Prism reaches out to LGBT community

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Devon MacFarlane

When it comes to offering counselling services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT) communities, Toronto beats Vancouver. But Vancouver is catching up.

While Vancouverites can boast that their city offers the innovative Four Pillars approach to tackling drug programs and that practitioners typically offer evidence-based services far in advance of the rest of North America, Toronto started offering drug and alcohol counselling programs to that city’s LGBT community through Rainbow Services in the late 1990s.

This spring, Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is offering the new Prism Alcohol and Drug Services which includes seven counselling groups targeted to the LGBT community and offering a range of options. “To my knowledge, this is the second in the country,” VCH Community Developer Devon MacFarlane said. MacFarlane said the LGBT community needs specific counselling services but, for a range of reasons, they have not been offered.

“All substances are used more frequently in LGBT communities,” MacFarlane said, adding that using drugs and alcohol is one of the strategies some people use to try to cope with the pressure of having non-mainstream sexual orientation. Most in the LGBT community also report that they, and others they know in the community, have had bad experiences with medical practitioners who have no understanding of LGBT issues and experiences. That means that while the community is more likely to use substances, they have less access to services to cope with substance use or stop using all together.

“I think it gives people hope. Just knowing that there’s some place safe to go is a huge issue.” Devon MacFarlane

MacFarlane explained that in 2002, he headed the LGBT Population Health Advisory Committee for the former Vancouver-Richmond Health Board, leading a series of consultations and focus groups looking at issues related to substance abuse in the LGBT community. The committee issued a report in 2003 but by then Vancouver Coastal Health was focused on re-designing the system to implement the five core services in every Community Health Centre and it set the report temporarily aside.

Meanwhile, others looked at its findings and MacFarlane said the Vancouver School Board and other groups used the report in their work with those in the LGBT community. This year, VCH was able to start implementing some of the recommendations from the report.

The new groups under Prism’s Alcohol and Drug Services include:

The two queer men’s groups already existed but they’re now being offered more often. The other groups have just started up or will start shortly. MacFarlane said the groups that have started have good participation. “I think it gives people hope,” he said. “Just knowing that there’s some place safe to go is a huge issue.”

MacFarlane said the groups have been set up throughout the city, so that access is improved for participants. He said, however, that there is a huge need for these programs beyond Vancouver and noted that one of the participants in one of the men’s groups travels from the Sunshine Coast to attend sessions.

Last March, VCH offered sessions for addictions and mental health staff at VCH and contracted agencies, alerting them to the issues associated with working with LGBT clients who have addictions or mental health issues. Three hundred people took the one-day session. “There’s a lot of systemic bias to getting good services,” MacFarlane said, pointing out that most schools offer no training on working with LGBT clients. “It’s a systemic problem, not an individual counsellor problem.”

MacFarlane has continued to run sessions every two to three months, for those who want to build on their skills working with LGBT clients. He maintains a list serve of interested people, to let them know about upcoming sessions; anywhere from 12-25 counsellors turn up for each session.

For more information about these groups, please phone 604-658-1214 or visit http://www.vch.ca/prism/index.htm.