experimental treatment. It brought her to the edge of brain death ten times tom as she puts itm turn her brain off and then back on to reset it. Here in Canada there are also big advances being made in treating depression. Daniel Blumberger is the medical head and co-director of the Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And he is with me in Toronto. Hi.

DANIEL BLUMBERGER: Hi. Thank you for having me.

MG: What do you make of what you just heard and in particular the treatment that Heather B. Armstrong went through?

DB: Well I think it's a fascinating idea. The idea of potentially using a medication to create a similar type effect to what we do when we do electroconvulsive therapy and the idea is in some respects as Heather described it to reset the brain. So this idea burst suppression or causing the brain to quiet itself and leading to an increased inhibitory capacity within the brain is an interesting idea.

MG: What happens in those moments when she says you reset the computer.

DB: So the point of what's trying to happen is we're trying to increase the brain's inhibitory capacity. So if you imagine depression is kind of a traffic grid system and you have red lights and green lights and if they're operating in unison and in a coordinated fashion all the traffic moves freely and correctly. But if all the green lights are on you can have traffic backing up in another area and you can have things you can have crashes you can have things not work properly and in some respects one of the areas that we think is happening in depression is a lack of the red lights working so a lack of the inhibitory capacity and there's burst suppression that Heather talks about and something that we see in electroconvulsive therapy is an increase in the brain's inhibitory capacity and sort of a resetting and more harmonization between excitation and inhibition within the brain.

MG: So if you're able to do that, you're able to reset to your analogy, the timing of those red lights and green lights?

DB: Correct you're able to have the information flow in a more coordinated fashion and sometimes in depression in particular, there's that kind of increase in negative thinking and as Heather describes it.

MG: What do we know about why it is that some people's depression is resistant to treatment and other people are able to over time find some treatment that will alleviate the symptoms of depression?

DB: Well I think depression isn't one thing. I think there are many different types of depression. Some people's depression manifests in a certain way and some depression is in one circuit within the brain and we know there are multiple circuits involved in depression. And so sometimes. Right now treating depression is trial and error about a third of people who are experiencing depression will have what we call treatment resistant depression meaning their depression won't respond to standard first line treatment.

MG: And won't respond to any of those standard first line treatments?

DB: It means it will take time for them to respond. So they don't respond to an antidepressant or a talk treatment talk therapy. And once you try one medication there's a certain chance that you'll get better. You try a second when there's a certain chance but after two medication trials your likelihood of responding to another medication trial dropped by 50 percent. So that's why we need new mechanisms and new treatments to target this illness.

MG: What do you know about where that leaves patients? I mean we heard from Heather about the sense of frustration, but it's worse than frustration. I mean she was in an abyss.

DB: Right. So one of the symptoms of depression is hopelessness. When an intervention is tried and it doesn't work it perpetuates the hopelessness and leads to people feeling discouraged. And that's why we need a multitude of different options.

MG: Tell me about the work that you're doing. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. What does that mean?

DB: So that's a form of treatment that involves delivering repetitive magnetic field pulses to specific areas of the brain and specific circuits within the within the brain that are involved in mood regulation and affect regulation. It's an effective treatment and it works when antidepressants don't work. It works specifically on the brain and it doesn't have systemic side effects. So it's a very interesting and hopeful option for patients because it works on a very different mechanism than current standard treatment. How does it work. She described it in visceral terms what it was like to undergo the treatment that she got. If somebody gets this what happens. Right. So this is a non-invasive treatment. People come into the clinic a magnetic coil is placed over the areas of the brain that are involved in depression and people can have a treatment that typically between 20 and 40 minutes. We've recently been able to reduce that treatment session time down to about three minutes but people have to come in for four to six weeks. So 20 to 30 treatments in order to treat the depression. And what happens when they're undergoing the treatment.

MG: What do they feel?

DB: So they feel a kind of pinching or a tapping sensation at the site where the magnetic field pulses are being delivered into the brain. So magnetic fields penetrate through tissues without being blocked or impeded. So we can actually target the brain specifically.

MG: What happens after the three minutes? What changes are you noticing?

DB: So we don't notice changes after each specific treatment. It kind of takes time to reset the circuit. And it takes about like I said four to six weeks for the circuit to reset itself if it's going to work. If we've been able to target the right circuit in that person.

MG: And if the circuit is reset properly, what's the change that you see?

DB: So we see a reduction in their symptoms of depression. So we see that the depression goes away. For some people they have a marked reduction in their symptoms and for a good proportion we have a full remission of their symptoms.

MG: She described it as being like the Wizard of Oz, where suddenly they land and everything that was black and white is in colour. How have patients described, if it works, after that period of time what their life is like in terms of the difference between the two?

DB: Well you know the great thing about being able to offer these treatments is I hear stories and people say you've given me my life back. I don't have that great cloud over me anymore. So they go back to experiencing the way they experienced life previously.

MG: And is that a permanent thing or do you need to, I mean in her case she continues to take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. Do you have to take medication? Is there kind of a fine tuning that continues down the road to continue to reset the computer? How does that work?

DB: It's a fantastic question. So we've spent a lot of time and energy into trying to figure out whether or not this treatment works and we're certain that it does work and it's an evidence based treatment that's offered across the world. But the treatment effect isn't permanent and depression is a recurrent illness. It comes back. So oftentimes people need to stay on their medications to prevent relapse. And we're studying different ways to, once this treatment works, prevent people from relapsing and from having to come back to the clinic for more treatment. The nice thing about this treatment is that it does work. If it has worked for someone, it does work again on repeated administration.

MG: The real sense you get in talking to you is that we're still and I mean this goes well beyond treatment of depression, but we're really still learning so much about how the brain works.

DB: I think the brain is probably, it is the most complex organ that we have. It's there's more connections in the brain than there are stars in the universe. It's extremely complex and we're really trying to figure out all of the moving pieces that are involved in this very complicated illness. But there is work, real work that's being done to try and come to terms with this. I think there are many people and our group are really focused on trying to come up with new and better ways to treat depression.

MG: Daniel, we'll leave it there. Thank you.

DB: Thank you very much.

MG: Daniel Blumberger is the medical head and co-director of the Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He is in Toronto. And if you missed my conversation in the previous half hour with Heather B. Armstrong, you can catch it on the CBC Radio app, on our podcast or on the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Heather's book about the experimental treatment of her depression is called The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live.

3

Inclusive education isn't living up to its name, expert says

Guests: Nicole Kaler, Sheila Bennett

MG: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti.

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VOICE 1: While New Brunswick is a fully inclusive province, I don't really think that the schools have the proper resources and staffing to make that effectively work for all students with special needs. We're in regular communication about things and we work out new plans and things, but sometimes things are limited by resources.

VOICE 2: This is my family ever since I was small.

VOICE 3: What do you like about it?

VOICE 2: It's nostalgic.

VOICE 3: Tell you about what you hope high school will be like.

VOICE 2: I want to do good, so I can go to college. I want to do a job with computers and stuff.

MG: That's Catherine Derry and her son Robbie, a student with special needs in Saint John, New Brunswick, speaking with the CBC's Ben Silcox. Catherine Derry was talking about the realities of having an autistic son in New Brunswick's celebrated inclusive education system. It's a system in which children with special needs are taught in the same classroom as others, an approach to education that public schools across this country are increasingly adopting and the one that's been welcomed by disabilities advocates and parents of students with complex needs. Doesn't come without its challenges though. Some educators are wondering if provinces have put enough thought into what it means to teach in an inclusive classroom. Yesterday, New Brunswick's education minister Dominic Cardy announced plans to start tracking the number of students who are only attending partial days of school because of behavioural or developmental issues, students such as Robbie who'd been sent home for hitting another child. The province hopes the data collected will help it better understand how inclusive education is not working for children with special needs and we'll hear more about what's not working and why in just a moment. But first, Nicole Kaler is the parent of a daughter who requires extra care in the classroom. She's also a board member with BC Ed Access, a support network for parents and guardians of school children with special needs. And Nicole Kaler is in Surrey, British Columbia. Nicole, hello.

NICOLE KALER: Hi.

MG: How often do you hear students like the one told by Catherine Derry in your role with BC Ed Access?

NK: Oh every day probably several times a day. We're part of a network of about 1600 parents, so the conversation about exclusion and what our kids are going through and how to effectively advocate to get our kids back into school is a constant conversation.

MG: And this is personal as well. Tell me about your daughter Maya. How old is she?

NK: Maya is 18. She's in grade 12, so we're just finishing up her school career. She's autistic. She has significant needs. I would say that she is included in school. She's you know inclusion for us has been a big struggle and that it's been a lot of work, but we have managed to keep her in and make sure that it's been a place of learning for her.

MG: What were those early days of school like?

NK: Well what we started with was just that realization that the expertise, we're going to have to bring a lot of expertise on what she needed and the training for the people who worked with her. We were going to have to bring that to the table and bring it to the school district and make sure it was accessible to her. Staffing has always been a challenge. So you know one of the big reasons inclusive education can be so daunting and difficult for people is that they don't really know how to be with our kids. So you know making sure that the people who are around her and who supported her had the information and the knowledge that they needed. That was always, that's always been our constant challenge.

MG: In those early days what did you see from Maya when she came home from school? What was she like and what did you get the sense of in terms of what happened in the classroom that day?

NK: Well Maya is completely non-verbal. So she always has somebody with her. What we inferred from the early years they were actually really really hard and I think we were probably about six months in when I had decided that public school actually was just not going to work for her. I used to say she was a square peg, trying to fit her in a, yeah, square peg in a round hole because she was a different child. She was very very sad. We had to fight her to get her to go to school. We started seeing behaviours when we first started taking her to school. So whereas she was just really calm and happy at home, she was hitting other kids and we had a lot that we had to work through. But within a couple of years and getting her in the right environments she has, ever since she's thrived and ever since we also realized that we had to step up with the support that she needed.

MG: What changed because that's a huge change.

NK: It is a huge change. We make sure that she has a behaviour analyst that comes into the school. It's at our expense, but we're still willing to do that and we're able to do it. That has always been there to make sure that we understand the functions of her behaviours. So what is she trying to communicate. She is non-verbal and kids who have difficulty communicating are going to act up behaviourally. So we were always on top of that and we always had a school team that was willing to take the input from the family team and that's also very huge. I think my dream for the school system would be that you wouldn't have to be in a position like ours where you bring the people in to support your child, that it would be in the school system, so that Mayas across the country could do really well. It's easy to see how she could have fallen through the cracks and not been able to stay in the classroom.

MG: What happens if the assistant isn't there. People fall ill, you call in sick, what have you. What happens then for Maya?

NK: So what traditionally happened was in elementary school we kept her home. It is a lot of training for someone to be able to support her and there was only ever one person in the building or in the district that could do that. So you know the school would let me know the person wasn't there and I'd keep her home.

MG: What was that like knowing you know how important school is to anybody to know that essentially you couldn't send her to school, that it wouldn't work.

NK: Well it's stressful because you wake up, the first thing you do is you check your phone to see, even though it's a school day, to see if she can actually go to school. I'm probably luckier than most in that my daughter doesn't necessarily understand you know what's going on with her day. Even though she loves school and she's happy to be there, with some kids they understand they're missing the field trip or that it's the class play that day and they can't go or things that they're missing out on. I don't have that immediate response from her. I think the hardest and the biggest adjustment for my family has been the realization that it would be really difficult for me or impossible for me to work outside of the home and making those kind of adjustments, both financially and I think just socially and emotionally.

MG: If you take a look, this is a conversation that's happening across the country, the idea of inclusive education and true inclusive education. How do you think it's working right now?

NK: So inclusive education when anyone, people say how is it working, I mean of course inclusion is always going to work because diversity and inclusion, that's the society we live in. Are we effectively sustaining and supporting our schools so that they can be inclusive? We're just not. I'm really excited about the fact that a place like New Brunswick is going to be tracking exclusions and really looking at who isn't at school because when you start looking at who isn't there then you start to be open to why, and when you start to be open to why then you can fix the issues. So I think that's our biggest problem right now is we're calling our schools inclusive or we're trying to call them inclusive, but they really aren't. And it's a difficult thing to admit, but unless you admit it you can't actually target the issue.

MG: And so your sense is that if we have the data and it starts in New Brunswick, but if we have the data that we'll be able to get a better sense as to whether that word is appropriate, inclusive, whether we're actually living up to the meaning of that word.

NK: Exactly and as parents we know we're not. Like schools are not inclusive and when you're not being inclusive, you are also walking away from diversity, which I know that as Canadians, none of us want to go down that road. So it's hard to look at the data and it's it's ugly, but it's really necessary. It's very intimidating because you start to see, we track it in BC as parents, we've been tracking it and it's very daunting and depressing to look at how exactly our schools operate, but we have to do it.

MG: It's great to talk to you about this and important as well. Nicole, thank you.

NK: You're very welcome. Thank you.

MG: Nicole Kaler is a parent and board member with BC Ed Access. We reached her in Surrey, British Columbia. My next guest has researched what happens when students with special needs are excluded from school. Sheila Bennett is a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario and she's on the line. Sheila, hello to you.

SHEILA BENNETT: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What went through your own mind as you were hearing Nicole Kaler's story and Nicole's story in particular about her daughter, Maya?

SB: Well it's interesting. Everything that was said rang true. It also related very closely to a study that we just completed with Jackie, Spectrum, Western and myself and some colleagues from the ARCH Law Association and what happened in that study that I think it's important to mention because it talks specifically around excluding kids from school. We were approached by ARCH to say you know we get these calls from parents who are saying my child can't go to school or my child is being asked to stay home from school and various other things and we're wondering are these anomalies or are these things that are happening. So we surveyed more than 700 parents in the province. We in terms of reliability kept about 300 and surveyed over 30 parents and what we found among other things is that in that particular population, which is intellectual disability, 39 percent of parents were told that they were frequently told that their students should arrive late. 54 percent of parents reported that their kids had to leave early and in the group that we looked at, of an average of six hours a day, some of them were losing up to 3.86 hours per day of schooling.

MG: What would the reasons be that the teachers or the principals would give to send a child home or ask them to stay home or ask them to come in late?

SB: Yeah. There's so many of them. So lots of times you know as your parent alluded to earlier, it's sort of cloaked in this you know your child is not really doing well today. They're having a hard day. The EA is absent today. We're doing something in school today that might be upsetting for your child. So therefore you know we're all in agreement that maybe your day should be a little shorter or they often used one, it's just too much for them.

MG: Too much for them. Them being the student?

SB: Them being the students, yes. But one wonders if that's what that actually means.

MG: Well I was going to say it. I mean the idea of inclusive education is as Nicole was saying something that everyone's trying to aim towards and something that people want to raise, but is it in a resource issue where perhaps the educational assistance isn't there, is it understandable that ever if a principal or a teacher would say this situation isn't working for us today?

SB: So what I would say is that if we stopped separating kids with disabilities from kids who don't have disabilities, we should ask ourselves that question all the time. So when is it reasonable for us as an education system to say you know what you don't really behave very well at assembly, so Suzie I'm sending you home. We don't have any way of thinking about doing that with kids who we assume are going to stay in school all day, but when a child has a disability we somehow have this different set of assumptions that well you know it's and again it's based on that sort of charity based model where it's almost a favorite to have a kid in school. So yes you're here, but that might be upsetting for you. In really good systems and we have some really good systems, in the data that we looked at in Ontario, you know simultaneously while some kids are being sent home, other schools and other children were enjoying the full depth and breadth of education with the same type of disability. So this notion that there are some kids who benefit from not being in school because it makes their day better is a faulty premise. The truth is that when we plan an activity for school or we plan a field trip for school, we need to plan ahead and we need to put the pieces and the supports in place, so that all children can participate. And I'll tell you Matt, I was at a meeting a couple of years ago where a parent whose daughter was 20 had been excluded from the Grade 13 field trip. Here in Ontario, many students go to Ottawa. Every single day on her birthday she cried even at the age of 20 because she remembered missing out on that trip.

MG: That's heartbreaking.

SB: It's terrible.

MG: What are those pieces you say put the pieces in place. What are the pieces that need to be there and you might hear from teachers or principals about this to make sure that inclusive education isn't just a nice phrase.

SB: So a couple of things that I think are really important to say. One is our research also showed that it's not just kids in inclusive settings who are being excluded from school. It is also kids in special needs setting. So it's not uncommon for a child in behaviour class for example to be sent home either. So if there's any notion that segregating children out is a solution to these types of problems that is not a solution. But what is a solution or could be a solution is rethinking how we deliver service in schools, in terms of you know and I can speak to this in terms of teacher training, ongoing teacher training, not just initial teacher training, working with special education teachers. Right now many of our special education teachers are trained in a model where their training is focused on fixing kids. There are lots and lots of models of teacher training that are focused on working as partners with teachers in school to improve teacher skills so that they can learn things like classroom management. That they can learn things around antecedent behavior and consequence, so they can feel supported. You know the real solution is thinking of a system that's much more nimble and much more flexible in being able to provide the support where it's needed, when it's needed to build the capacity in teachers and in school communities with good leadership so that we can anticipate things that are going to happen. Put supports in place and then you know keep our promise that school is for all children.

MG: Is it about providing more money to those boards of education? We're seeing this fight play out here in Ontario with changes being proposed by the new provincial government. Is it about just putting more money into the boards?

SB: My response to that would be that we see many boards in Ontario who have pre-successful approaches and pretty low numbers in terms of excluding kids and who have good service delivering good student support and a lot of those are around innovations that boards have chosen to do. Moving away from segregating kids to including kids. We certainly you know in the area of mental health and in the area of you know assistance for behaviour, we need more support. The question is if you're putting supports in that aren't working or if you're having systems that aren't working, putting more money into those systems won't make a difference.

MG: You have to change the systems first.

SB: You have to change, in particular you have to change the belief in educational systems and not just our research, but research of many many people have talked about it doesn't really matter if the beliefs don't change. So if you have a school system that thinks that kids, that believes that kids don't belong, they'll keep practices in place that will show that that is true.

MG: Sheila Bennett, we'll leave it there. It's great to hear from you. Thank you.

SB: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Sheila Bennett, professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Brock University. She was in St. Catharines, Ontario. If you have a child with special needs in a school we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what's working and what isn't for them and for you. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. As you've been hearing, The Sunday Edition has been doing great work on this issue as well. And coming up this weekend, Michael Enright will have more on the challenges in elementary school classrooms. We'll speak with three principals from across the country about what is and what isn't working. That's coming up this weekend on CBC Radio One's The Sunday Edition. Well that will do it for us today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q. You'll hear the extraordinary artist Carrie Mae Weems on that program. We end this program with some sad news today. Jean Vanier, respected Canadian religious figure, whose charity work in special facilities helped improve living conditions for the developmentally disabled has died. The charity he founded L'Arche said that Jean Vanier died in Paris today after suffering from thyroid cancer. He was 90-years-old. He worked as a Canadian Navy officer and a professor before turning to charity work. A visit to a psychiatric hospital prompted him to found L'Arche in 1964, where those with developmental disabilities could be fully fledged participants in the community, instead of patients. In 1998, Jean Vanier delivered the CBC Massey Lectures. His subject was being partly becoming human. Here he is from the conclusion of those lectures. My name's Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to. The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: To forgive is to break down the dividing walls of hostility that separate us and to bring each other out of the agonies of loneliness, fear and chaos into communion and oneness. Each of us is accepted just as we are. The weak and the needy have a secret power, which opens up people's hearts and leads them to compassion and mutual trust. But let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviours of the world. We are simply human beings called together, enfolded in weakness and in hope, who can change our world, one heart at a time.

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May 7, 2019 episode transcript

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