2022

October 21, 2022 — Workshop on BPD, hosted by the MUHC Personality Disorders Program

It was a pleasure attending this full-day training workshop hosted by the MUHC Personality Disorders Program and led by Dr. Choi-Kain, director of the Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute. I learned a lot about helping patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and I look forward to implementing these practices into my clinical practice.

Here are some of the take-home messages from the workshop:

  • Despite the high prevalence of BPD in clinical populations, there is a shortage of clinicians trained to treat BPD.

  • A proposed solution is the implementation of Good Psychiatric Management (GPM), an approach in which all health professionals are trained to provide basic care to patients with BPD. More health professionals would thus be able to help patients with BPD, making interventions available faster, and needing only to be escalated to more specialized treatment if necessary.

  • The 6 key principles of GPM:

  1. Work actively & do not wait for a crisis to happen to intervene

  2. Support the patient by validating their views as legitimate and understandable

  3. Focus on helping them build an active life to generate personal stability, particularly work-wise

  4. The therapeutic relationship is important; make sure to disclose how you are feeling when therapeutically relevant (e.g. “That would have made me angry”)

  5. Change is an expected part of treatment, and lack of it indicates treatment failure

  6. Self-agency is key; patients are viewed as the primary agent of change and assume control of their life and progress

  • Some studies have found GPM to be as effective as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, based on a wide range of outcomes (including frequency and severity of suicidal and nonsuicidal self-injury) with medium-to-large effect sizes.

April 29, 2022 — Now published: "How open science can benefit bilingualism research: A lesson in six tales" paper (with links to paper and preprint)

Our newest paper is now out - this one is a fun one! While bilingualism remains difficult to operationally define and study, similar difficulties have been faced for constructs throughout the field of psychology. Open science has been proposed as a tool to help us combat the infamous replication crisis. In this paper, we present stories (one starring Future-Dr. Brouillard!) to illustrate how open science practices can practically support the making of quality research.

Find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728922000256.
Don't have access? No problem, find the pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/2tmdr

March 17, 2022 — Now published: "Family language policy among Québec-based parents raising multilingual infants and toddlers" paper (with links to paper and preprint)

Our newest paper is out! Here, we study how resources influence language practices. We compared the transmission of immigrant heritage languages to those transmitting societal languages (English and/or French). We found that societal-language resources were more accessible and satisfactory to speakers than those available for heritage languages. The theoretical and practical applications of these findings are discussed.

Find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2022.2050918. Don't have access? No problem, find the pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/sa7h5

February 15, 2022 — Now published: "Quebec-based Parents’ Attitudes Towards Childhood Multilingualism" paper (with links to paper and preprint)

Yet another paper is now published by this wonderful team! This one focused on the attitudes of parents towards childhood multilingualism. It revealed three dimensions to these attitudes relating to the status of languages, solidarity, and potential impact on cognitive development. Implications of these findings and future directions are discussed.


Find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X221078853.
Don't have access? No problem, find the pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/txh4j

February 10, 2022 — Now published: "Reading to bilingual preschoolers" paper (with links to paper and preprint)

Our paper on bilingual book reading is finally out! This paper is special: this project was started with Daphnée Dubé (now a successful speech-language pathologist) in our undergraduate years with Krista Byers-Heinlein. It was conducted with love from A to Z, from the careful planning of our dream experimental design, to evenings spent on Photoshop designing the pages of the books. This paper, my first first-authored publication, puts a close to 6 years of greeting incredibly smart 5 year-olds to the lab, learning R, presenting exciting findings, and exchanging with other wonderful researchers to help support bilingual book reading.

Find the paper here: http://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2294.
Don't have access? No problem, find the pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/5f8kw

Throwback to October 2016, when Daphnée Dubé and I first presented preliminary data for this project. I am forever grateful to have had such a wonderful co-author!