Philip Stokes

Biography

Born and trained in Britain, Dr. Stokes has spent his career as a psychiatrist in Calgary, gradually taking on more roles in teaching, to the point where he will now end his career wholly as an educator. He has particularly focused on undergraduate teaching, both within his specialty and across the full range of medical education, and for more than twenty years he has been winning awards for his work, both from students and organizations. He has chaired both the pre-clerkship and clerkship courses in psychiatry, expanded clerkship teaching outside the city, and robustly defended psychiatry against repeated proposals to erode the time allocated to mental health care in the undergraduate curriculum.

Two principals underlying his teaching are that it should be as interactive as possible, and always tailored appropriately to the level of the learner. When teaching psychiatry, he is pleased at the extra opportunities to use movies to illustrate clinical presentations and to use acting to demonstrate symptoms and diagnoses, while always being mindful of the need to counter the stigma that still surrounds mental illness.

Aside from working and enjoying the mountains, he also attempts to beat his colleague master teacher, Dr. Law, at tennis each week.