The Birthday Book Online

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching…. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope – into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations There is a story about the wolves of the Yellowstone National Park in the Lamar Valley. Some believe that reintroducing the grey wolf in 1995 led to profound consequences for the park's ecosystem and physical geography - large-scale change that ecologists call a trophic cascade. The elk population declined, forests regenerated, and other flora and fauna began to thrive again. Even the behaviours of the rivers changed in response to the wolves.  The reintroduction of the wolves...

I have been a keen participant observer to changes in our mental healthscape over the past eight years - as an advocate, a youth mental health professional and from my own lived experiences. In this essay, I will share some of the narratives that I observed are underway, and my best hopes for us going forward.  Recovery: Embracing Possibilities and defining New Normals Recovery is not the exception but the expectation. Traditionally, mental health professionals anchor themselves in what psychiatrist Robert D. Laing has called “the medical model”: often adopting expert positions, couched in deficits-driven questioning, and steeped in problem-focused...