Dr. GP Brooks
A graduate of Mount A, Dal, and the Queen’s University of Belfast, Dr. GP (Garland, Gary) Brooks (PhD) began his career as a clinical psychologist at the Nova Scotia Hospital. Switching to academia, he taught first at Mount Allison and subsequently at St. Francis Xavier, from which he retired as Professor Emeritus in 2005. Since retirement he has continued to write in fields as varied as local and institutional history, culinary arts, and bridge.
Still Imperfect, But Better
Premier Tim Houston’s plan to have MSI cover certain types of psychological services is certainly welcome, and Nova Scotians can be proud that ours will be the first province to offer such support. Dr. Rod Wilson, the NDP health critic, has applauded the move toward universal mental health services, but questions whether it will be possible to find sufficient staff — 250 psychologists, social workers, and counselors — for the proposed new program.
As the years go by, I find myself comparing present and past. The recently proposed idea of the government hiring 250 new mental health workers reminded me of how things were when I finished my own clinical training. It was 1961. When I began to think of career options, private practice as a psychologist in Nova Scotia never occurred to me. The only two possibilities were academia (but I didn’t yet have a PhD) or government service. In the entire province, there was not a single psychologist working privately. So much for role models. As a 21-year-old, I became a clinical psychologist at the Nova Scotia Hospital. And, as an aside, the field of psychiatry was no different: teaching at Dalhousie University or government service were the only real possibilities. In that field, however, there was at least one exception: an older European-trained woman who was working in Halifax as a Jungian analyst.
Over the past 60-plus years, the number of psychologists working in the province has increased dramatically, as has the range and scope of the psychological profession itself.
The first organization of psychologists in the region was the Maritime Psychological Association, organized in 1948 with the purpose of furthering the development of “psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare.”
A provincial organization — APNS, the Association of Psychologists of Nova Scotia — was formed in 1965 with one of its goals being to seek legal status for psychology as a profession, something that had been achieved in Ontario in 1960. The local Nova Scotian medical profession, viewing the growth of professional psychology as unwanted competition, was not supportive of this move, and it was not until 1981 that the Nova Scotia government finally passed an act providing for the legal registration of psychologists.
The five psychologists who were most active in the registration battle were the first to receive the designation. How has that number changed over time?
According to detailed data supplied by the Nova Scotia Board of Examiners in Psychology, in 2024 there were 726 registered psychologists in the province, of whom 95.9 per cent were employed, most full-time. This was an increase of 175 since 2016. Of the working psychologists, 67.4 per cent were clinical psychologists, 18.3 per cent school psychologists, and 11.3 per cent counseling psychologists. The majority —522— were in private practice, while 174 worked in public settings, employed in government hospitals or public schools.
No doubt hiring 250 mental health professionals will be challenging in the near term. I don’t have information about the supply of social workers or counselors who, with psychologists, will make up that number, but what we do know about the growth in the number of psychologists working in the province suggests that cautious optimism is warranted. Some psychologists who are in private practice — and there are now more than 500 — will no doubt be attracted by a government position where they don’t have to run their own office (although this transfer among jobs would benefit the government program without increasing the number of people actually providing mental heath services). The number of registered psychologists working in Nova Scotia has increased by about one-third in the last decade, a trend that can probably be expected to continue. And two-thirds of the psychologists working in applied settings in the province were trained elsewhere in Canada or internationally, so we don’t have to count entirely on our own training programs. This is just as well as there are currently only two graduate programs in clinical psychology, a well-regarded doctoral program at Dalhousie that accepts five to eight students a year and a master’s program at Acadia with four to five students admitted annually. The government should probably strongly encourage these universities to expand their programs, something that is not without precedent.
While recognizing the need to strengthen the services provided in Nova Scotia to address mental health problems, it’s sometimes also worth taking a moment to look back and recognize the positive changes that have already occurred. Yes, our population has increased. And yes, we need to do more. But we are better off now than we were when I began my career and there was only one psychiatrist and no psychologists in private practice in the province. It will be a real benefit to Nova Scotians when these private clinicians are augmented by a significant increase in government-funded mental health practitioners.
Retired Mount A and St FX professor Gary Brooks resides in Southend Halifax. The Notebook photo
