By Charnel Anderson and Kunal Chaudhary
THUNDER BAY — Elysia Monaghan’s “hopeful dream” is to become Canada’s first Inuk psychiatrist. During her placement as a nursing student in the mental-health ward at Yellowknife’s Stanton Territorial Hospital, Monaghan noticed that many of the patients she cared for were Inuit, but most health-care providers were not.
“I felt like, in order for a patient to feel heard or listened to or understood, it’s important to have physicians who look like them, listening to them — especially if it’s a mental-health issue,” says Monaghan. She notes the high rate of suicide among Inuit people, which is up to 25 times higher than the general population, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction.
Monaghan is a third-year student at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, in Thunder Bay. (The school also has a campus in Sudbury.) An Inuk who grew up in the Northwest Territories, she decided to study medicine because “helping people is really important, and learning is really important — that’s so central in medicine.”
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