Patrick Cools, drug checking technician, and Destiny Herman, operations coordinator, both with the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mid Island Branch, talk drug checking in Nanaimo. The service is offered at the CMHA’s overdose prevention site on 250 Albert St.

Piotr Burek, research assistant and graduate student with Substance Drug Checking in Victoria, discusses what can drug checking tell us, what its limitations are at the moment, and what are we seeing in the drug supply right now.  

In her new memoir Chronic Conditions, University of Windsor professor Karen Engle wanted to explore using language to “capture what it’s like to be in a body that appears to work from the outside, when its internal systems operate through an ad hoc assemblage of garbled messaging, reroutings, and shaky foundations.” Engle has been dealing […]

Victoria has a new community led crisis response team. It started a gradual rollout earlier this year, and is designed to respond to mental health emergencies in the community avoiding police involvement wherever possible. It’s being operated by AVI Health Services. Dreanna Picard, an experiential crisis response worker with the team, and Lacey Mesley, its […]

Kim Mackenzie of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s BC Chapter shares the latest on the Peer Assisted Care Teams (PACT) that the organization is rolling out across BC to help deal with mental health emergencies in communities.

A group of housing providers are saying we need to tweak some of our systems and attitudes around supportive housing. In a column that appeared in the Victoria Times Colonist last month, they called for changes to the Residential Tenancy Act, and identified a tendency towards “firefighting” rather than systematic investments in solutions. The column […]

“Punk rock saved my life” is a phrase you’ll find often in Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health, a new book from Jason Schreurs. Informed by his lifelong membership in the punk community, it tells the story of Schreurs’ life navigating a bipolar diagnosis in his late forties, and the punks he learns […]

It likely wouldn’t surprise you to hear that people with serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia, experience stigma. Family members and others close to a person with a mental health condition can experience discrimination as well, a concept called stigma by association. A new study from York University found that one in three family members […]

Christopher Andersen is crossing the country for a cause, and he’s doing it on inline skates. The Ladysmith resident has nearly 500 wheels to get him from Whistler to Newfoundland. He set off on Monday, the start of The Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Week. Anderson lives with bipolar, attention deficit, and hyperactivity disorders. […]

Natalie Frandsen, assistant teaching professor at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria, discusses how online courses could better support student mental health.The subject was the topic of Frandsen’s doctoral thesis, as well as a recent article in The Conversation.