So thank you for that. Hands up if you can still hear me. Excellent, excellent. Okay, so I was shown just before this talk two sheets which appear to have somewhat slightly different content leading to confusion about what I'm actually talking about. So I'm just going to talk about what I'm going to talk about and I hope you're going to enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it then I hope you learn something. Okay, so what I'm going to cover in reality, the themes I'm going to cover I'm going to give you, I'm guessing very few of you are experts on genetics. Very few of you are experts in psychiatry. So I'm going to give you a very general hopefully light orientation to the topics of genetics and mental illness. And I'm going to illustrate this talk largely by actually by talking about schizophrenia. But in fact the principles and the content of what I'm saying applies across the board and I will make reference to other disorders as I go. So I'm going to give you the orientation. I'm going to tell you what we've actually found in general terms. But more importantly I'm going to discuss what that's telling us that might become useful clinically because I'm a psychiatrist as well as a researcher and I'm not just in this for a laugh. And then because medicine and its area can be a rather dry topic I'm going to lapse briefly into the more esoteric topic of evolutionary psychiatry which preoccupies people with a very different bent in life than I have but people seem to be interested in it. So I'm going to briefly touch on that if time allows. Okay, so this is one of two slides that will give you a brief orientation to schizophrenia. And I apologize the only way I can see my slides if I look that way but I'd rather look at you. My glasses are the wrong strength for actually seeing these slides so I'll do my best. So schizophrenia is what's classically called one of the major psychotic disorders in psychiatry. And typically it starts in an obvious manifestation in people in their late teens or their early adulthood. Now the sort of symptoms that people experience that are the kind of the most dramatic ones in many ways are hallucinations which are sensory perceptions in the absence of there actually being anything to perceive and delusions which is more of a kind of subjective thing but their false beliefs and I'll give you some examples of those with reference to the pictures in the side in a moment. What most people who are not involved in psychiatry or who don't have relatives with schizophrenia don't appreciate is in many ways those are not the most damaging symptoms. They're the scary terrifying alarming the symptoms that you see in movies and so on if you ever watch movies about psychiatry but the really really impairing symptoms are what we call negative symptoms and basically a lot of people of schizophrenia have impairment in their ability to socially interact with other people. They have a low or an unresponsive very flat mood in fact that can be very debilitating and they often neglect personal care neglect eating and they really can become the most disadvantaged people in our entire society. Another feature that's not appreciated even by quite a lot of psychiatrists is that people with schizophrenia often have intellectual or cognitive impairment so they can't think as fast or as clearly as perhaps an average person or their IQ if you believe in IQs but measurements of intelligence are reduced in some but by no means all and often these impairments actually are evident in some shape or form all the way from birth and this is why those of us who research schizophrenia and what I'll refer to sometimes as Allied conditions really conceptualize this disorder in a lot of people as being something that happened early in life probably whilst a person is developing in the uterus and I read this fact or this statement a year or so ago when I was preparing a different talk according to the World Health Organization acute schizophrenia is the most disabling condition of all medical conditions including having all your limbs amputated this is rated as producing a greater degree of personal suffering how they do these ratings that could be challenged so onto these pictures on the side it can be very difficult giving this kind of dry description of what schizophrenia is to really appreciate the degree of suffering involved and this chap called Brian Charney who was an artist was a man with schizophrenia and actually his treatment was quite successful but for various reasons that I'm not aware of he decided to stop his treatment and whilst he was descending into relapse into his psychosis he kept notes of what was happening to him and he did a series of increasingly bizarre paintings of himself and so in the top painting you can see an average looking person perhaps slightly more handsome than average, bearded gentlemen shortly after stopping his medicine his self-portrait becomes a bit bizarre I don't know if you can see them there's a giant mouth in his forehead and that he describes as depicting one of the cardinal symptoms which is having you feeling that your thoughts are being screamed out loud and that other people can hear them and that must be pretty terrifying there might be I was hoping to if you'd see these little waves coming in through the window that's supposed to depict him hearing people shouting from the streets talking and commenting on what he's thinking about and that must be pretty terrifying and it's a generally kind of blue colour because he was very depressed at the time things got more bizarre and so a few weeks later I believe he's painting himself as these two hollowed out eggs and what he's describing in the text that accompanies of it is that because everyone can read his mind he's hollowed out he has no secrets, he has no personal life there's mouths on that painting which is the people commenting on him and smiling and grinning there's crows flying away which he describes as being reminiscent intentionally of a scene from Vincent van Gogh's last painting which is supposed to denote both his increasing suicidal ideation but also his thoughts being dragged by some kind of machinery out of his head and then there's more paintings and ultimately he committed suicide so it's a tragic story but if you're interested in it there's a website at the bottom that gives all the pictures and all the way he's describing how he's feeling now some statistics as kind of alluded to in the last slide when people talk about schizophrenia it's often with a total sense of despair but in fact many people have a good response to treatment but for 20% of people who have it they remain chronically in a condition not identical to what I just described but in some shape or form like that but even the people who do pretty well find it almost impossible to get jobs and in part that's secondary handicaps people hear that they've had schizophrenia they don't like it, they're afraid of it, whatever they have a very high suicide rate but even those that don't kill themselves live on average 10 to 20 years less than someone who doesn't have schizophrenia so it's a physical health problem as well as a mental health problem there has been effectively no new treatments in the last 60 years and the treatments that they exist were discovered entirely by chance and nothing new has really emerged and that's largely because we don't know its origins other than we do know that it's genetic or there's a substantial genetic contribution so this is a slide about my own origins I did, as was mentioned earlier on I did a training in psychiatry in Paisley in a non-academic institution it was frontline psychiatry I saw loads of patients I read a book from Edinburgh that's the thing I read on the right hand side that was supposed to teach me about the origins and the treatments and everything that people knew about schizophrenia and what was evident is that people didn't really know a great deal about what caused schizophrenia so there were some speculations there was the subject of today's presentation genetics was thought to be involved there was a tidy increase in risk of schizophrenia people born in the winter months there was a lot of chit chat about stress causing schizophrenia I think this is possibly a lot of this was coincidental if you remember the previous slide people with schizophrenia often is evident in early adulthood and the evidence for stress was quite often happens when people join the army or go to university or take up their first job so that could just be developmentally coincidental people with schizophrenia more commonly were found in cities and there was arguments raging are cities toxic themselves or do people with liability to schizophrenia drift into the anonymity that city life affords there was some really pretty terrible thing from the perspective of the parents of schizophrenia parents got blamed for the origins of schizophrenia either because they were supposed to communicate in strange ways or they were supposed to be cold all sorts of things that I don't consider as relevant but these were theories at the time and then there was this thing dopamine which is basically a brain chemical so there was some biology, some psychology, some sociology and that was mainstream textbook psychiatry you had stuff that was operating outside the mainstream which I didn't learn much about so on one side we have Sigmund Freud who had some theories about the origins of schizophrenia on the other side we have Glasgow Zoo and RD Lane many of you will probably have read his works I myself haven't and we had all this type of mumbo jumbo really going on about what might be causing schizophrenia and the problem is people with schizophrenia do not live in many respects ordinary lives they are exposed to different environments they are usually poor they are often taking drugs, they are often malnourished you name it, anything that is disadvantageous they are often experiencing it which means you've got the opportunity for schizophrenia itself to be causing some of these things not these things causing schizophrenia but what seemed fairly certain because you're born with your genes is that having schizophrenia didn't cause your genes and that's why I got interested in studying genetics so how do we know that schizophrenia and these other disorders are partly genetic? well basically what we've got plotted here on this axis here is the higher the red goes up the bigger your risk of schizophrenia and along this axis here what we've got is how closely you are related to someone with schizophrenia so the rate in the general population is about 1% then if you have a parent or a sibling or a child, a first degree relative we call it it's about 10% your risk of schizophrenia if you have a twin that's not genetically identical your risk is about that 5-10% if you've got a genetically identical twin or what we call an MZ twin your risk jumps to about 40% so the degree of risk follows your genetic relationship to someone else who's affected and that's a hallmark of genetics and the heritability here so the involvement of genes is about 60-80% there's imprecision in the measurement there is an environmental contribution it's not entirely genetic and if you do the same types of studies to other psychiatric disorders you find they vary in the relative importance of genes so even anxiety has quite a measurable genetic component all the way through to autism at the bottom which is the most genetic of the disorders but schizophrenia and bipolar disorder which is a major mood disorder they're both predominantly genetic and you've got other disorders in between so big deal, these things are heritable and that's what the story was when I was a young trainee you could see that things were heritable but we didn't know how to study DNA so there wasn't really much you could do with that now what we think we're trying to do and it is a process and it's a long process is we're trying... basically we know that genes make proteins if we can find genes that are related to schizophrenia we know the proteins if we know the proteins we can try and work out what's happening in the cellular components of our body if we can work out what's going on in the cellular components of our body the hope is we can work out what's happening in the body as a whole organism and by understanding that we should be able to then instead of just guess new treatments design new treatments based upon a deep understanding of what the cause of schizophrenia and these other conditions is so that's the kind of enthusiasm this was the enthusiastic model I set out with in something like 1990 or so and spent a decade maybe more finding nothing and the reason for that will perhaps become clear but the old model of genetics that perhaps if any of you studied biology a long time ago genetics was essentially largely a deterministic concept so the basic deal is you'd find a big family like that people shaded in white are people with a disease this is classic genetics there's one bad gene one faulty gene in that family anyone who inherits the faulty gene gets the disease no argument anyone who doesn't get that gene doesn't get the disease no argument this is a purely deterministic model of disease and this applies to things like Huntington's disease for example however after searching for 10 years or more myself and many more colleagues around the globe we never found anything psychiatric disorders and in fact pretty much all common disorders be it cardiovascular, diabetes other common things that people suffer from don't adhere to that model rather they adhere to this rather complicated slide which I'll go through slowly disease risk conferred by genetics is probabilistic and there are many causes so on this slide what we've got is not many risk factors for the disease along the bottom increasing number of risk factors until you've got a lot of risk factors for the disease if you follow the dotted line that's how often in the population people have not many people have a small number of risk factors not many people have a high number of risk factors most people by definition have quite a lot of risk factors if you then follow the solid line that's the probability that you'll actually become ill so you can have a lot of the dotted line you can have a lot of risk factors but you don't become ill until you get quite a lot of risk factors and then your body can no longer compensate the body is actually pretty well designed it might not look it in my case but the body is well designed it can tolerate a lot of problems and still keep functioning and still keep functioning well it's like straw once the straw in the back of the camel scenario basically you can keep chucking straws in the camel it'll be fine but ultimately the whole system will collapse no one straw is causing the camel to collapse no one risk factor is causing the disease and to find this type of thing the tools simply didn't exist until maybe about 10 years ago or so so there was emergence of this technology and I won't give you the details because I'm sure that you're absolutely not interested in it but it's simply a sort of jazzy name called genome-wide association studies now in order for you to understand DNA a cartoon I think the DNA double helix is very well known amongst everyone no matter what their background I have say two copies of a gene one I got from my mother one I got from my father essentially they're identical but every so often these letters denote the genetic code there's a difference between those two copies and that's called a polymorphism it just means it's a variation that occurs and we all have millions of these things and some of them lead to disease but because there's millions of them it's pretty difficult to find out which ones lead to disease we now have the technology in you sir, you sir, you madam, me to measure millions of these things from your DNA and to measure it in huge populations and this allows us pretty simply to find out which of these things are more common in people with a disorder like schizophrenia than in people who don't have schizophrenia and that's called a genome-wide association study for those of you who don't know the technology the genome is simply your total body's content of DNA when those tools became available pretty rapidly I led this study which was the first time a common genetic finding was implicated in any psychiatric disorder now the importance isn't the finding the importance was we had to study 20,000 people to make that one finding we had to get DNA of 20,000 people and clearly, actually in the first 15 years of my work my colleagues collected 1,500 people so to make this discovery required a serious culture change and this is reverberating throughout genetics and medicine more widely people need to get together and so what's happened since that first study back in 2008 is that loose collaborations formed and this looks like some kind of evil empire you might see in a backdrop of a James Bond film but basically we've formalized structures in 2014 there was about 35 countries involved with lots of research groups coming together in a formal way sharing resources by 2019 I think it's about 50 countries I can't have lost track about 1,000 scientists and as we've pulled the resources we begin to find more and more and more now the details of this next slide are not important there's one box that's very important but basically what's here is I've got all the chromosomes lined up from number chromosome 1 to 22 there's a red line if any dots are above that red line it means we've found a genetic variation that's associated with schizophrenia and these days in the most under paper that's currently been written up we've studied 150,000 participants we've found over 300 genetic things that are related to schizophrenia the key thing about the nature of what we're finding is that of these 330 things we've found every single one is common I'll come back to how common they are in a moment each increases your risk it's the straw and the camel's back each one is increasing your risk by less than one tenth of one percent it's a tiny increase in risk one of these is doing almost nothing and there's much more to be found the other disorders depression, bipolar disorder attention deficit disorder autism they're going through similar processes they're finding similar things but they're less advanced than schizophrenia which is why my focus is on schizophrenia because I can illustrate more but the other disorders are going through similar processes now so far I've talked to you about these common genetic variants that have minimal effects but occasionally there are these things we call rare copy number variants it doesn't really matter what we call them there's a picture of a chromosome there sometimes people get a hole in their chromosome a big chunk gets knocked out of it so they've got a chunk of their chromosome missing they quite often lead to medical conditions in this case this person has got a... the name of the syndrome doesn't really matter what matters is that instead of a minuscule increase in risk of schizophrenia the person with this hole in a chromosome has a 25 fold increase in risk of schizophrenia so this is not like putting the straw in the back of a camel this is like putting a giant tree on the back of a camel camels are pretty strong so they can cope with the trees so they still need a number of straws but they just can't cope with as many straws and since those discoveries the same technology that I refer to allows us to look for holes in chromosomes systematically and a bunch of these have been found now there's about 15 of them there's a few key properties that I'm going to look to now and important properties I'm going to look to later first of all they're rare each of them occurs in less than one in a thousand people they have these big effects on disease but they're still not deterministic you can have these there'll be people in this room with at least one of them the combined total frequency in the general population is about, you know, one, two percent so there'll be people in this room with them you can have these things and live a perfectly high achieving life not develop a psychiatric disorder so they're not deterministic but they do increase your risk a lot so this is kind of what we've found we've found lots of, this is how common something is from common to rare this is how big the effect on disease risk is up there and we've found a whole lot of things that are common and have tiny effects on risk we've found a whole bunch of things that are rare and have relatively large effects on risk the shape of this curve is important and I'll come back to it when we're talking about evolution later on however, so far this is just a stamp collecting exercise we're finding things if this is not going to do anything useful we may as well not have bothered so, my main motivation for getting into this was to try and understand biology so what have we been able to find out? well, we've got a lot of these things so we can begin to look right so we've got 300, say we get 330, 340 genetic findings related to schizophrenia there are ways where we can say ok which bodily tissues are those genes active in and there are so many hypotheses about the origins of schizophrenia that that's a very legitimate question because there are even people who think that schizophrenia has no biological basis so what you can do is you can say well are these genes active in fat tissue the immune system, the cardiovascular system the gut, the liver, etc, etc these colours here correspond to the colours here and if you see a dot above that line there then that means the genes are active in that tissue they're more active in that tissue than any other tissue and the tissue in schizophrenia that the genes are active in is the central nervous system it's that kind of, I don't know what you call that colour, orange-ish there's pretty much no evidence for genetic activity in any of the other tissues so the main risk organ is the brain now if I'm talking to much younger psychiatrist in training I regard this as the, if you'll excuse the language no shitsherlock slide on the other hand speaking to my contemporaries when I was training there are plenty of people who are not willing to assume that the main risk organ existed never mind that it was the brain we can go a little bit further than that so the brain has multiple cell types the neurons, most people have had neurons they're the kind of cells that are the process the information in the central nervous system they're the kind of the main where the main action is traditionally thought to be but there's lots of other cell types that have got important roles and we need to know what are the cells in the brain that are most likely to be aberrant in schizophrenia so by the same principle we can see which of these cells the genes are active in and again it's colour coded and above that blue line is only the big green one and that's the cell corresponding to the neuron we know the main activity is in the central nervous system we know it's in neurons now neurons are quite big structures and there's this there's this tiny bit that I've cartooned in here called the synapse now for those of you with no biological background the synapse is the bit where two nerve cells speak to each other one kind of releases chemicals that is picked up by another one and that's how they communicate with each other and so that's the point of contact between two different neurons which I've got a bad cartoon over there so when we look at where in the neurons the genes are concentrated in it's in this particular structure of the synapse now the details I think are probably not that exciting to this audience and in fact but we know that the signal is concentrated in this type of neuron and we know that it's concentrated in the cell that's receiving the signal rather than generating the signal now that's pretty much as far as our biology has gone but that's gone a long way from this kind of vague stuff that I was being trained about it's still not deep enough to really understand exactly what's going wrong with these proteins exactly how it could then be targeted if at all for treatment so there's still a lot of work to be gone about I think we've come along quite a lot in a relatively short period of time and some of these molecules suggest immediately new ways of targeting them with treatments I believe that's optimistic but there are some people pursuing some of these molecules now trying to see if there's new ways of treating it but I think we need a deeper biological understanding than that I'm going to move slightly on to the... because one of the things that's been very surprising to psychiatrists is the structure of psychiatric diagnosis and what genetics is telling us about that so for those of you who are unaware you know, when you go and see a GP or a physician or someone else and you've got a bad back's a bad example but maybe a pain in the chest or something like that the GP will come up with a hypothesis as to why you've got the pain we'll usually organise some tests which may or may not confirm the hypothesis you go and see a psychiatrist you've got a bunch of symptoms the psychiatrist says those symptoms fit schizophrenia those symptoms fit obsessive compulsive disorder those symptoms fit depression that's where it ends there's no biologically... biological way of testing whether or not the doctor's hypothesis is correct so diagnosis in psychiatry is a hypothesis it can be reliable but that doesn't mean to say it's biologically valid and given that a lot of the treatments we offer are biological we need to begin to make biologically valid diagnoses not just on the basis of symptoms but on something else so does genetics have anything to contribute towards this story? in order for me to explain how it's contributing to that story I have to talk a bit more about what I described earlier on is these highly polygenic disorders and this is where the high frequency of these risk factors and their small effects becomes critical so bear with me it looks terribly complicated it's in fact very simple each of those squares with colours in it represents a different person now imagine there are only a hundred risk genes for schizophrenia we know I've already told you there's more than that but let's just imagine there's only a hundred each of these tiny boxes represents a possible risk gene it's a 10 by 10 grid so there's a hundred risk genes so you picture that let's imagine each has a frequency of the population so 10% of the population carries one copy or more if you've got one copy of the risk gene you've got a blue square if you've got two copies of the risk gene you've got a red square if you've got no copies of the risk gene you've got a white square even with only a hundred risk variants there's enough ways of filling in these squares for every single person in the world to be different so no two patients is identical in terms of their risk genetics what's more you can do the maths even with only a hundred risk genes that means the average person in the population this isn't the average person who has schizophrenia this is the average person in the population has 20 of them and there is no one statistically who has none now you can multiply that up by at least a factor of 10 there's at least a thousand risk genes not a hundred so the average person probably has about 200 of these things now what we can now do I mentioned that we could measure your DNA using the same technology I could grab your DNA and count how many you've got and how many you've got and I can see who is relatively more or less at risk where are you on this risk curve and when you do that it looks like this so there's about 10,000 people representing this graph and this is if you count up the number of risk alleles these people don't have very many these guys have got quite a lot and the more they've got the bigger the risk of illness I don't want anyone to go away thinking that we're now doing genetic diagnosis of psychiatric disorders because we're not without giving you the figures this is woefully this is no good for diagnosis you'd get vastly more people wrong than you would write if you ever tried to apply this methodology what you can do is say okay we can measure people's risk for schizophrenia and where they are on that spectrum are there any other disorders that look a bit like schizophrenia so are there other disorders that share a lot of these risk genes with schizophrenia when you do that and this I have to say none of my psychiatric colleagues would leave this when we produced something that looked like this about 10 years ago now on this graph you've got the higher the bar is the more similar the disorder is to schizophrenia in terms of genetic risk along this axis all we've got is different psychiatric labels every single psychiatric disorder that we've mentioned that we've measured is more similar to schizophrenia shares genetic similarity to a greater or lesser extent with schizophrenia the most similar disorder is bipolar disorder which is the kind of major mood disorder with mania and depression the depression share is about 50% correlated with schizophrenia even anorexia obsessive compulsive disorder ADHD you name it they share risk with schizophrenia if you take those CNVs they're the holes in the chromosomes I was talking about earlier on the ones with the big risks on schizophrenia every single one that we've found so far that increases risk of schizophrenia also increases risk of intellectual disability most of them increase risk of autism as well so the bottom line is that when you look at it from the biological genetic perspective there is no neat separation between the psychiatric diagnosis that doesn't mean to say that there is no validity at all in psychiatric diagnosis people with schizophrenia are more similar to each other than people with schizophrenia are to someone with autism so there's degrees of relationship so there is some validity but it's not a clear cut biological validity so this leads us to wonder can we instead of relying entirely on a diagnostic label can we begin to cluster people by the degree of genetic similarity that's illustrated in the next slide so imagine you've got a disorder let's call it bipolar disorder manic depression and old money let's pretend there are only kind of two forms of that with different biologies so although they've got same symptoms same outward appearance internally there's only two biologies biology blue, biology red biology blue really needs treatment A biology B really needs treatment B but we've got no means of telling the difference between A and B based upon the clinical picture so what we decide to try and do is if we take people with bipolar disorder can we divide them into people who've got high schizophrenia liability because bipolar disorder shares risk with schizophrenia and low schizophrenia liability and as it happens to a beginning approximation we can so if we take the population of people with bipolar there are basically two classes of bipolar which are more severe and less severe and they're called bipolar one and bipolar two exactly what underlies them is important it's only the bipolar one that shares similarity with schizophrenia, bipolar two doesn't so you've already got a biological basis for dividing those two types of bipolar disorder we can take bipolar disorder further and divide that into people with bipolar disorder who have psychotic symptoms that's hallucinations and delusions very prominently, very frequently they're quite similar to people with schizophrenia whereas those that don't are much less similar to people with schizophrenia so again there's a point there of beginning to divide and carve up what we call stratify bipolar disorder so this is the start of being able to divide up disorders the aim is that we can then target treatments more effectively we can understand the subgroups better I'll give you one ADHD slide here I was going to give two slides but I'll skip one of them so we also, I've said to you that we cannot diagnose we cannot say who's going to have schizophrenia or ADHD or depression based upon the genetics but looking to see whether or not genetics distinguishes amongst people with a disorder is a different question so challenge one, ADHD is its onset usually in childhood for a reasonable number of people it begins to peter out in terms of the main symptoms by the time they reach adolescence and early adulthood but for others it remains persistent and for those people, ADHD some people view as almost a trivial thing people with ADHD get vastly inflated rates of being incarcerated drug addiction, loss of life expectancy, blah blah blah ADHD is a serious disorder and particularly in those where it doesn't peter out so this is where I'm going to skip so we looked at population of people and this line basically, all these various lines here this is age on this axis and months and this is the degree of symptomatology on this axis and we're really interested in the top two lines you get people who are the age of 47 months that's about 4 years old you get two groups with high levels of symptoms but one of the groups begins to decrease by 100 months or 86 months the other group remains chronic up to 200 months and we haven't measured beyond that the group with the high burden of ADHD genetic risk alleles are the ones that remain high so we can to a statistical level at the moment not a clinical level but to a statistical level we can start to distinguish those people who might need more interventions very early because the other ones to a greater or less extent will take care of themselves now evolutionary psychology why people are preoccupied with this I don't know but nevertheless there is a huge discipline of evolutionary psychology in my view it's entirely speculative but we've now got some hard data to talk about it so there's a couple of... this applies to most psychiatric disorders again I'll illustrate with schizophrenia there's no clinical aim here as far as I can tell you what I'm going to tell you will never be of any clinical value whatsoever but it is a curiosity the people are interested in that it is a curiosity so people with schizophrenia have on average one third of the children that people without schizophrenia have got now in real... in Darwinian terms if you like this is natural selection if you don't have children then your genes don't get passed on and that disorder those genes should vanish from the population this is what's called negative selection and actually only having a third the number of children is actually a very intensive form of selection it really should if all things being equal vanish from the population there are very few if any disorders where the number of children is reduced by quite so much that where the disorder remains as common as schizophrenia is so in order to try and explain this there's been a whole load of creative thinking going on so some people... what people like to do I think because it's a nice intellectual exercise they can sit around having a glass of wine and talk crap with their mates and speculate back in Greek times or something like that having schizophrenia and genetics would be advantageous I've given you a few examples here one of the most popular ones is based upon the I forgive the language mad genius idea that the people who don't fully manifest schizophrenia but the people who are related to those with schizophrenia they have got more creativity and this is a benefit to themselves or society and that explains its persistence we've even seen someone say that being an artist I don't know if we've got artists but I guess we'll probably have some creatives in here being creative or being an artist is the male... the human equivalent of a peacock's tail this is a highly sexist type of remark but the basic idea is that male artists will be very desired amongst females and so they'll mate with them having a big peacock's tail I'm not saying I buy it I'm just telling you that's the story someone else proposed the Odyssean personality this is such a major paper that I was unable to access it on the internet but nevertheless in a manuscript that I wrote last year I was specifically told I had to cite the Odyssean personality I think the general idea is that people who have high schizophrenia liability might be cunning like Odysseus maybe a bit more involved in out-of-the-box thinking magical thinking more cold-hearted, more detached willing to take a risk that kind of thing but without reading the paper I can't be sure but anyway they speculated that that would be advantageous in a world plagued by terror, strife and war and then I don't know if anyone's read this book by Sebastian Faulks he deals with a theory proposed by this gentleman Tim Crow that the basic evolution of schizophrenia parallels that of language and that really in order for the brain to formulate language that had to become structured in such a way that you were liable to psychosis I've never bought that, but there we are so they're the exciting ones that people can chat about and argue about till the cows come home and as far as I can see there's very little way of showing that it's true there's a really boring theory that actually the thing, these genetic effects can remain common just by random chance although having schizophrenia itself has a strong negative pressure on you most people who carry these risk alleles, i.e. all of us are not subject to this and that just allows things to float around kind of by chance and things by chance can drift to become common so that's the boring theory now looking at the evidence so the anecdotal theory, this is a chat back in 1931 it cannot simply be chance that among geniuses the healthy constitute only a small minority now this kind of works where people would read biographies of famous composers or painters and so on and conclude that they were mentally unwell but of course that sort of thing is open to huge bias because people who are very creative and who happen to do very dramatic or outlandish things tend to get biographies written about them so the people who are very creative but just kind of sit nicely about it and don't trumpet it will have less written about them these guys however, do we have any accountants or auditors in the audience? so these chaps here somewhere in Sweden decided they would define people as being creatives if they were PhD level scientists or they were occupied in the visual and non-visual arts and what they found out in a pretty systematic study so you could argue about the definition of creative nevertheless amongst this group of people there was pretty convincing evidence in fact that these people were more often to be found in the relatives of people with major mental illness as a contrastor they chose accountants and auditors who they were classified as less creative now don't shoot me, I didn't come up with this and I think if you spoke to Al Capone he would find out the benefits of creative accountancy quite early nevertheless these people were underrepresented in the families of people with schizophrenia and they had all sorts of elaborate things so there's a story case to be answered we're back to our nice genetics here so this is the you measure genetic liability to schizophrenia you get this curve this was done in Iceland they defined creative individuals as belonging to the national artistic societies of actors, dancers, etc and if that green line is the midpoint the average genetic liability to schizophrenia people who were creative were more likely to be on the high side, score wise so that is consistent with this idea that one of the manifestations of genetic liability to schizophrenia could be increased creativity again they chose as the boring group executives and executives were smack in the middle they didn't have a high or low schizophrenia liability they were just normal folk however selection depends upon all the effects of the risk alleles in the population so for any children who see schizophrenia liability increases risk of psychiatric disorders maybe creativity it also is associated with poor recognition unstable mood various personality measures like neuroticism open this low well being and actually selection is on the these are only some of them selection depends on the net effect here and natural selection really boils down to how many children do you have that survived to go on themselves to have children it depends on reproduction it doesn't rely upon us making a value judgment that it would be great to be creative or it would be great to be this or great to be that it's about numbers of children so we looked at this in a sample of about 150,000 people from the UK we measured genetic liability and we know the number of children and what you've got here on this axis is less this is being slightly more than average schizophrenia liability to more and more and more and more until you get high schizophrenia liability up here is a measure of your number of children that you've got if you're below that dotted line you've got less than the population average if you're above the dotted line you've got more than the population average and basically we found evidence for a difference by sex so for males increased schizophrenia burden wasn't really increasing the number of children in fact if anything once you got to the extreme end it was reducing the number of children for females on the other hand there was an increased number of children by increased burden of schizophrenia liability now that's quite contrary if you remember the peacock story I told you it's the males that have got the big peacock things not the females but if this means anything it would be the women that are wearing the peacock tails but in fact although this looks dramatic in the graph the number of excess children is tiny and it cannot offset the real serious reduction in the number of children that people with schizophrenia got so I asked you to try and remember this slide and I think given the way time is going this will be my last slide we've got all these things that are common and small effect we've got these things that are rare and big effect the way it all works anything above this imaginary curve is very easy for us to find anything below that curve is difficult to find but we need to concern ourselves with that basically if there was anything that was common that had a big effect we would have found it we could be pretty sure we would have found it with what we've done therefore there is nothing that's common that has a big effect this these things are driven to be rare by natural selection these things are kept to have small effects by natural selection so rather than being this positive beneficial effect of all these other weird phenotypes that have been affiliated or speculated to be associated with schizophrenia it looks more like the boring thing natural selection is keeping it down there are no major benefits but on the other hand if you've got a reasonable number of these there's no major hazard either some of you might become creative some of you might become depressed but natural selection is keeping it low so it looks like the true answer is the really boring answer and that is it's just chance drift I'm going to skip this out even though being born in winter was quite interesting and come to the conclusion so you know I hope I haven't been either too aggressive or too defensive but over the years I've had to face a lot of skepticism about there being any purpose to doing psychiatric genetics so I hope at least two of you have been persuaded that despite the shortcomings in our ways of classifying psychiatric disorders and so on mental illness can be approached by genetics and that there's a purpose to it that we haven't got all the answers by nowhere near got all the answers trying to find things that look like they'll become useful from biology, from stratification and even things that are interesting but not useful like evolution also genomics can be applied increasingly by researchers with no primary interest at all in the genetics of A, B, C, D which is the vast majority of people I was very cheered a few years ago when I read a paper the authors of which were the social sciences genetic association consortium I personally would not associate genetics with the social sciences and I'm delighted to see that social sciences have taken it up and with that I'll finish up


Just a brief introduction. First of all, my name is Connie Soryo. I am the migrant justice coordinator at Kairos. This is the second webinar that we've done so far. The first one was on March 31st and we had about 55 people joined us and the conversation where the theme is around the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on temporary foreign workers, undocumented workers and refugees. At the last webinar, we had four speakers and they are here today as well. So we had Anne Whitley from the Cooper Institute in PEI. We had Sanchavis Kubar from United Food and Commercial Workers Union and also with the Abicucho Workers Alliance. Tiwa Marsilino from Migrante Manitoba in Winnipeg and we had Roland and Gina Moreno from New Brunswick. I do not see Roland and Gina joining us today and I've been trying to get in touch with them but I'm not hearing back. So I think they're not able to join us. From the last conversation, we received or we heard updates from the different provinces on how the pandemic is and continues to impact temporary foreign workers. Particularly temporary foreign workers, those who are coming in to work in the farms and also those who are already here. For today, we will continue to hear updates from the four speakers and we will also hear from Claire who has introduced herself earlier. She was the former president of the Canadian Council on Refugees from 2017 to 2019. And she is the ministry, well, from the diocese of London and the ministry specialist on Indian protection. So Claire will basically give us an update on how the pandemic is impacting refugees, claimants, refugees and protected persons who are here in Canada. After the sharing, we would open it up for people in the room to give us an update from where they're coming from. So pretty much in 10 minutes. And then we will look at, what are the recent announcements at the federal level with regards to strengthening protection of temporary foreign workers? And later on, we can continue the conversation on how we can all be of support to the workers coming in and to those who are already here. So we can start with, well, we can start with the updates and I guess we can start with Diva. Hi everyone, I'm Diva with Migrante Manitoba. I've been an organizer with Migrante starting in Toronto since 2001. In Manitoba, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected workers in different ways. The granted mainly works with permanent residents, temporary foreign workers and also migrant workers and also undocumented workers. So off the bat, we know that many workers in the meat processing industry, the industry with the largest share of temporary foreign workers, has laid off quite a few workers in order to keep safe businesses. But we are still receiving reports that workers are still working very closely with each other. And we know in the past, there's been incidents like inadvertent stabbings and cuts because workers are working very close to each other and that has not changed. Workers are still working less than a meter away from each other. We're also looking at, we're also helping a number of undocumented workers, workers who've had status in the past but have lost their status. Some of these workers or most of these workers are still in the process of getting their way back to getting their status. But in the meantime, they're left, unfortunately, they're not able to, for the most part, able to access federal income supports. But that's why we're calling on the government, federal government to give federal income supports to all workers regardless of status. And also healthcare to all workers regardless of status. And also, we've also had a number of reports from permanent residents themselves. We consider workers with permanent resident status to also be precarious like temporary foreign workers, seasonal agricultural workers, refugee claimants and undocumented workers because many workers are still trying to find their way towards citizenship. And we often see that employers will use this against them and sometimes exploit them in different ways. So in Manitoba, we are still seeing much of the same abuses as before with migrant workers. But now with the COVID crisis, we find that many are left without income supports. So that's a little bit of an update in Manitoba. Thank you, Tiwa. Anne? Sure. So in Prince Edward Island, we still don't have very many workers here. But those who are here, there are concerns about losing income because of reduced work hours. And I'm not sure that the, I think Connie, you've actually been maybe in touch with a few workers who've had some issues getting access to the emergency benefits and the employment insurance. And I've heard from one or two as well that that's a little complicated. And I think that if, I also think that there are workers in Prince Edward Island who don't speak English and that information, I'm not sure that it's available in other languages. And isolation is an issue for the workers who are here. They're being, they're obviously a lot less mobile and reporting that they're not sort of, they're keeping being kept very separate from other workers. I just heard our Premier say in a press conference that he had told the federal government that we don't need as many foreign workers this year, which is a little odd because the farmers are complaining that they haven't gotten here yet. And I know that our lobster fishery or all of our shellfish fisheries depend on workers in processing. So I'm not sure what that's all about. I think that we know from some of the Mexican workers who are still in touch with, who are still in Mexico that they want to come here, although there is some concern about what will happen when they come, how they'll be protected. But this is really important. A lot of the workers who come to Prince Edward Island every year have been coming for decades in some cases. So this is a really crucial part of their income. So I hope that we can find a way of getting them here. We did hear, I also heard the Premier say that those workers who do come will be undergoing self-isolation in hotels. They've booked rooms for people to do that. Of course, it's the employers who are supposed to make sure that all of the considerations around self-isolation are taken into account and that workers are paid for their two weeks and that they have enough food and access to everything that they need. We're part of the Migrant Rights Network. And so as Idiwa said, really advocating for total access to the supports regardless of immigration status for undocumented workers as well. And the other thing that we've been sort of involved with with the Migrant Rights Network would be just making sure that those guidelines around what happens when workers get here and they're needing to self-isolate, making sure that those are followed and that they're monitored, that workers have a way of complaining if they feel they're not, if they're not being paid, if they don't have what they need, if the measures aren't adequate enough for their safety. And I think the other thing that I would say, I can put the link in the chat box, but there have been a couple of articles. There was one yesterday in the Toronto Star that I'm not sure if anyone saw, but it was there, there was an interview with a worker who felt that he arrived in Canada a little while ago in I think the Niagara region and didn't feel that he had received the information that he needed to keep safe. And so there were some local activists also interviewed and making the point that this needs to, everything needs to be completely accessible and in people's language and there needs to be more monitoring of these guidelines. So I think that's my update. Thank you very much, Anne. I just want to add a little bit because I've been in contact with the temporary workers who are in O'Leary, they're working at the South Shore Love Sur processing or yeah, fish plant. And in one of the houses provided by the employers, there's about 32 of them. And so it is a concern about being able to follow the physical distancing, and also then being provided with the necessary, health, say this infectant soaps and so forth. I was also informed that many of the workers who are in that particular house were denied or refused access to employment insurance. They are expecting about 76 for the first year for just a particular plan. They're expecting 76 more temporary workers to arrive soon although the opening of the season has been postponed for about two weeks, I think. So I've connected with Anne and we're planning to do a webinar with these workers in terms of being able to support them in accessing EI, finding out why they were refused in the first place and providing that support that no, they should be included in being able to access EI and all forms of income benefits for workers who are not able to work yet or that they're waiting for the season to start. So that's a bit of an update from O'Leary. We can go to Santiago. Hi everyone, here's Santiago with U of CW. So a quick update following loving efforts by U of CW advocates, community allies, migrant workers have achieved paid protection and employment insurance, the eligibility for those who are laid off have become ill or have to quarantine due to COVID-19. So meaning that migrant workers arriving in Canada will be paid during self-isolation. These are very good news. In light of the fact that they would likely otherwise be working, are self-isolating for health and safety reasons and to ensure that workers can adequately take care of themselves while in self-isolation. So while we welcome these measures, our union is concerned that workers are not able to practice appropriate physical distancing in their cramp, leaving quarters and closed working spaces. We all know they leave the shared spaces with 10, 15, 20 workers in some cases in one house. And that they may be vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 as we have already seen migrant workers contracting the COVID-19 in Kelowna and now in Ontario. So it is a time bomb because unfortunately we have learned that most of the employers are not implementing accordingly. We also learned a couple of days ago that agriculture minister announced 50 million in federal funding to provide $1,500 per worker which can be used to cover wages while there are in quarantine or they're cause of space to isolate for 14 days. But it's gonna be, this funding goes to farmers, to employers. So we believe that migrant workers who play such essential role in sustaining our food supply chain should be properly compensated for the work during this crisis. And this is why we are calling on the government to mandate a $2 wage increase for all migrant farm workers participating in the temporary foreign workers program and in the seasonal agricultural workers program. And now is also an appropriate time to question our reliance on the temporary foreign workers program. When we know that migrant and temporary foreign workers are critical to feeding our cities and make it possible for us to have food on our tables. So we should instead be prioritizing pathways to permanent residents for these workers, not only because it's the human thing to do as the right thing to do, but also because it is essential to sustaining our food supply particularly in this time of crisis. So this is my update. Thank you very much, Sanchaco. From the last webinar, it was pointed out that, we did not have much update or sharing on what the pandemic is impacting refugees. So that's why I invited Claire to give us an update on how this is impacting refugee claimants and also in terms of what the CCR is doing. Claire. Hello, everybody. So thank you, Connie, for inviting me today. My work is mainly with refugee claimants, convention refugees, but often I also find that there's a cross-section between the two populations, which is the migrant workers and the refugees. So this is very important for me to hear those updates. So thank you. So I guess what I'm gonna be bringing is just a little bit of what we know as we also just trying to learn information daily almost and we just try to cope with what it is. But I guess in the forefront for advocacy, this is actually a joint call from the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Amnesty International, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and the BC Save and Liberty Association is to ask the minister to reconsider opening the borders to refugee claimants just like with the exception with some international students and temporary foreign workers. Because as you know, the borders have been closed to refugee claimants. It will be a month now next week. And this really posed a whole lot of legal implications. I'm not gonna say what those are, but it is truly violating international legal obligations on the practical side on how that plays in the ground. We are very much worried that refugee claimants as some of you may know only has one time opportunity and a lifetime to make a refugee claim. So although we are told that if they make a claim at the border or at the regular border and are turned away, we were told that there's a dialogue that they will not be penalized and will not be detained when sent back to the US. For sure, hopefully that is what's happening. If that's really what's happening, we don't know. And unless we find that when the borders are reopened and if they're truly allowed to make a claim and not get penalized on that one time when they already made that initial claim, we will never know. So we will always keep a very, we're gonna be remain vigilant on this particular issue because this is truly violating human rights. So that is as far as the borders for COVID-19. As far as the refugee claimants that are already here in Canada, but are in the process of making the refugee claim, there is a process of email between IRCC that has IRCC has issued directives. So they will acknowledge the claim and hopefully that will allow refugee claimants to access services. However, that means in this world today where there is really no frontline workers on the settlement advisors in their offices, I'm not really sure how refugee claimants are going to be able to access that help. So we try, like for me, I try to do as much as a remote support as I can. But it is happening, they can still make a claim if you know someone that is interested in making a claim, there is still a process for that. Maybe later we could share the link. There's a very up with the CCR where you can find all the resources and to help refugee claimants. Now for those refugee claimants who are already in the system and now have to face the fact that they don't have now legal representation to help them during this time and they have deadlines to meet, especially with their basis of claim, that's where the actual story and the actual claim to go to the Immigration and Refugee Board, that deadline has been extended up to May 30th and hopefully that nobody falls between the cracks. But even though that 30th, there's still that worry that if we reopen services in May 15, let's pretend all these refugee claimants will now scram and find their lawyers and meet that May 30 deadline. So we're gonna continue to watch out for those as well. As far as also the Immigration and Refugee Board, especially for those that are waiting, the refugee hearings, as you know, for the longest time, we have refugee claimants have been waiting for so long. What originally was supposed to be a 30 day and a 45 hearing process has now turned to one year and prior to this COVID, it has been 18 months and it was actually unfortunate because it was during the time, this time that the Immigration and Refugee Board has actually now have utilized the additional funding that they have received from the federal government and now everything will be put to a semi stop. I think, and this is also sufficient, that maybe they are going through some paper review. Paper review is where there's those cases that can actually be decided positively on paper but not on a negative, the decision on paper. But still, this will be very difficult because some of the paper review actually requires refugee claimants to submit paper evidence. So within that time. So we're still also, even though that process is there, we are, I'm not sure. Another problem that we are facing and which is huge is work permits. Work permits for refugee claimants that have been waiting since the process, since COVID has started, those work permits that are expiring, that, you know, that what will be the directives to the employers, will they let go of this employees? But just so you know, majority of these refugee claimants are working at the agricultural sector and the health sector. We have, there's so many personal support workers for refugee claimants and many refugees. It hasn't been that it's a, most of the work permits, especially like late last year, have only been issued for a year. So those are all expiring. And there is really no way to renew work permits right now because there is a biometrics requirement as of this time. And biometrics for refugee claimants is quite impossible for the majority because they don't have the identification to even complete biometrics. So that is that. But there is like, well, the CCR, the Caging Council for Refugees, have an ongoing dialogue with the immigration refugee board citizenship of Canada and the Canada Border Service Agency regularly during this time. So we're able to really bring cases forward and see what directions we're going to move forward. The last one I think we had was April, right around refugee rights day. And I know we're going to have one soon. Another one, if I have two more minutes, Connie, is this for convention refugees? Convention refugees are those the ones that have already successfully passed their refugee hearing and now actually are in the middle of the process of reuniting families. So there are many visas already, travel ready family members that are about to join refugees in Canada, but unfortunately with international organization of migration also halted. Also the visa application centers where they biometrics, where they're going to get their passport, those are also stopped. So there's a really bit of worry, a lot of worry that those visas will expire. And when those visa expire, how, what will be though the policy for those visa office as far as moving forward. Lastly, is as far as the practical help to access Thurb and the EI, it is very financially, it's very, we find that there are many that are falling between the cracks. That's another sort of like basket that I'm thinking that truly are not, just able to access any. And even those that some that are able to have entire your works at least, but they're still not able to have, let's just say refugee claimants that have been here last year, they have not filed their taxes yet. So they don't have the GSD that is helpful to many of us. Also, I find that no matter what, refugee claimants for the most part have only access internet in public places. They're not able to afford internet. So what is simple to others for us to say that, oh, just apply online or even in phone, that they have very limited minutes on their phone. It's those pay as you go. They're not able to do so. And what worries me the most about internet, though that might not be a lot, is because this is their number one sort of mental health solution because that's the only thing that they have access to families outside Canada without internet. Now we are very worried on the mental health on those people that are isolated and totally alone living here. So that's a little bit of the shortcut of what I can give you. And thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you very much Claire. It is very, very informative and helpful for us to understand how refugees are being impacted. I just want to add on the two points that you mentioned. One is the work permits. This also applies to temporary foreign workers, caregivers and other workers in other streams of the program. Many of them have applied the permanent, to renew the permanent residency. No, sorry. Many of them have applied to renew their work permits and some of them have been waiting for three months and they are not hearing anything. So they are going to lose the 90, if this work permits are refused then they already lost the 90 days window to be able to restore their status. Also in terms of visas to families issued to refugees and also temporary workers who had already been accepted as permanent residents in Canada. So family reunification is also very much affected. Visits have been issued but because countries and even Canada is not allowing permanent residents who have not landed in Canada yet to arrive. The possibility or visas expiring and what would be the next steps for them. If they have to renew the visas it's going to be an additional cost for them. Also in terms of settlement organizations or agencies in Ontario, I don't know how it is in other provinces but in Ontario offices are closed, the agencies are closed but they are providing skeletal staffing in the office to be able to respond to phone calls and be able to assist refugees, temporary workers and permanent residents who are in precarious and vulnerable situations, assisting them over the phone. So we've heard these updates from our presenters. We've heard about in the sharing many of the concerns raised includes the ability of the migrant workers to be able to access the aid packages that the federal and provincial governments have been announcing. This is a big concern because although on papers and in those announcements they are saying that foreign migrant workers are able or are included in these packages but we all know as well that when it comes to implementation, there's a lot of problems there. One of the biggest problems is how foreign workers can access information. How foreign workers can get support or assistance in filing for access. Where would it go? Claire mentioned that many of them did not have access or did not have personal computers or internet and they go to libraries or settlement agencies to be able to use computers and be able to apply online. We also heard about how the Minister of Agriculture had been assuring us that the physical distancing is going to be implemented by employers and that these workers are going to be paid for the two weeks that they are doing self isolation. But we already heard that some of the workers are not getting access to this two week isolation with pay and also housing is still a big problem. We at Kairos, we are in the process of coming out with an advocacy letter, advocacy campaign in terms of supporting those asks that despite the fact that we are encouraged by these announcements it is very different when it comes to what's happening on the ground. Like how access is provided to temporal workers and documented workers and refugees. I wonder if a part of the conversation we're going to have in the few minutes remaining, if we can hear from you in terms of what are you doing in the organizations that you're in or with as an individual in terms of providing assistance and an accompaniment to the workers who are in your communities. I could start, I guess. I think at this point we're really just trying to keep in touch with workers who are already here. And be open to supporting them in whatever way they need. But I think also the advocacy is really important and making sure that those programs are accessible. And because the barriers, as you just really outlined those perfectly, they're worse. They're more significant right now in terms of communication. And of course the condition around housing those things were bad to begin with and they're good and it's worse now and with very serious implications for people's health and well-being. So I think as much as that's kind of where we're at to largely it's advocacy, getting in touch with our MPs, sharing information on Facebook and sort of mobilizing the sort of community of people who have some connection with workers who are here so that they just keep in touch. Thank you, Anne. In P, I know that there is a group of Chinese speaking workers who are both working in fish plants but also in the farms. I met some of them and a lot of them do not speak English. So it is a big barrier for them to, one, understand what are they entitled to and also how they can express what they're going through the exploitation and need that they are facing, the challenges they are facing. And I guess this is also true to other provinces where those working in remote communities are not able to speak the language fluently and feeling very isolated and feeling detached and not supported. Other places? If I may jump in, as UFCW and the Agricultural Workers Alliance we have a toll-free and also we have social media vehicles. So we are trying to spread the word because we have seen that a lot of migrant workers, they don't know how to prevent, they don't know what to do if they contracted the virus, they don't know procedures and also I think it's important to coordinate with sending countries. So we are in contact with the government of Guatemala and Mexico. So we're coordinating with these governments too. A lot of migrant workers are calling, especially from Mexico, because they don't know what's next. They don't know if they'll be able to travel to Canada this year or not, or in many cases they already got their flight tickets and they couldn't fly to Canada. So we are also providing assistance to these workers and for those that want to try the employment insurance benefits because just to mention a farm in the Cinco area, they stopped working because of the COVID-19. So these workers apply and we will see how it goes after the next couple of days. And also those who are experiencing abuses, we're still assisting these workers to apply to obtain an open work permit as vulnerable workers. So the good news is that IRCC is still processing these work permits. And yeah, that's all on my end. Thank you, Santiago. I'm wondering, Father Peter. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, I'm in a unique position because I've got on the one hand contact with the migrant workers. I mean, not that I've seen many in town. So they're just coming in a little bit at a time. But I'm also in touch with the farmers. So I know that we know there's many examples of tough situations or unjust. I could say that at least for my community, I'm only talking about a handful that I know from my church, the farmers are very good to their workers from what I've been there. They treat them humanely. And they themselves don't have all the answers either. They're trying to get the information because everything is changing, evolving and so forth. So yeah, so I see them making an effort like the other day, one of the farmers asked me, can you help me put some like a little package or a little instructions for them? And I said, well, I said, there's a YouTube video put up by the migrant worker community. And it's actually bilingual. I don't know if anybody's seen it. It was made by the Ontario Provincial Police and it's bilingual in conjunction with the farm worker, migrant worker community. It was well done, just the basics about the COVID, the crisis, the health being quarantined, washing your hands, so forth and so on. And also where they can, in general, where they can go if they have any concerns. So that's one sort of assistance, but you're right, there needs to be a lot more information sharing. And then we have a lady here who kind of becomes kind of a conduit of information because when the workers are here, she has a little business of helping them transfer or send back money back home. So right now she set up a kind of a on the WhatsApp chat because guys have been asking, saying, what's going on? How's the situation? We don't know. So yeah, there's still a lot of uncertainty and aside, coupled with even before the pandemic in this area, there are already some cutbacks because of international trade, whatever. So there are things that were going on beforehand. So it's a difficult situation right now. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I just like to, if Anne has pre-prepared letters that have gone to MPs or could go or posts to Facebook, that would be great to share on the chat or afterwards to everybody because I think that would help kickstart us to move ahead on this. And the same thing with other links that Santiago had mentioned and so on. That would be really helpful. Thanks, Suzanne. Hi, Catherine. Hi. How are you? I'm good. I'm in the Beamsville Vineland area. And we have 203 workers at the moment, 30 women. And I'm one of four churches involved in an organization to help them. And if before the virus arrived, we were having dinner every Sunday with all the workers. And of course, now we can't do that. So at this point, one of the churches is delivering food every week, fresh bread and buns and cakes and to the workers. But they're lonely because they miss seeing each other. Catherine, are you with the Anglican Church? With the United Church. Oh, with the United Church. But the Anglican Church, St. Albans is the one who really organized this whole thing. Yeah, yeah. And they, I'm gonna try and get someone from that group to come on the webinar. And Catherine, if you know, you can have a worker join us. That might be difficult because... They are working or they feel, you know, a threatened or, yeah. No, I'm flexible, yeah. I think it would be difficult to get them in here. Get them to join in because they are at work. Yeah, yeah. The timing is not conducive for them. Although we are trying to organize webinars, you know, to just for workers, to have a forum where they can, you know, they can share information but also to break the isolation. Yes. So that they would feel they're connected, even given, you know, the current situation. But being in a webinar and seeing other people and talking the same issues, I think, you know, that would help them as well. Yeah. So I'm organizing one with the workers in Lamington in Kingsville. And also I just spoke to Anne and we're organizing one as well in, you know, for the workers in Old Leary or in PEI. So maybe it can help us organize, you know, one for the Binsville area. Are most of them Spanish speaking? Yes, yes, they are. Yeah, we can bring in Alfredo. Oh, and Shannon, you know. Yeah. We'll get in touch with you in terms of, you know, how we can and when we can, you know, organize this webinar to reach out to workers there. Well, I will speak to one of the other organizers and we'll see what we can do. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay. Okay, bye. Bye. We have four minutes remaining and I guess what is very important, you know, in the conversation or in this webinar is the ability to be able to share, you know, information on the ground and also looking at what each and every one of us are doing in terms of being able to support directly or being, yeah, the affected workers, refugees and the vulnerable community and also finding support in how we can, you know, we can do things both at the community level and at the federal level. As mentioned, you know, earlier, there's a lot to do in terms of making sure that, you know, any of the policies or action that the government is doing in response to the pandemic in response to providing support to people who are vulnerable and precarious that, you know, we follow up and we make sure that these are implemented and that we become, I wouldn't say the third person but we become the bridge, you know, between the implementation of these policies and those people who are needing the support. We are all rooted in, you know, in our organizations in our communities and one of the strengths I guess that we can do is really have our eyes and ears open making sure that both the workers are protected and that the employers or the farm owners are abiding by the measures that, you know, the guidelines that both the federal and the provincial government have put in place in ensuring the protection of, you know, the temporary workers. In the next, you know, webinar, I am hoping that, you know, we would be able to invite farm owners to share, you know, what are the challenges they're facing and also to hear from them how they are implementing, you know, these measures and also from directly, you know, inviting an agricultural worker or workers in terms of what they are experiencing on the ground, not to, you know, to have these two groups face-to-face and possibly open to, you know, conflict or anything, but really in terms of making us understand where are the gaps and how can we jump in and be able to support both? We've already, we've been saying that, you know, farm growers and migrant workers are important in ensuring that there's food security, that, you know, the food supply in Canada is not impacted, but our need should be consistent to, you know, promoting and respecting the human rights of everyone, especially the workers. One thing also that I'm looking at or we're looking at at Kairos is how our personnel support workers or health workers are, you know, surviving or coping with these challenges. They are in the front lines in terms of providing support and care to infected or, you know, people, especially those in the nursing, you know, or long-term healthcare or facilities. So these are the, you know, these are the two things or two topics that we want to explore in, you know, the next webinar. We've said in the past that, you know, we're doing this every two weeks. I don't know if that is still, you know, a goal for the people who are in the call right now. And yeah, and if we can also just get a brief feedback in terms of how you find this webinar helpful and useful in, you know, in our common understanding of what is happening and where we can jump in to provide support. I guess I want to, yeah, I want to close, you know, the webinar with a note or thoughts from, you know, from participants in terms of how you find this useful or helpful. I think this has been really very valuable and I'm not involved directly, but hearing the things that are possible to be involved in, I agree with, I think Anne, who said if you were to post the possible kind of letters and things that would be really helpful to me and I've learned a lot today. So I hope to come back in two weeks time. Thank you. I also want to say, this is Claire, I also want to say, you know, I think this is very helpful. I think it is very understandable that we all learn as we go along. There's nobody, nothing has prepared any one of us to this kind of situation and march more to the people that we're trying to help and serve. So the more information we have, I think that will be our weapon to move forward. So anything like this, thank you to Kyros for organizing it and looking forward to joining you in a couple of weeks. Thank you, Claire. This is Linda from Hamilton. I found this invaluable, I learned a great deal and I certainly support the idea of looking at the PSWs and what's been going on for them. I think this is a really critical issue and it's been going on a very long time and I think what the virus has done is helped us begin to realize the injustice that's been going on in that system for a very long time. So thank you immensely. I appreciate it very much. Yeah, thank you, Linda. I guess in that note, we can, you know, we can say we close the webinar and again, thank you, thank you so much to Santiago, to Anne, to Tiwa and to Claire for providing us updates from where they're coming from and the work that they're doing and for everyone, you know, for sharing your thoughts and you can always connect with us at Kyros in terms of what you can do, how you can support and also let us know how can we, you know, continue the work that we are doing. Thank you so much, everyone. Bye. Thank you, everyone. It's very, very good. Thank you. Bye.