Anna Skorzewska

Dr. Anna Skorzewska is a psychiatrist and director of the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit at University Health Network. She received her Doctor of Medicine degree from and completed her psychiatric training at the University of Toronto. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and is very active in teaching and training both medical students and residents. She has a varied background in the arts and humanities with a BA honours degree in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal. She was awarded one of a very limited number of fellowships to study at the New School for Social Research in New York and completed an MA in psychology there. While studying in New York she worked with the seriously mentally ill and discovered her calling. She abandoned her PhD in favour of medical school and works with patients with severe and persistent mental illness. Dr. Skorzewska is very interested in the arts and has tried to work at the intersection of the arts and medicine. She started a community outreach film program for psychiatric inpatients with the Toronto International Film Festival which received a Johnson and Johnson Society for the Arts in Medicine grant. She also made “Faceless” (2012), a documentary film about the inpatient psychiatric ward which has shown in festivals and in academic settings throughout North America. She has started an arts and humanities group for training psychiatrists to explore the interface between the arts and psychiatry. As a psychiatrist she has always been interested in personal history and the meanings that we make out of our own personal stories. The archive is a living recording of these histories and how they inform culture and community.