The second annual MindFest kicked off Mental Illness Awareness Week on Monday, October 6 at Hart House with a day full of guest speakers, workshops, and prizes in hopes of increasing mental health awareness.

Several events in October, which has been designated as Mental Health Awareness Month at the University of Toronto, aim to promote awareness of and education on mental health issues. MindFest is focused on erasing the negative stigma connected to the subject of mental illness. The event included multiple informational lectures and sessions like, “#sicknotweak,” “Good 2 Talk,” and “‘Psycho’ Stigma: Understanding what psychosis is and isn’t”. Such sessions were designed to to equip students, professors, and community members with knowledge about mental illness so that they can become allies in the effort to eliminate associated taboos and misconceptions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORT

Several organizations participated in the mental health fair. ELLEN HO/THE VARSITY

Several organizations participated in the mental health fair. ELLEN HO/THE VARSITY

“One in five Canadians is diagnosed with mental illness, so why not talk about it?” said Jasmine Garraway, a volunteer for The Jack Project.

The Jack Project is an organization which aims to reduce the stigma associated with mental health. The project was founded in memory of Jack Windeler, a first-year student at Queen’s University who committed suicide in March 2010. Now, the organization strives to create a network of young people across Canada to promote open conversations and to change the way young people think about mental health.

Improving mental health and well-being were the focus of many events and were explored through the use and application of various modes of coping.

Dr. Robert Maunder of the Department of Psychiatry began the day with a lecture entitled “Health Happens Between Us: How Close Relationships Shape Our Health.” He discussed the importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships in alleviating mental unrest and preventing mental illness.

Maunder, who is also the head of research at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, focused his seminar on the impact of relationships on mental health.

“Its often the tough, loner-types who we admire,” said Maunder, referencing Clint Eastwood’s character in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Such detached, ambivalent characters don’t fare quite as well in the real-world as in the movies, where they have to relate, rely, and confide in others for support.

“Your health emerges between what happens between you and other people,” Maunder said, “The more support people feel, the longer they live.”

HANDS-ON APPROACHES

Breaking up formal lectures were mini-workshops offering hands-on approaches to mental health. These activities focused on enabling individual students to develop personal strategies for managing mental health and included a yoga workshop for increasing self-awareness and mindfulness, drawing, and improvisational sessions emphasizing the importance of art in combatting mental illness.

Mount Sinai’s Melissa Barton ended the day’s sessions with a seminar on strategies for dealing with mental health in the workplace.

“People with mental health issues are more likely to be workless,” said Barton amidst her discussion of psychological health and safety in the workplace. The talk, which focused primarily how employers can strive to be allies in the fight against the negative stigmatization of mental illness, was especially relevant to the modern student enrolled in a full course load while trying to balance part-time jobs.

Various sessions offered practical advice at MindFest. ELLEN HO/THE VARSITY

Various sessions offered practical advice at MindFest. ELLEN HO/THE VARSITY

For staff, employers, and students in particular, mental health in the workplace is sometimes a difficult subject. Employees who take time off to go to therapy and seek treatment for mental illnesses often find it more difficult to return to the workplace than employees who take leave for a physical illness.

To cope with mental illness at work, Barton suggested establishing a strategy with employers that includes a non-judgemental dialogue about mental health, discussing your functional ability to perform work related tasks, routine check-ins to prevent a relapse and regular evaluations to gage how your duties as an employee are positively or negatively affecting your mental wellbeing.

“The goal in increasing coping skills,” Barton concluded, “is to create a work environment where people feel loved.”

FOSTERING DIALOGUE, COMMUNITY 

A “Magic and Stigma” performance by Bruce Ballon of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health was also among the day’s offerings at MindFest. Leading a group through a series of card tricks, illusions, and memory games, Ballon illustrated the prevalence of deception in discussions of mental health and how trickery is a common, although unsuccessful way of avoiding conversations regarding mental illness.

“Sometimes the facts are fiction,” claimed Ballon while leading an interactive discussion about the ambiguity of mental health, “We start fitting these facts into what we already believe.”

An important part of erasing the stigma of mental illness, stressed Ballon, begins not with a diagnosis but with introspection.

“We all have magical thinking,” he said, “ therefore you have to decide what reality is for you.”

The majority of the day’s events shared a similar sentiment; that creating an open, receptive conversation surrounding mental health issues is paramount. As Joshua Miller, founder of Louder than Noise — an organization for youth coping with mental illness — said, “The goal is to foster a community whose youth can grow as leaders and become more than what labels have defined them as or by the personal obstacles holding them back.”