 My name is Nancy Watt and I'm really happy to be here. This is my first AIN conference and I'm just, this is crazy. You people are really different. I've never been hugged. I have never been at a conference where I get hugged at registration. It's really different. Thank you Barbara, it's just a little different. Yeah, I'll see you in the gondola. I will not, I will not. You know I will not do that. Okay, I'm going to tell you a little story about how improv met forensic psychiatry. Thank you. I come from Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton, Ontario is about 45 minutes southwest of Toronto. It is about a seven and a half hour drive due west of here. It's a blue collar steel town much like American Pittsburgh, you know? And we have our steel industry is what is known, that is what Hamilton is known for. Our steel town in the last decade or so has been going south as the manufacturing sector has been struggling and so consequently the economic fallout of that is significant. The cascade of economic distress is a real thing and that ripple effect affected my city greatly. And over the last 10 to 15 years we had empty warehouses and lofts and things and when that happens like any urban renewal when you have those vacancies in comes the starving artists and the designers and the musicians and I tell you in the last decade we have transformed ourselves into an amazingly significant cultural art center in what we call the hammer in the Hamilton. Thank you, I'm wickedly excited about it. I have loved to be just have played a small part in that transformation. And now I can tell you that in the hammer we like to say art is the new steel. It is a very big deal to us, it is a very big deal. I tell you that in the next 150,000 people came to something that we have there called the super crawl. It is a fantastic celebration of art and music and food and everything that's going on in the hammer. So Hamilton is really enjoying this resurgence. This is our staircase theater. It is a heritage place. This is where we do improv. It is a wonderful theater run by a very talented woman, Colette Kendall. It is a micro theater. We just hold 65. It makes for a very intimate space. We have film festivals and improv and solo performances and some fantastic theater. And then on the outside, sorry, go back please. Go back to there. And our staircase has a cafe and comedy routines and poetry slams and all sorts of things. We have about a hundred events going there a month. Thank you. Hamilton Health Sciences is also what we are known for. This is a world renowned world class academic tertiary center. It is comprised of seven facilities. One which is significant is St. Joseph's Health Care. Hamilton Health Sciences is an academic medical school and we have, because of its integrity and innovation in their inquiry, we are known as a world leader and a tremendous amount of education and research. It is the home of evidence-based medicine. You can just go right to the next one. It is in 2014, these doors opened. We had a large injection of healthcare dollars to the Hamilton area to develop this facility. This addiction and mental health center services all of Central and Southwestern Ontario. Mental health has, we need a lot of dollars. It's a huge problem and we have barely, we have begun to really impact the work that needs to be done. So this is a very important facility and it is also a home to a lot of research and education going on. I will share with you that in my family tree we have been affected by mental illness. This is kind of what my family tree looks like. The, it is, and so several years ago in 2012, I was asked to be a part of the Quality Council. The Quality Council of St. Joseph's Health Care for Addiction and Mental Health is comprised of all of the social agencies and the departments who are the healthcare providers. On those Quality Councils, they want to have a family and patient advisor to those, those who are familiar with the system, those who have had loved ones go through the system. I am that. In one of those Quality, oh, you're so, this is the woman who hugged me at registration. How cool are you? I do love her. I love, ah, she's fantastic. In one of those Quality Councils, I met this woman. Dr. Prathasarathi, everyone just calls her Dr. P. She is very intelligent and incredibly kind. And on one day in the Quality Council meeting she was talking about an initiative that she was doing. She's a psychiatrist at Inpatient Psychology. It was called Positive Psychology. And I had told her about this event that this, we had had improv delivered at a community center mostly for young male sex trade workers. And they were good. And these young men did not come back for the housing application or the free muffins or the group therapy, but they keep coming back for improv. And we hit it off and we became fast friends and she was intrigued. And so this arts resurgence in my Hamilton met this research based hospital medical community. And very quickly I was doing some improv in inpatient psychiatry. It was so much fun. I can't, I can't tell you. It was the first thing I did, it was some in their lunch room lounge area. And I came in early and in bright tape I taped out my stage. I taped out the space, you know? And I also had cut out some footsteps and I made a path coming on to the stage. And then I came out and I introduced myself to everyone in the lunch room and around. And it made, doing that simple task was very effective. It really worked. As soon as they came on the stage their whole countenance changed as you know. You know, like it can, it changed. It gave them that, it gave them that invitation. And the little pathway, they indeed followed up. The Usha introduced me and I needed to just go around the room initially and ask their name and tell me something, one thing that they like, one thing that they're good at. And I got offers like soccer and knitting and housework and fishing. And I'm not very good with names but I remembered everything that everyone was good at. So when the offer to come up, the offer had already been given to me and I would invite him up and we're gonna talk about fishing and I already know that you're good at that. So come on up. And it was an easy in, you know? So it was an amazing, they had this game of yes and. I had given him, he had his fishing rod. He was good at fishing. And this is my fishing rod and handed it to the next woman and she said yes and. And very quickly there was something on the fishing rod and they were off, you know? And then it went on and on and yes and and yes and and it got away, what was ever on the fishing rod as it does but it actually had a good, it was a good, simple, clean scene. It even had resolution. They changed the bait on the fishing rod and there was something about superstition and it worked, it worked. I believe every artist needs to be both a part of the creative process and the creative process in and of itself. We need to both be introspective and internal and an external part of that process. It behooves me to understand this intimately, both what I do and why I do it. Two minutes, okay. We're in good time, we're perfect. However, in improv and forensic psychiatry is a little different. This is a little different. It is not necessarily what we think. I, Usha, my good friend and brilliant psychiatrist, Usha had moved over to from inpatient psychiatry to forensics and so she invited me to do the same thing. Let's continue with the improv there. I did. It was great. However, this time both the staff and the patients were involved and we came into the lounge area and the staff were giving me these looks like, are you kidding me? Like, Usha gave me no heads up about this, right? She had, but they were not, they were truly reticent to it. So I had to, I did this, we breathed and we stretched and they were good with that. And again, we went around and named and tell me one thing that you're good at, both the staff and the patients. And then we did that walk around. I don't know, we called games different things in different areas, I've noticed. The walk around memory is just where you use the space you walk around, you walk around. And then when the person you meet up with is someone that you know that you, but you just can't remember their name and hey, you have those little interactions, that quick little improv scenes and you go around with those type of scenarios. And that was easy and it was an easy win and quickly they were doing improv. Yes, and the funniest thing of gibberish I have ever seen anywhere. They did a fantastic job with gibberish. It was really, really great. It was the staff that was interpreting and the other one was the patient interpreting for the staff, you know, I sort of, and it was, it was great. Forensic psychiatry is different in that. This is a subspecialty of psychiatry that is managed by our legal. It is the judiciary that monitors the patient. They are in consultation with the medical community. The user of a forensic mental health facility, their progress is monitored by the Ontario Review Board, which is a judicial board and the medical people are used as consultants about that. And sometimes those cultures can clash. They have, is he an accused person or is he a patient? It is a very interesting and challenging culture to work in and there are some of the hardest working people and that I have had the pleasure to meet. Some of the constraints that I have experienced thus far. We had gone in to forensic and just started doing what we were doing and then someone got wind that Nancy Watt does not have the right volunteer status at the hospital. I have been on the quality council. I have volunteer status but not for forensics, I do not. So there was like, there was four months of police checks and blood work and four reference letters and everything, it was a big, it was sort of a big deal. There was some nursing concerns, you know, about making sure that they were good. The union issue had stuff because am I taking a job away from the rec therapist, you know, and we did a Phoenix grants. We didn't get the one from 2015. We will be applying again for 2016, which will give them the funds to make this a proper paper and right now it's in the ethics committee. So that's, those are some of the constraints but you know, the and part to the yes end of this experience is that what I have now is improv that has cascaded within the healthcare system. I have the Youth Wellness Center, which is like a mental health youth drop-in center in Hamilton and these kids are amazing. Oh my goodness, they're this one boy, he's not a boy, he's a young man, but he likes to call it improvisation. And it is, and it is. The men's addiction services Hamilton, I've done improv there. It's our MASH, we like to, it's a MASH unit. I've had interest in the anxiety clinic and I've also been involved in a creative writing program for 10 years and I have implemented some improv with there. What, finally, I have, this is my last slide. I have seen something very close to freedom in experience in improv and for those who are incarcerated that has meaningful irony. I can tell you that if it is true, like did you know that the lateral prefrontal part of our brain, that part which is responsible for the self-monitoring, you know, that editor, you know, that voice in your head, we like to call it the editor, you know? That is suppressed when we do improv. What is expressed, what is activated, what lights up is your medial prefrontal, which is responsible for the self-expression. That is freeing, that is freeing. And if it is true that as a psychiatric nurse told me, she believes that all mental illness is a form of profound disconnection, I know, we know that improv is all about profound connection and I've been very blessed and very humbled and grateful to have an opportunity in playing a little bit in some people's freedom. Thank you.