Event Info
A Growing Gulf of Human Loss: The People of the Opioid Crisis
Presented by Kingston WritersFest
7:30pm - 8:30pm
$19.61-$21.69
Event Description
A Growing Gulf of Human Loss: The People of the Opioid Crisis
Vincent Lam with Mike Condra
Reading and Conversation
Bellevue
8:00 – 9:00 pm
Dr. Chen, from the Giller-winning Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is back. A decade out from med school, he is now running an addictions clinic in downtown Toronto as opioid addiction and overdoses surge. Join Vincent Lam, author, emergency and addictions physician in conversation with Mike Condra, a physician and advocate in mental health education for a look at the intimate and profound impacts of addiction on individual human beings.
Vincent Lam
Vincent Lam is an author and practicing physician whose first book, the short story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. The Headmaster’s Wager, his first novel, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize. Vincent published a biography of Tommy Douglas, “father of Medicare,” for Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians Series. He is also the co-author of The Flu Pandemic and You, which received a Special Recognition Award by the American Medical Writers’ Association and served as executive editor and co-author of the textbook, Opioid Agonist Therapy: A Prescriber's Guide to Treatment. This year, he released the moving novel On the Ravine, a quiet but impactful look at the toll opioid addiction takes on people’s lives, hopes, and dreams, and the care givers who try to help them. The Globe and Mail calls it “a small miracle… a compelling narrative on the purgatory of addiction.”
Dr. Lam is an emergency physician and addictions physician who lives in Toronto. He is the medical director of the Coderix Medical Clinic.
Mike Condra
Mike Condra is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and recently retired as director of the department of Health, Counselling and Disability Services at Queen’s University. A respected fixture at Queen’s University for over two decades, Mike has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programmes in the Department of Psychology at Queen’s and in the faculties of Education and Law. He has provided advice to the university’s senior administration on issues involving mental health and lethality and has extensive experience in providing public education and training workshops on the topics of mental health, stigma-reduction, crisis-intervention and suicide-risk assessment. He is also the Principal Investigator for two projects on mental health in the postsecondary education system funded under the provincial Mental Health Innovation Fund.
Venue
2 Princess Street
Open / Operational