Insomnia is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Lynne McVey, who has a mild case. “I am very fortunate because I suffer from it between 3 and 5 in the morning, once or twice a week.” She makes the most of those hours. “It’s a wonderful, peaceful time, with no interruptions. That’s when I usually get some reading done.”

And that’s where she finds inspiration – in books.

McVey is the Executive Director of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. In 2012, she became the first nurse to hold that position.

When she arrived at the Douglas, she discovered the partnership between the Institute and Blue Metropolis. An unusual collaboration perhaps – between a mental hospital and a literary festival. But not for McVey.

“I spent many, many years building a cancer centre and working with cancer patients. Very often, we’d hear stories in the media about individuals who’d overcome cancer, reclaimed their lives and become contributing members of the community. Whereas in mental health, still to this day, we don’t often hear the voice of recovered patients.” She mentions research showing that 83 % of published articles on mental health issues don’t include citations from patients. And adds that the partnership with Blue Met gives patients hope that they can read and write and have a voice in the context of literature and the media.

McVey peppers her conversation with book titles, most of them dealing with health and how to improve the patient experience.
Such as Is There No Place On Earth For Me, by Susan Sheehan, which came out in 1982 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Cited as one of the landmark non-fiction books of the last 50 years, it’s now being reissued. “It’s about a woman who suffers from severe schizophrenia, a self-described difficult person even at the best of times, but also bright and articulate when she wasn’t delusional,” says McVey. “She died at the age of 46. And Sheehan claims that not much has changed for the severely mentally ill. In fact, it may even be worse today.”

This book was sent to McVey by the co-president of the users’ service committee at the Douglas, a body created to give patients an active part in how the hospital is run.

“This woman, the co-president of the committee, continuously lets me know that we have stigma in our society and in our healthcare system, and that, as a society, we haven’t invested enough money in research to find cures for these individuals who suffer from severe mental illness, to give them a quality of life. We also don’t have a place where we can talk about some of these issues.”

For McVey, the partnership with Blue Met represents a perfect example of a community organization opening its doors to mental health patients. She describes another patient, a young woman with an interest in writing and publishing, who, when she attended an event announcing the collaboration between the Douglas Institute and Blue Metropolis, was inspired to write two stories. “All of a sudden we associate recovery from mental illness with the artistic world, with the literary world. There, the magic can happen, possibilities can occur, to create a path for recovery, and a place for the voice of the patient who has recovered.”

Leaping ahead to another topic and another inspiring, Pulitzer Prize- winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukerjee, McVey describes it this way: “It’s a history of how we found treatments to turn cancer into a chronic disease as opposed to a death sentence. We have a new prophecy to write about mental illness. We’re about 60 years behind, but certainly the dialogue about a cure, about new treatments that can actually prevent psychosis, that can prevent severe mental illness and severe depression, that’s where the future is.” She explains that research being conducted at the Douglas Institute in the field of epigenetics allows scientists to identify biological and psychosocial markers in children and adolescents, to see who is at risk and to intervene early to prevent mental illness.

“I’m a big believer in the relentless pursuit of making things happen,” states the CEO, just in case that wasn’t already crystal clear. In her mouth, the word “relentless” evokes something admirable. She offers another title to illustrate her point. “Jim Collins wrote a monograph called Good to Great and the Social Sectors….”

Lynne McVey: relentless optimist.

Lynne McVey’s Reading Recommendations

• Is There No Place on Earth for Me? (Vintage) By Susan Sheehan
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer By Siddhartha Mukerjee (Scribner, Simon & Schuster Canada, Inc.)
• Good To Great And The Social Sectors (Harper Business)

And for children

• The White Stone in the Castle Wall (Tundra) By Sheldon Oberman, illustrated by Les Tait

 This interview was done and written by Shelley Pomerance