OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award
This award is supported by the Council of the Ontario Psychiatric Association. The OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award recognizes contributions to the profession of psychiatry and to the public by a community psychiatrist engaging in grassroots advocacy in their local area. It is expected that candidates have not previously had provincial or national level recognition for their advocacy work. The successful candidate must spend a majority of their time engaged in delivery of clinical services. The award is open to OPA members who have been engaged in advocacy work through one or more of the following areas: clinical care, education, and administration.
Nomination Process:
Nominations for 2025 are now closed. Stay tuned for the 2026 nomination cycle.
The 2025 OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award Winners are:
Dr. Andrew Howlett
Dr. Howlett practices full-time in the Department of Psychiatry at St. Joseph's Health Centre - Toronto, and is Service Head of the Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health Program. His advocacy work and contributions have included expanding the concept of perinatal mental health care to include fathers, and he co-founded the Fathers' Mental Health Network and identified a clinical focus on expectant and new fathers. He established the first Fathers' Mental Health Clinic in Canada, and this work has been featured by media outlets, and presented at conferences and other public health and community settings. Dr. Howlett has also been an advocate leader and chaired a working group for his professional division that eventually led to the creation of an Advocacy Forum. The Advocacy Forum will enable other members to submit advocacy related issues and will facilitate discussions on the top priorities affecting the mental health of children and adolescents in our community.
Dr. Samuel Law
Dr. Law is the Associate Head of the Community Psychiatry Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, the Clinical Director of the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team, and the Lead for the program's Court Support program for over 20 years. He and colleagues have pioneered an innovative model of care that targets under-serviced and marginalized populations with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) who are of immigrant and refugee background, often unilingual, and unable to access mainstream treatment. This innovative ACT team targeted people of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tamil background by hiring clinicians who possess language skills from one of these four populations to form the multidisciplinary team to best serve them. Dr. Law has also complemented his front-line work with evaluation, including research on how to improve adherence to treatment and research on service delivery to patients with severe mental illness during the COVID pandemic.
The 2022 OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award Winners are:
Dr. Anna Chen
Anna Chen is a psychiatrist working in community practice in Toronto. She and Patrick Lo started Charis Clinic for Mental Wellness approximately 5 years ago, with a shared vision of working together in community practice in a supportive multidisciplinary environment to serve various patient populations. Her work at Charis Clinic includes psychiatric assessment and treatment of young children with primary anxiety disorders, and group psychotherapies for various adult populations. She is passionate about implementing group programs for populations that may not be able to attend hospital programs for a variety of reasons, and is recently working on group therapies for mothers of young children with a variety of mental health issues.
Dr. Patrick Lo
Patrick Lo is a psychiatrist working in both hospital & community settings. He is responsible for various outpatient clinics at Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences. His work at Charis Clinic includes psychiatric assessments of adults, primarily in mood & anxiety disorders, and group therapies (CBT, DBT skills, and Schema Therapy).
2021 OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award Winner
Dr. Barbara Dorian
Dr. Barbara Dorian received her MD degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1975. Following two years of post-graduate medical training at McGill and then the University of Toronto, she switched into the psychiatry specialty training program due to her interest in psychosomatic medicine and received her FRCPC specialist certification in 1982. Following a Fellowship in Behavioral Medicine at Stanford University, she joined the University of Toronto and staff of the Toronto General Hospital to work on the consultation-liaison team providing psychiatric care to medically ill patients and those undergoing lung transplantation, while pursuing interests in eating disorders and the link between stress and immune function.
She later joined the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital to participate in a clinical research team studying psychological treatments for women undergoing treatment for breast cancer. In 1995 she was recruited as Chief of Psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital and Head of the Society, Women and Health Collaborative Program for women’s mental health research with the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now CAMH). During her tenure they developed the Women’s In-Patient Unit at CAMH, the Women Recovering from Abuse Program (WRAP) at Women’s College Hospital and the WSIB Psychological Trauma Program (now Work, Stress and Health Program) at CAMH.
After her term at WCH, she worked as the director of the WSIB Trauma Program and as a consultant in the Mood and Anxiety Program at CAMH. For the past 18 years she have been a consultant in the Physicians Health Program of the OMA, and in past 10 years of private practice have focussed primarily on the treatment of Physicians.
2020 OPA Breakout Community Psychiatry Advocacy Award Winner
Dr. Paula Walsh-Bergin
