Shannon Hazlett According to a 2013 Toronto report, 206 people died from drug overdoses in that year, the highest annual number to date. Toronto is following the lead of its West Coast counterpart, Vancouver, in establishing supervised injection sites. The City is planning to introduce at least three supervised injection services to provide drug users…
Tag: mental health
World Health Summit: Conflict and Health
Fiona Downey The World Health Summit has been held annually in Berlin since 2009. The summit hosts dignitaries and experts from politics, academia, and the private sector to discuss the current state of global health. The central topics of the 2016 summit included migration and refugee health, infectious diseases, health development goals, and technological innovation….
Precarious Housing and Psychiatric Disability: How to Ensure Development over Displacement
Shelby Challis Individuals who experience psychiatric disability are too often forced to navigate their way through precarious housing situations and manage these situations with little support. The social conditions of our housing economy are deteriorating to a point where they not only provide little alleviation for those suffering from adverse mental health conditions, but they…
Web Summit Interview: The Future of Providing Mental Health Services to the Bottom Billion
Shelby Challis One of the greatest societal issues facing the world today is the delivery of affordable and accessible mental health services to the majority of the world’s population. Oren Frank, the CEO and CO-Founder of Talkspace, an online platform that connects users to licensed therapists from around the world, has been leading the fight…
More Than Just A Roof: Why Toronto’s Affordable Housing Struggles to Meet the Needs of Tenants with Mental Illness
Celine Caira According to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” security and shelter rank second only to basic physiological needs as the most vital requisites for human survival. There is significance to Maslow’s approach, since it is still telling today. Community health literature maintains that access to secure, adequate, and affordable housing is a key social…
Criminal and Police Records: Are We Criminalizing Character instead of Crime?
Shelby Challis A judge once told me about his own personal run-ins with law enforcement agencies when he was in his 20’s. It was the late 1960’s and he was attending a number of anti-war demonstrations (though he later confessed it was more about finding the perfect opportunity to pick-up women than about following his…
