The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of behavioral health, senior housing, skilled nursing, home health, and hospice care. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Stephen Parker, a behavioral health planner at Stantec, has been named a 2023 Future Leader by Behavioral Health Business.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for behavioral health patients, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

Parker sat down with Behavioral Health Business to talk about his career trajectory and the ways the industry is evolving.

BHB: What drew you to this industry?

Parker: I would say equal parts interest, education and experience. I have a father who has been admitted to a mental health facility. My namesake is a family member who died of addiction. And my godfather is a Vietnam veteran with undiagnosed PTSD.

Regarding my education, I did my thesis work in wounded warrior trauma care after my buddies were returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And I heard these stories about traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

Then experience-wise, behavioral health became more and more a focus of my practice. Again, I’m an architect specializing in mental and behavioral health facilities. So there’s not that many of us. First, I worked on an autism clinic for Kaiser, and, then, I spent three years researching the VA, developing their inpatient mental health design guide. It snowballed from there, with one product after the other until I came here to Stantec.

What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?

I would say understand your bias when you go into these situations. We are a very global firm, so we touch many different communities in crisis. Whether it’s an indigenous community in the Canadian Arctic, which might be dealing with generational trauma, or a facility addressing homelessness in Colorado, or youth mental health in Southern California, it’s really understanding what is your experience you bring to the table but also the experiences that you’re trying to design for.

If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of behavioral health, what would it be?

I would like to see behavioral health be at the same level and have parity with other sorts of health care typologies and departments – as a way to overcome and defy stigma by design. And generally speaking, to address it as we do with any other health care issue. It’s the idea that mental health is health.

What do you foresee as being different about the behavioral health industry looking ahead to 2024?

I think people realize that it’s not a series of isolated issues. There’s a more holistic approach. So I think, in particular, seeing communities wanting to address addiction and homelessness, chronic mental health not simply by checking a box and providing a service line to do that, but thinking about the root factors and health equity issues that can drive homelessness, that drive addiction, that drive crisis and things of that nature. It’s just having a more holistic, bigger picture.

In a word, how would you describe the future of behavioral health?

Hopeful.

If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?

Slow down, take a breath. Try to figure out what is driving your purpose and your practice.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit: https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.