Today@Dal

Doctors may know how to keep our bodies healthy, but aren’t always adept at treating our minds, according to Dalhousie University medical student Tara Riddell.

The fourth-year med student, who also has a bachelor of science in kinesiology, hopes to help change that, by starting up a social media project called Beyond the Body, aimed at sparking the mental health conversation within the medical community – and beyond.

“Mental health and mental illness (are) something that we’re continuously seeing,” Riddell, 27, said Monday inside the Sir Charles Tupper Building on the Halifax campus.

“Regardless if you’re an emergency physician (or) a family doctor, you’re going to come in contact with it,” the Oakville, Ont., native said.

Riddell, who started Beyond the Body in her second year of medical school as a “one-woman operation” class project, has since recruited more than a half dozen contributors for the Beyond the Body website, Facebook page and Twitter account, since “multiple perspectives are better than one.”

Beyond the Body’s social media platforms feature everything from advice on how physicians can better address the emotional and psychiatric well-being of their patients, to stories of doctors who have dealt with mental health struggles such as depression themselves.

“Our hopes in the future are perhaps to include some podcasts and other different streams of media, but all available online, (so) it’s easily accessible,” she said.

Interest in Beyond The Body is certainly growing; her project received second place honours for poster presentations last fall at the Canadian Psychiatric Association’s annual conference, held in Vancouver.

Even six-time Olympic medallist Clara Hughes, a well-known spokesperson for the Bell Let’s Talk initiative who has been open about her own struggle with depression, has given Beyond The Body props on social media.

“I did a psychiatric emergency rotation my first year, which (was) really eye-opening, because you see such a spectrum of illness,” Riddell said of what has inspired her to focus her studies on mental health education.

“I remember becoming really fascinated with how the mind works.”

Riddell finishes at Dalhousie this June, and will be moving to Hamilton, Ont., in July to work on her psychiatric residency, and potentially her masters of education, at McMaster University.

Read more (http://www.metronews.ca/news/halifax/2016/03/21/dalhousie-med-student-breaking-down-mental-health-barriers.html)