People First Radio

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 […]

Journalist Sandy Ernest Allan first got into a career as a mental health journalist 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 time […]

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, […]

Patricia, Beatriz, and Constanza Morén are three sisters living in Spain. They joined People First Radio to share memories of their father, who died last year. “He was the best father a daughter could have,” Constanza said. “My father worked as an industrial engineer in the civil service in Spain and made a very good […]

For the last five years, Calgary based clinical psychologist Jonathon Stea has been posting online to try and confront misinformation related to mental health. “I really started out on social media and just in more popular media, trying to debunk myths related to the nature of cannabis addiction,” he said. “Once I got to social […]

From getting help for his own mental health, to working to change the culture around mental health at his fraternity at UBC, to insights from his role as a community mental health worker supporting people with diagnoses like schizophrenia, Noah Battista shares his journey to becoming an advocate for mental health. Battista says he was […]

Heather McDonald and Shane Steinhauer were in attendance at Nanaimo’s event marking International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31, 2024. The Monday following the event, they spoke with People First Radio. The pair have worked together on a grass roots peer outreach initiative called Nightkeepers. McDonald said that in the week leading up to and […]

Speeches and stories from events held to mark International Overdose Awareness Day, August 31, 2024, in Nanaimo and Victoria. Amber McGrath urged people to lift others up and take action. “I know there’s been many times that I’ve sat on a sidewalk and cried for an hour and not one person said, ‘are you okay?'” […]

Author Bryce Andrews rowed his way up the Salish Sea from Seattle as he got to work on a future book exploring the area’s ecosystem. Along the way, he’s also encountered plenty of other folks on the water, and Andrews says he’s been struck by their kindness and manifest decency. “People are often just so […]

Mark DeVries of Parksville had spent decades visiting doctors and specialists for a variety of symptoms, including joint pains and daily headaches, which he says he was always told were normal. It was only recently that DeVreis, 57, received a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a condition that affects connective tissue. “It was my nurse […]

In September, people will start moving into 23 units of housing at 420 Albert street in Nanaimo, which had spent decades as an office building. Two of the developers behind the project, Adrian Vlasic and Fillah Karim, both in their twenties, spoke with People First Radio. Recorded August 21, 2024.

Charlotte Waddell, Director of the Children’s Health Policy Center at Simon Fraser University, says people of a certain generation will have experienced drug use prevention programs like “Just Say No” and D.A.R.E. when they were in school. But Waddell says the efficacy of those programs wasn’t thoroughly studied before they were widely rolled out. “Nobody […]

Brandon Kirk is sharing his story of life after addiction, and creating a space for others to do the same. The Cowichan Valley resident is working on a new video podcast series, Beyond Your Wildest Imagination. “it’s a podcast about life beyond addiction,” Kirk said. “It’s about Cowichan Valley people telling their powerful stories about […]

Back in 2009 Craig Ellerman was staying at the downtown Victoria Salvation Army Men’s Shelter. “I wasn’t in too good a state of mind, and I saw a poster up on the bulletin board advertising information sessions for the Uni 101 program,” he said. “I looked at it, and at first I thought maybe this […]

Carissa Halton remembered her own graduation, so she didn’t expect her daughter’s to hit quite so hard. “I’m sitting there in the graduation, the principal is starting to talk,” she said. “She just said, I see you guys out there and  this is something that your kids are doing because you sat and read with […]

Recent research suggests people want to get back in touch with old friends, but are worried about being a bother. “Although people seem to be generally interested in the idea of reconnecting, they don’t want to be the one to do it,” said Lara Aknin, Director of the Helping and Happiness Lab at Simon Fraser […]

Georgina Franki and Dingeman van Bochove speak about homelessness in Yellowknife and actions they’ve been taking to address the situation. First broadcast July 25, 2024.

The documentary escape game She Could Fly aims to educate around obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Sara Kenney and Mairéad Ruane from the game’s creative team spoke with People First Radio. “It was such a cool experience like to see how creatively such difficult experiences could be shown and conveyed to people without the experience [of […]

Ruhr University Bochum PhD student Laurin Plank has been exploring the idea of using social media posts as a diagnostic aid for mental health conditions. He says people could benefit from early detection. “If people only ever get help once they’ve developed the disorder, then a lot of damage has already been done,” he said. […]