Maple Ridge resident Rina Varley distinctly remembers the powerful feeling of relief that washed over her after talking to a psychiatric genetic counsellor from the Psychiatric Genetic Counselling Clinic about her generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) for the first time.
“I’d always wondered if trauma that I’d experienced earlier in my life had caused my GAD. Emily (the psychiatric genetic counsellor) let me know that while trauma can exacerbate GAD, it certainly doesn’t cause mental illness,” says Varley.
Being diagnosed with prostate cancer was shocking for Vancouver resident Daryl Clark, but it wasn’t nearly as devastating as being re-diagnosed nine months later despite his seeming success earlier with chemotherapy and hormone drug therapy.
“Suffering a recurrent diagnosis was absolutely worse than the initial diagnosis,” says Clark. “Particularly when you think you’ve got a leg up on it and going in the right direction.”
In the process of researching public opinion about gene therapy, a medical procedure aimed at delivering new genetic material into a person to prevent or treat a disease, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Julie Robillard unexpectedly found that beyond personal risk concerns, people were most troubled by the lack of information around the experimental treatment.
