The CatalystConversations on Mental Health

This Month — and All Year

It’s Pride Month! These celebratory events — signature weeks and months, T-shirt days, and other public acknowledgments — provide visibility and a sense of collectivity. Let’s not let the colours fade when the calendar changes.

Essential Connections

Evidence that strong interpersonal connections are essential to our mental and physical health is growing. And these ties may be more important as we age, particularly among older adults living in retirement residences and long-term care homes. According to Dr. Kristine Theurer, who’s been a researcher in the long-term care sector for more than two decades, “We all yearn to connect with others, and for many people, moving into a residence means seeing friends and family less frequently. So it’s crucial for them to make new connections.”

Father and a son sitting on the river bank.

Tough Talk

Long before I knew what mental health was, I knew that men didn’t talk about it. Certain topics were simply off the table, with deep personal feelings heading the list. To talk about those things would be unnatural, unwelcome, and uncomfortable — not to mention unmasculine.

Cuba Gooding Jr. as Rod Tidwell and Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire from the 1996 film

It’s Broke – And Don’t Fix it

First, it’s best not to assume we know how that person feels and what they should do. I often say, “Don’t let anyone “should” on you today, and don’t “should” on yourself. So, let’s get away from our preconceived notions of what the person should do.

This is your brain on Instagram

While Digital Health Week was a celebration of the advantages of connected care — from virtual consultations to e-health records to useful apps — it was also an opportunity to reflect on how we maintain our best mental wellness in an increasingly digitized world.

Safe — and Sound

When the language of isolation, quarantine, and lockdown predominates, there isn’t much room for words like socialize, connect, or empathize. Yet even though the pandemic has made our workplaces more prone than ever to stress and anxiety, creating a culture that gives workers the confidence to ask for mental health support has always been a challenge.

A Conversation with Canada’s First Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Carolyn Bennett

When I first learned that Carolyn Bennett had been named Canada’s inaugural minister of mental health and addictions, I was overcome with gratitude.

Leading With Mental Health in Mind: Tips for Managers in a Hybrid Workplace

The shift to permanent hybrid office schedules in post-pandemic workplaces presents a unique challenge for managers and team leaders. Although flexible work has been shown to reduce psychological and physical stress in previously non-remote employees, a distributed team requires different approaches in managing employee orientation, performance issues, and conflicts.

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Meditations on motherhood, mental illness, and resiliency

It’s easy to make assumptions about people based on their academic accomplishments, professional successes, or philanthropic contributions. But sometimes if you pull back the curtain, you discover untold depths and hardships that reveal a more valuable story than a five-sentence biography can.

Getting older, feeling better

People 85 and older make up Canada’s fastest-growing population segment, increasing at nearly four times the rate of the total. Also growing quickly is the number of evidence-based tools and strategies to help them live longer, happier, and more fulfilling lives, which is good news, since the size of this group will triple over the next few decades.

A tale of two illnesses

Dr. Manon Charbonneau remembers the day vividly, though she’d rather forget it. “So that’s it, then — cancer,” she recalls saying in disbelief with her eyes locked on the digital images of her mammogram. The radiologist confirmed the diagnosis, and in a moment her world was “completely dismantled.”

Spotlight on recovery

I reached Ian Morrison at his office at the Regina branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). A graduate of the Humber College comedy writing program, he teaches people how to harness their experiences — with mental illness and life in general — into stand-up comedy routines. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said. “Just tell jokes, make people laugh.”

Industry turbulence: Building mental health into WestJet’s pandemic operations

When the world shut down in early 2020, industries around the globe were forced into the realities of operating during a pandemic. Perhaps no sector was as hard hit as the airline industry, with many organizations laying off thousands of workers in an effort to keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of COVID-19 travel. WestJet’s organizational well-being manager Lisa Dodwell-Greaves described the experience as nerve wracking.

Group of smiling children looking down | Groupe d'enfants souriants regardant vers le bas

MHCC research inspires funding opportunity

Research conducted by Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) staff into early childhood mental health has helped inspire a new, multi-million dollar funding initiative by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). This spring, CIHR’s Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health (IHDCYH) expects to issue a call for proposals devoted to early childhood mental health.

More than skin deep

“I’m so glad you’re Black.” That’s the first thing Donna Richards hears from her new client. But as one of the few African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) clinicians working in the client’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) — and one of the few ACB psychotherapists in Canada — she hears it a lot.

A new curriculum of challenges

September in a post-vaccinated world was supposed to hold the promise of a return to normalcy. And while there was elation when that first bell rang, a new reality has since set in — one that includes helping children manage their emotions as COVID continues to leave its stamp on school communities.

The road to re-entering society

When Mo Korchinski left prison, she wasn’t handed a kit with resources to help her turn her life around. There was no guide on how to readjust to an autonomous life. Instead, like many before her, she was given a plastic bag with her belongings and a ticket to where she came from.

MHFA veteran community spotlight

Well before the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the pandemic, there was already a crying need to support the mental health of people in the Veteran community. But adding these further pressures to an already charged powder keg makes it clear that this need has only grown. In particular, the end of this 13-year mission has many asking, “What was it all for?”

Jann Arden’s Age of Acceptance

Only a few pages into Jann Arden’s new book, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, I am convinced she’s borrowed a tiny piece of my own experience with grief and put it on the page in my stead.

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