Pascale Gendreau, M.A., c.o.
Psychotherapist (OPQ) (elle/she)
UGME Wellness Consultant
Pascale Gendreau is a counsellor (OCCOQ) and psychotherapist (). She holds a Masters’ degree in Counselling Psychology from Ï㽶ÊÓƵ, as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia. She was the first UGME Wellness Consultant to be hired at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Ï㽶ÊÓƵ.
Pascale has clinical expertise in medical student mental health, having accumulated over 9 years of experience in this domain. She provides confidential short-term counselling and psychotherapy to medical students across the four years of the MDCM Program. She is highly proficient in helping clients dealing with anxiety, depression, relationship issues, grief, gender identity, sexual orientation, academic difficulty, life-transition challenges, and trauma. Her counselling approach is empathetic, mindful, and collaborative in order to best support the personal, social, and professional goals of learners. She carefully analyzes the individual’s needs and coordinates plans to offer the best positive strategy for attaining wellness, resiliency, adaptability, and academic success.
Pascale is the content lead of the MDCM Longitudinal Wellness Curriculum, which consists of evidence-based wellness sessions within protected academic curriculum time. The aim of the curriculum is to promote well-being, self-care, and resilience in medical students by educating and engaging them in diverse dimensions of wellness. Her role involves finding and working with talented speakers and reviewing content of sessions to ensure meaningful, tailored, and evidence-based tools for medical students.Ìý Some of her contributions include the implementation of: Ice Cream Rounds in 2016, a first in Canadian undergraduate medical education; the longitudinal financial Wellness Curriculum; Block H: The Floor is Yours, where the theme is chosen by the current cohort; support groups around CaRMS; and recruitment of influential speakers, such as Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa.
Pascale is a dynamic speaker and has developed and delivered numerous presentations designed specifically for medical learners. She also facilitates various support groups, such as Ice Cream Rounds andÌý CaRMS groups. She has developed expertise for emotional support around the matching process and collaborates closely with the UGME Career Advisor.
She works closely with the Medical Student Wellness (MSW) Committee and student leaders to ensure the students’ needs are represented in the curriculum. She will often invite student leaders to co-facilitate workshops with her to bridge her expertise with actual student experiences. She is currently researching how medical students experience the Wellness Curriculum, with an emphasis on the curriculum effects on students’ personal and professional wellness and development.
Lastly, Pascale is a clinical supervisor for psychotherapists and trainees, and has been a course lecturer in the Counselling Psychology program at McGill.
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Do not hesitate to reach out to Pascale directly at:Ìýpascale.gendreau [at] mcgill.ca
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