People First Radio

Sleep Country Canada and Listen Up Canada co-founder Gordon Lownds spoke with People First Radio about his experiences with cocaine addiction, which he’s documented in a new memoir called Cracking Up. According to his memoir, while he was in the work associated with the startup phase of Sleep Country, Lownds ended up in a relationship […]

Nicole Letourneau says that when things get difficult, instead of wishing she had a drink, she now thinks “ thank god I’m not drinking right now.” The lawyer who works with the Ministry of the Attorney General in Ontario spoke with People First Radio about her experience recovering from alcohol addiction. Letourneau says she had been […]

Francis Baptiste is using music to share his experiences with addiction. “ I think addiction is something that thrives in secrecy and in stigma,” he said. “If you don’t talk about it, and if you don’t open up about it, then we all end up just kind of suffering in silence.” The Vancouver musician is getting […]

Trevor Botkin is drawing from his experiences in recovery to bring peer support to the world of construction. Botkin works with the Construction Foundation of British Columbia (CFBC) is involved in a project called The Forge, which is in the midst of transforming an old biker clubhouse in Langford into a support space for people […]

Cindy Blancher is a lawyer with the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee in Ontario, and before entering that career path, she was a registered nurse in a psychiatric hospital. She’s also an advocate around issues related to mental illness, although it’s a term she isn’t a fan of. “ I have a relative who […]

Mary Vaccaro is a faculty member in the school of social work at McMaster University in Hamilton. She’s also been working in the women’s shelter system since 2012. She spoke with People First Radio about her observations from those years of work. “ I think we need to know that many of the women that we […]

More than seven thousand times last year, people were released from Ontario jails with no recorded fixed address. It’s also estimated that 80 per cent of people in Ontario’s provincial jails are there on remand. Those are some of the details from a report from the John Howard Society of Ontario, called From Incarceration to […]

Michael Sellick lives in Nova Scotia and teaches crochet on YouTube to an audience of 1.3 million subscribers. It’s a hobby he says he first discovered when he was going through a difficult period in his youth. “Two weeks into high school, I had no friends at all,” he said. “And I was unable to […]

University instructors Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby are the authors of Psychedelic Capitalism, a book that takes a critical look at the direction of the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, particularly within the medical system. “We began this work, I would say, with a sense of naive optimism, even enthusiasm that this psychedelic renaissance, this process […]

Cole Kennedy, a Phd student in neuropsychology at the University of Victoria, led newly published research aimed at improving healthcare for people with brain injuries experiencing homelessness and mental health and substance use issues. “We know that every brain injury is different, so the cookie cutter approach doesn’t work in terms of treatment as well […]

As a journalist and documentary maker, Luke Galati says he’s learned that good storytelling has a through line. “ It has something that takes you from the beginning, the middle to the end,” he said. In the two documentaries Galati has made about mental health, he says he’s been that through line. “Using myself as the […]

CRCL stands for “crisis response community led.” It’s a model for a team that brings lived experience and minimizes police involvement in mental health related crisis situations. CRCL used to be called Peer Assisted Care Team or PACT. It’s funded by the Province of British Columbia, developed, and administered by the Canadian Mental Health Association, […]

Janel Van Dongen is the founder of 100 Kids For Change Oceanside. It’s a group that brings youth together to support local charities. Inspired by similar groups in the area for men and women, 100 Kids members meet every three months. Each member brings a $10 donation, and a charity to nominate. At each meeting […]

About a year ago, Joanna Pozzulo of Carleton University started the Reading For Well-Being Community Bookclub. “ I wanted to use my background in psychology and research to really highlight for people books that I think might be useful, or at least interesting to read,” she said. “ It’s more around well being rather than trying to […]

Laura Eramian of Dalhousie University was the lead author on a study looking at the experiences of 21 Atlantic Canadians who identified as having no or very few friends. “There really was no single profile of a person who identified as having fewer no friends. We had participants ranging from their late teens up to […]

Rob Wipond, author of Your Consent is Not Required, visited Nanaimo for an author talk on his book, which takes a critical look at involuntary psychiatric treatment. Wipond says that in the late 90s, after voluntarily seeking treatment, his father was committed for a period of several months, which included experiences of forced electrocunvulsive therapy. “ This […]

Guelph On. resident Elaine Uskoski’s journey to becoming an author, coach, and speaker on the issue of video game addiction got started on Halloween in 2014. “ I got an SOS email from my son who was in his first semester of second year university,” Uskoski said. “He had been backed into a corner where he […]

Rocky Sloan, a student at Nanaimo’s Dover Bay Secondary School, has a plan after receiving a Loran scholarship, worth up to $100,000. “It is my dream to become a doctor,” Sloan said. “Right now, I’m thinking family medicine. Hopefully come back and work here in Nanaimo after I get my MD.” It’s a goal Sloan […]

Keynote speaker and mental health advocate Jessica Ward-King says opening up about her mental health challenges in a public way was a difficult decision. “It was terrifying, but it was also very liberating because then when people ask me, ‘how are you doing?’ I could actually say, ‘not so great,’ and there would be an […]

At age 42, Opal Dar has hit a major milestone as an artist. “Until just a month ago, I haven’t been able to direct anyone to a link with my music,” Dar said. “I’ve been on stage my whole life singing and doing music, also that whole time was caregiving children and people, and my […]

Addictions medicine specialist Dr. Kelsey Roden spoke with People First Radio at a pop up overdose prevention site near Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria. “The toxic drug supply has gotten so toxic with so many additives and contaminants and high potency fentanyl, that sometimes the medications we have available in the hospital are just not […]

Before he was a four time Grey Cup champion, the first player to be the game’s MVP and Most Valuable Canadian at the same time, Andrew Harris was playing in Nanaimo with the Vancouver Island Raiders. Now retired, Harris has shared some of the challenges he faced growing up and during his career in a […]

The relationship between people and plants is at the root of Ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph’s work. “ In my Squamish teachings from that side of my family, it is taught that plants are relatives, that they are relations to us,” she said. “When I was going through my undergrad, which was in botany and biology, there really […]

Evelyn Thompson-George has been hoping someone would write about her father Art Thompson’s experience surviving abuse at the Alberni Indian Residential School. “ I’ve been trying for five years to get somebody to write this book about my dad. I was asking university professors. I was asking people that have written already, and my mom kind […]

Journalists Hal Newman and Chris Curtis have been exploring the intersections between poverty and the criminal justice system in Quebec, interviewing a number of people over the course of several months.. “ What we were finding is that people who get caught up in the system, their lives almost always get immeasurably worse,” Curtis said. In […]

Mental health researcher Yasmine Simone Gray says she identifies as a complex trauma survivor, and resists the label of having a mental illness. “ It’s a very particular push to try to label our distress as a disorder, and it really situates the problem within say my body, as opposed to say within the systems that […]

U.K. Barrister Nick Bano explores the themes covered in his book Against Landlords. Bano specializes in representing homeless people and residential tenants and migrants in housing struggles. Bano says landlords were on their way to extinction in the U.K. through the start of the 1970s, but deregulation of the private rental sector and a sell […]

New York based solutions journalist and author Julia Hotz paid a visit to Nanaimo to talk social prescribing – a treatment modality that lets doctors put patients in touch with non medical supports to address unmet needs. Hotz says social prescribing comes from the idea that healthcare issues are being driven by things in our […]

Guaranteed basic income would reduce poverty in Canada by 40 per cent, according to analysis from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). Guaranteed basic income(GBI) is a framework that would provide everyone with a minimum income, which would come in the form of regular payments from the government, using the tax system. There […]

At 81 years old, longtime Victoria resident Gene Miller says the problems facing society right now are unlike anything he’s ever lived through. “ Probably most alarmingly, everything having to do with environmental impacts and climate change, I’m very concerned about the spreading and growing impact of autocracy. I worry that as robotics expand that people […]

Almost six years ago, an accident in the kitchen left Kate Walker’s preschool aged son with a severe injury. Now, Walker wants to help other families going through the same experience. “ It was after a really lovely day on the ski hill that we came home and I was preparing, just kind of doing the […]

McMaster Associate Professor Iris Balodis is among a group of researchers raising concerns about Ontario’s approach around online gambling. “ I don’t think there’s anyone in Ontario that is unaffected by it, from hearing and seeing ads, to all the opportunities for play,” she said. “But we have very, very little idea of how things have […]

Now 19 years old, Victoria composer Camilo Aybar put the finishing touches on his first symphony in 2021. It wasn’t only composed during the pandemic, but inspired by it. The symphony features 5 movements, each representing a different phase of the pandemic: Outbreak, Lockdown, Restart Process, Variants of Concern, and Vaccine. Aybar’s story caught the […]

At age 12, Laetitia Satam started volunteering with Kids Help Phone, a Canadian charity which provides mental health support to youth through phone, text, and online services. “ I remember at that young age being like, why is talking about how you’re feeling not always socially acceptable?” She said. “And of course, when you’re a kid, […]

Tessa Blaikie Whitecloud is set to start a new role as senior advisor on ending chronic homelessness to Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew. Earlier this month, the province announced a new plan to address chronic homelessness, including addressing encampments on a case by case basis. “ I think the core piece that this plan brings to the […]

“For five years, I was out on the streets homeless, and I struggled coming to the hospital because I never had anywhere to use,” said Comox Valley resident Heather Edward, who has been sober for eight months. “I procrastinated coming to the hospital for infections and stuff because I was scared that I was going […]

“Siblings, they kind of straddle this space between, you know, they’re family, but they’re also friends, or maybe they’re kind of frenemies,” said Stephanie Harrington. “It’s one of the early formative relationships you have in your life, and it’s a defining relationship in many ways.” Harrington’s brother Ian died in May 2020 from drug poisoning. […]

“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 […]

Dr. Paula Cook and Dr. Darlene Petersen specialize in addiction medicine, and practice in different parts of Utah. They joined People First Radio and shared a number of topics, including systemic barriers to accessing treatment in the U.S., intersections between addiction and other determinants of health, and the role of trauma in substance use. Petersen […]

Culture journalist Mihika Agarwal shares insights from her recent reporting in The Walrus on AI companion bots, which mimic the experience of a close, sometimes even intimate relationship. “Think chat GPT, but it will pretend like it’s your lover or partner,” she said. Agarwal compares the situation to the 2013 film Her, in which a […]

Christine Korol, a Vancouver based psychologist, says it’s not uncommon for people to diagnose themselves with a mental health condition based on information they’ve seen online or on a social media platform. “It comes in waves,” she said. “A few years ago, Tourette’s seemed to be all the rage.” Korol says a few years ago, […]