VoicePrint Salutes Mental Health Week (Monday, May 4th to Sunday, May 10th) with Special Interviews

PART ONE, May 3: What can be done to challenge the stigma of this barrier?

The national awareness week provides Canadians with opportunities to find out more about the importance of mental health and how to achieve it in our daily lives.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, 20 percent of Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. Approximately ten percent of adults will experience major depression at some time in their lives.

Even though one in five Canadians, over the course of their lives, can experience mental illness, there is still a great reluctance to talk about it, acknowledge it openly and treat it as a form of human illness.

Tune in to a special edition of Contact that launches VoicePrint’s special programming for Mental Health Week. We talk with Dr. David Goldbloom,
Vice-Chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the senior medical adviser of education and public affairs at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Why is there such a stigma? What can be done to challenge this barrier? What can government do to improve services for people with mental illnesses?

Tune in and find out.


PART TWO, May 7 (Special time: 12:00 p.m. & 6:00 p.m.): In the first half of this special, we talk to Joan Seabrook, a member of the London-Middlesex Suicide Prevention Council, and founder of the Suicide Bereavement Peer Support Group at the Canadian Mental Health Association. Find out about services available to survivors of suicides and their loved ones;, and the Lifting the Silence Walk event, held in London on Thursday, September 10th.

In the second half we talk to another Londoner, Robin Rundle Drake. Drake, a health-care provider, has founded a theatre troop with the mandate to produce shows dedicated to mental health issues.