Mental Health

As Alberta staggered under a third surge of COVID-19 in May 2021, Premier Jason Kenney announced a province-wide, two-week school closure. Immediately, up rose the chorus that has accompanied [...]

“Hello, 911. What is your emergency?” “I’m at the St. Albert Inn and I think someone has poisoned me.” “We’ll send someone right away.” I hadn’t been poisoned. I had just spent the night in [...]

You wake up.  You’ve received a phone call. Disoriented, you fight sleep and attempt to make sense of what the voice on the other end of the line is telling you. You discover that your [...]

As though nostalgic for his Manitoba boyhood, my father points to his beloved hunting rifle. Transforming his fingers into a silent trigger, he touches his temple and says, “Sometimes I want to [...]

Before she died, Anna Kessler was a promising scholar of Kant. She left Cornell University in 2004 to complete her doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Alberta. Charming, talented [...]

There are two things you never want to have happen to you. One of them is to suffer a mental illness. The other is to suffer a mental illness and try to get admitted to a hospital. The problem is [...]

For the past few months, activist Angela Bischoff has been parked in front of her laptop, working around the clock in a small room at a house she shares in Toronto—checking e- mails, confirming [...]

You suicides are all alike: too strong an imagination. You did what you did, now shut up. — Samuel Beckett My 13, 1987. Six weeks left of high school, six more weeks until we were free. That day, [...]

Sometimes you need to be in the hospital. Sometimes no other place—not even your own place—feels  safe. In the hospital you can find that secure holding environment that protects you from your [...]