This 13-point deficit reveals that parties’ efforts to reflect Canada’s diversity are more performative than substantive.
Remember, only 30 per cent of those elected were women. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. National Capital Region's Top Employers.The information can be monitored by postal code, city or region, allowing it to be used, for example, to direct information campaigns, or implement and assess suicide prevention strategies. He developed an algorithm called SAIPH (Suicide Artificial Intelligence Prediction Heuristic) that examines the tone, language and frequency of users’ tweets to help predict their suicide risk by identifying high levels of distress or peak periods of stress. With this in mind, Kaminsky began looking at Artificial Intelligence and social media, particularly Twitter, where all posts are public. Zachary Kaminsky has developed an algorithm that looks at people’s tweets to determine who might be at a high risk of suicide. Canada’s suicide rate over the past two decades has consistently hovered between 10 and 12 deaths per 100,000 people, and so even a test with a 99 per cent accuracy rate would identify about 1,000 false positives. “What might have kept us from getting eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger at the watering hole is now allowing us to become depressed or develop PTSD.”Īdditionally, he adds, biological findings go a long way to removing the stigma attached to mental illness, which in turn encourages more people to seek treatment.Īs Kaminsky continues to look for other genetic biomarkers related to mental health, he recognizes the challenges in developing a biological test that only identifies those likely to become suicide fatalities. “It’s not keeping us safe anymore,” he says. But how one copes mentally can be determined in part by one’s biology.”Įpigenetic changes, he adds, that were once adaptive in largely positive ways often have maladaptive results today. It’s not just your biology, it’s also what happens to you during life. “The biology is the cards you are dealt in life for how resilient or vulnerable you will be to things like this pandemic. He uses the word predetermined carefully, he says. “These are the times that are very well studied, but what about COVID and the pandemic? Could that be changing our epigenetic patterns? Moms who are pregnant and highly stressed during the pandemic may potentially see their offspring with slightly different molecularly predetermined futures.” Kaminsky notes a study found that the adolescent children of women who were pregnant during the ice storm in 1998 had markedly different epigenetic patterns. High enough levels of stress hormone, for example, can cross the placenta to activate an unborn child’s DNA receptors. Epigenetic changes to gene function are brought about by interactions between genes and their environment, including such factors as diet, lifestyle, early childhood trauma and maternal stressors that can lead to in utero changes to a baby’s physiology. Article contentĪnother study, conducted last fall by the University of British Columbia for the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), found one in 10 respondents reported suicidal thoughts or feelings, a significant increase over the six per cent of respondents who experienced similar thoughts during the pandemic’s first wave and four times the pre-pandemic level.Ī molecular biologist, Kaminsky has been studying epigenetics, or the factors by which human genes are turned on and off, to find links to suicidal behaviour.
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