Clare Pain

Clare Pain is a Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Director of the Psychological Trauma Program at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. In 2003 she became the co-project director of the Toronto Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project (TAAPP) http://www.utoronto.ca/ethiopia through which the Department of Psychiatry at UofT assists build capacity and sustainability in the first residency program in Ethiopia. In 2008 due to the success of TAAAC, Addis Ababa University negotiated with UofT through Sarita Verma then Graduate Program Director, an extension of this program known as the Toronto-Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC) http://www.taaac.ca TAAAC is growing and currently has over 14 individual partnerships in 6 different faculties at UofT. Through these educational partnerships volunteer faculty travel to Addis Ababa University to teach for one month three times a year. By effectively strengthening the training of medical subspecialists, Masters and PhD graduates numbers increase and a critical mass of health and human resources for service expansion, delivery and training results.

Clare Pain’s clinical focus is on the assessment and treatment of patients who continue to suffer from the effects of psychological trauma, including refugees whom she works with at the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. She has lectured and taught on various aspects of psychological trauma including trans-cultural aspects; and increasingly on global mental health. She has published a number of articles including two books: “Trauma and the Body: a Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy” with Pat Ogden and Kekuni Minton Norton 2006 and “The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic” an edited book with Eric Vermetten and Ruth Lanius, Cambridge University Press 2010

Research Synopsis

Psychological Trauma; Global Mental Health