Our Prairie Regional Manager Nikki Langdon wrote an article on her experience with mental illness for CareerWise:
“COVID-19 is more than a horrible illness. It turned things on their heads. It showed us things about ourselves we didn鈥檛 want to see. It lifted a rock and one of the things that crawled into the open was mental illness. We knew it existed and peeked under that rock on occasion, then carefully placed it back, leaving mental illness stigmatized and more or less out of the mainstream.
But then COVID came into our lives and that changed. Mental illness, mental stress, mental wellness and mental health worked their way into our conversations. Mental illness was no longer assumed to belong to those we turned our eyes from. Mental illness came into our homes. We learned that our neighbours, friends, co-workers, family members, teachers, students, clergy, health-care practitioners and others we encountered every day identified as having mental health struggles 鈥 some episodic, some isolated one-time events, some chronic. We discovered that that which had remained unspoken was becoming present in our everyday lives.
For those of us who have a mental illness diagnosis, it had always been a well-kept secret. We didn鈥檛 speak of it. We felt the stigma, the quiet judgment and the slight yet perceptible change in interaction if we shared. We took our medication, saw our counsellors and doctors, and managed as best we could assuming we were the only one 鈥 until COVID forced us to move that rock. The widespread trauma, the fear, the unknown, the emotional/mental feelings of navigating this pandemic brought our mental health into the light. Discussions about how we were managing mentally were as prevalent as how we were managing physically. Mental illness discussion become part of the fabric of our communities.”
Read the full article on .
Nikki Langdon will be presenting on 鈥溾 at CERIC鈥檚 hybrid Cannexus conference, taking place Jan. 23-25, 2023. Learn more and register at聽.