“We think of stuff as being something that will give us freedom, happiness and all of the stuff that goes along with material belongings,” says Fred Cameron, who works on the senior management team at SOLID outreach in Victoria. “But when you’re out on the street, if you have too much stuff, it means you’re […]

Jade Oldfield works with the Chess For Life program at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, which sees youth involved in the province’s criminal justice system spend 25 hours studying the game of chess and learning to apply its principles to life. She says they’ve already got plenty of anecdotal evidence that the program has […]

The Victoria Hand Project is a charity that creates low cost prosthetic arms for lower income areas of the world. “Here in Victoria, we do the design, the engineering and the testing of the prosthetic arms,” said CEO Michael Peirone. “And then we partner with clinics in developing countries or conflict affected areas, and we […]

Edmonton resident Angelika Matson spoke with People First Radio about her experiences receiving electroconvulsive therapy. “All I heard online about ECT was that there was memory loss, and I was so scared that I was going to lose my memories,” she said. “I remember crying on the phone with my mom saying my memories make […]

Sandy Ernest Allan started on the path to becoming a journalist focused on mental health after receiving a 60 page, typewritten manuscript in the mail from a reclusive relative. “I had an uncle who assigned me to write a book about his life,” he said. “And that happened to include his schizophrenia diagnosis and his […]

Abe Oudshoorn recently argued that success, rather than issues like addiction or mental illness, is driving visible homelessness across many Canadian cities. “When we look at the data, you get some really strange phenomena where perhaps more poor cities, cities with a lower income across the board, may have less homelessness than rich cities like […]

Philadelphia based social worker and doctoral student Olúṣèyí Ṣẹ́gun shared a message from two very different experiences of grad school at the master’s level. “Just because one environment might not seem hospitable, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a space for you in the grander scheme of academics,” she said. Ṣẹ́gun wrote a first person […]

Isaiah Neil joined People First Radio to speak about his experiences as a suicide attempt survivor and journey to becoming an advocate for youth mental health. The Edmonton resident recently shared some of his experiences as part of a panel on youth mental health, to mark the launch of a report into the subject from […]

Denise McArthur has been involved with Restorative Justice Cowichan for the last 8 years, where’s she’s currently the restorative justice coordinator. She says over the years her group has discovered that if you can help someone take responsibility for their actions in a way that doesn’t end up being a huge crisis in their life, […]

Nancy and Susan Grundy are the subjects of Mad Sisters, a memoir written by Susan, which chronicles the siblings’ relationship from the 1960s through to the COVID-19 pandemic. When Nancy was 13, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A diagnosis that has since been updated to schizoaffective bipolar disorder. Susan says the relationship has changed dramatically […]