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Our envisioning of palliative psychiatry is that people are not at the end of life a-at all, and I think actually if you look at the WHO definition of palliative care, there is nothing in that definition about end of life.

And it's-- Although you're absolutely right that I think in the cultural imagination, palliative is synonymous with end-of-life care, and it's the idea that if it's synonymous with end-of-life care and there's a lot of stigma associated with that, that means you're giving up, you're, you're not-- there's nothing more we can do, you're giving up hope.

And if you talk to any palliative care professional, they say that is the exact opposite of what we do [chuckles] in palliative care, in physical medicine.

Um, and I would say the same thing as we're, you know, conceiving this idea of what a potential palliative psychiatry could look like, is that it's not about people who are at the end of life.

I think people may be at risk of dying because of their mental illness, or they might be because of, for some people, maybe conditions related to the social determinants their, of health, which makes them at increa- that increased risk, but that's-- but they're not at end of life.

And, you know, palliative care advocates and others have gone to great pains to say like, "Hey," like, "let's talk about early integration of palliative care." We know from the evidence that we introduce palliative care early in the, in the disease process, not only is it enhanced quality of life, but actually quantity of life.

But, um, and how does it relate to sort of the futility stuff? How does it relate to, um, uh, yeah, just sort of your work in, i-in general, you know, palliative psychiatry? W- can you give us a broad overview of your thinking about some of that stuff?

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I've long been interested in, you know, ethical and social issues that arise in healthcare.

I think when, you know, around the dinner table growing up, um, I have a parent who's a healthcare professional and so, you know, hearing things, you know, such as about bowel movements or blood or, you know, sort of things that are happening with the human body or things that are just happening in the healthcare system generally was something that was very much part of my environment growing up and kind of just sort of had a language that we sort of talked about this every day.

Uh, you know, my, my father, uh, who's a healthcare professional, also very committed to issues around social justice and, uh, and other sort of-- and values in healthcare.

And so I think that was very much as part of our, like, again, dinnertime or everyday conversation as well.

So it was very much absorbed into me and my family growing up.

And then when I was in, uh, undergraduate, uh, I was an undergraduate student, I was in a program, um, called Social Studies of Medicine.

Yeah, yeah.