{"id":1408,"date":"2019-09-23T20:47:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T20:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcchrtpgg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=1408"},"modified":"2025-09-16T23:17:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T23:17:28","slug":"genetic-counsellors-mental-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/2019\/09\/23\/genetic-counsellors-mental-illness\/","title":{"rendered":"Now There are Genetic Counsellors for Mental Illness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ADAPT is one of the first clinics in the world to provide psychiatric genetic counselling to people with a family history of mental illness.<\/p>

Victoria Maxwell was no stranger to mental illness when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and psychosis at age 25. Her mother had bipolar depression, and when Maxwell was a child she remembers her mom as anxious and depressed, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal. \u201cI walked around on eggshells so I didn\u2019t set my mother off,\u201d she says. Soon after Maxwell received her own diagnosis, she was hospitalized for running down the street naked during a period of psychosis. She was eventually hospitalized three more times, and says she struggled to come to terms with the fact that she developed a mental illness like her mother. \u201cWhen I was hospitalized, I really didn\u2019t accept the illness,\u201d she says. \u201cIt took almost five years for me to accept it.\u201d<\/p>

Maxwell, now 52, created a one-person show about her experience titled\u00a0That\u2019s Just Crazy Talk \u2014 A Story About Family, Secrets, and Stigma<\/em>. She was performing her show at a research conference when she was introduced to Dr. Jehannine Austin, a genetic counsellor and the founder of the\u00a0ADAPT Clinic.<\/p>

Read more on Medium<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ADAPT is one of the first clinics in the world to provide psychiatric genetic counselling to people with a family history of mental illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","fndry_alternate_title":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[29,24,23],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-bipolar-disorder","tag-depression","tag-psychiatric-genetic-counselling"],"modified_by":"Andrea Sakamoto","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2667,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions\/2667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/tgrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}