We all can remember a moment or a time when we were transitioning from middle school to high school, or transitioning out of high school and had no idea what to expect. What comes next? How do I navigate this new space? These questions racing through our minds.
As students you may be getting ready to go back to school this fall, and you might have the same questions as I once did. Well, our fantastic New Mentality youth at Lumenus Community Services have you covered! Our youth have created two resources to help students with the transition to high school, and the transition out of high school.
After working two years on this project, youth have created these resources to share with their peers what they wish they knew before going through these challenging transitions themselves. These resources are filled with advice, tips, and interviews from youth who have recently gone through these transitions themselves!
A huge congratulations to the young folks who worked very hard on this project. We are so incredibly proud to see resources created by youth for youth!
June is Pride Month! This month is a time dedicated to celebrating and supporting the 2SLGBTQ+ community. Whether you identify as LGBTQ or are an ally, everyone can join in the celebration of love. We spoke to two of our New Mentality youth, Rachel and Diya about what Pride means to them!
Why is Pride Month important to you?
Rachel:
I remember my first Pride. I was still in the early stages of coming out to myself, let along to other people when I had the opportunity to walk in the Parade with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). I was so nervous about going to Pride, and what people would think of me, but after a while, I convinced myself to go. When I got there, we had to wait for hours to walk, and it was a sweltering hot day. Eventually, we were allowed to start, and it was the most incredible feeling. I saw thousands of people cheering, waving flags that I identified with, and celebrating themselves and each other. By the time the Parade ended, I was filled with hope, I felt like I wasn’t alone. After I got home, I learned that the Parade had been held up by a Black Lives Matter protest. As I read and learnt about the reasons they were protesting at the Pride Parade, the more I respected and stood by them.
By this point, you might be wondering why I’m answering the question with this story. But it’s because it highlights what Pride month means to me. Pride month is a time where I can finally embrace the parts of myself that I was told were wrong, and it creates a space where I can be my most genuine self without having to worry about what other people think. Really, it’s a time where we can be visible and celebrate what we’ve all been through to get here today and collectively express and process all the emotions that come with that. Pride month creates a space to learn about and remember the history of the 2SLGBTQ+ community and, like Black Lives Matter, sought to do, work towards a brighter and safer future for everyone.
Diya:
Every day of the year, I experience my identity and I have to live with all the different parts of me. I know myself, and I can tell myself I’m valid over and over again, but the people around me will tiptoe around parts of my identity they don’t accept. Pride Month, however, has been the gateway into openly sharing my Pride, and expressing my identity outwardly, without hiding certain pieces to avoid judgment. Pride Month is the month I always feel the most inspired, heard, valid, and beautiful because it is the month where I see other people expressing their sexuality and themselves so vibrantly. It makes me feel as if I’m not alone, and makes me hopeful for the future I can have where I may be as amazing as all my fellow community members. All these people hold a space to freely talk about their struggles as a 2SLGBTQ+ member, and Pride Month connects me to people who are undergoing the same hardships and confusion I am with my own identity. It lets me be unapologetically me, and feel supported through that process. As a bonus, Pride Month gives me an opportunity to look bomb as hell without judgment or a second thought, and that’s an opportunity I will never refuse.
What activities have you participated in this month for Pride, and how has that supported your overall mental well being?
Rachel:
Before Covid-19 hit here, I lived in a space where I had an incredible and supportive 2SLGBTQ+ community around me. But with the pandemic, I had to move away to stay with family, and that sense community is a lot harder to find here. It doesn’t mean I’ve stopped looking though, and with Pride Month, I’ve been trying to find ways to connect with people virtually. Lately, I’ve been having zoom calls to hang out with other 2SLGBTQ+ youth and have been watching/ reading more 2SLGBTQ+ content online (if you haven’t seen it yet She-Ra is AMAZING!). It definitely doesn’t replace what I used to have in person, but it’s helped me feel less isolated and has given me a small way to celebrate Pride month.
This month I’ve also been engaging in more of the politics of Pride. The history of the 2SLGBTQ+ community is one filled with both struggle and radical compassion. So for me, part of the way I’m participating in Pride this year is learning more about our history and about the BIPOC 2SLGBTQ+ people who have been the leaders of this movement and paved the way for the rights I have today.
Diya:
The Pride Parade is always the event I look the most forward to since it is the most inspiring and freeing to participate in, however, this year since I can’t celebrate at the Pride Parade, I created a way for me to still fully reap the wellness benefits of Pride. I’ve decided to do a small project every week related to Pride to express my identity and acknowledge myself as a part of my wellness, and these small projects range greatly. One of the small things I decided to do was to come out to a member of my family, while a more lighthearted one was to decorate my room in Pride related items. As well, I have been finding more 2SLGBTQ+ role models online and hearing their experience over a variety of platforms. Since I am not able to leave my house during June because of COVID-19, I have been partaking in online ventures much more, and have found a lot of ways to still experience Pride Month. I have been doing a lot of online research for myself about the history in Canada and India (where I immigrated from) of 2SLGBTQ+ advocates and educating myself on how and to what extent the community has been accepted or denied rights in the past.
I’ve also stayed connected to my friends in the community and had some really great conversations that led me to a very liberating decision. I always kept long hair because people around me told me it made me more “feminine” and was even told with short hair when I was 6 years old that I wouldn’t be allowed in the washroom because I looked like a boy. This technically isn’t tied to my sexuality, but it is tied to my expression of it, and after 17 years of being afraid of not pleasing others and being “too masculine,” finally chopped off my hair and am now strutting around with a very very short bob! This small step might not mean a lot to anyone else, but I feel more myself than I have in a long time, and this was part of my growth this Pride Month 🙂
What mental health supports have helped you as a member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community?
Rachel:
To be honest, there haven’t been many formal supports that have helped support me in my journey so far. I grew up in rather conservative religious school systems, where it wasn’t safe for youth to be out. It was because of these schools that I didn’t realize I might be queer until a few years ago when I was in my late teens/ early twenties. When I went looking for support groups, I realize that most of the resources for our community were targeted towards youth under 18, or adults over 40, not transition-age youth like myself. So I never really had 2SLGBTQ+ friendly mental health supports like GSA’s or peer support groups as I was learning about myself.
Instead, I turned to a lot of informal spaces for support. I spent more hours than I can count online reading articles, forums, and watching videos. Finding these online spaces helped me process things and get to know the community and myself in a more distant way. Once I started to get more comfortable with the fact that I was queer, I began to turn to my friends for support and attended the odd event that my University’s Pride group put on.
Since then, I’ve found support in other’s visibility. When I started a work placement at the end of my degree, I realized that one of the staff members used non-binary pronouns. As soon as I saw this, and heard my supervisor ask for my pronouns, I knew that it was a safe place to use they/them and she/her pronouns. Those small acts of someone’s visibility and that simple question made me feel safe and supported enough to bring my genuine self into my work. Words can’t describe how incredible that felt.
Diya:
In my Scarborough school, being anything other than a cisgender, straight person automatically labels you as a target for slander, awful remarks, or even just general judgement. Most people, fortunately, aren’t openly homophobic but in my class in particular, there have been books stolen from the library and ripped up just because it displayed two boys kissing on the cover. This sort of demeanour as well as the unspoken dislike for the community has led me to not access any resources from my school, and most of the ways I’ve been supported have been from the interwebs. Watching informative videos online has been the only way for me to get mental health support related to the 2SLBGTQ+ community. However, there has been one place that has actually considerably supported me throughout the years, and that is the annual Disable the Label Camp by The New Mentality! That is the first place where I experienced queer representation, and also the first space where conversations around struggles and mental health support for our community were held in front of me.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Rachel:
For me, Covid-19 has highlighted how beautiful, resilient and compassionate the 2SLGBTQ+ community is. Over the past few months, I’ve seen my community set up phone calls to keep people of all ages connected, create card-writing campaigns to spread cheer, organize anonymous care-package drop-offs, and open up spaces to stay connected online. I’m amazed at how the community has stepped up to support one another in innovative and meaningful ways. It’s acts like this that make me so proud to be part of the community and hopeful for our future.
I want to finish by saying thank you to those who paved the way for us today, and to those whose visibility in the media, our communities, and our lives have created hope, gave us a place to see our identities reflected, and space to explore who we are. And to those of you who aren’t out or whose identities don’t fit neatly into any label, know that your identities are valid and that your very existence is a beautiful and radical thing. Happy Pride everyone <3
Diya:
From personal experience, I know it’s really hard to admit your own identity to yourself sometimes, and as someone who only recently came out (if a year ago counts as recently), I know that it feels like stepping into a world you can’t return from. For someone so far into convincing myself I was straight, even the act of saying ‘I like girls’ to myself was terrifying, because once I said it, I couldn’t keep denying the reality anymore. What I’ve learned is most important, is to do what makes you happy, and if no one accepts you, accept yourself, reach out, and find people who won’t judge you. Don’t be ashamed if you don’t know, or feel confused, because just sitting in your confusion and naming it is something you should be immensely proud of. Your journey is your own to take, and even though I am out to my immediate family and friends, it doesn’t mean my journey is over or that I don’t have room to grow or discover my identity more, so cherish your identity, be proud of yourself, and don’t let anyone take that away from you. Happy Pride! 🙂
Thank you to Rachel and Diya for always creating spaces for everyone to feel celebrated. We at the New Mentality want our 2SLGBTQ+ community to know that YOU are seen, heard and loved!
As many of you may know we have been hosting an 8 week virtual Disable the Label leadership program. For those who attended last week, week 5, you saw that we switched our sessions to be responsive to world events including the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto. We held conversations on anti-racism, specifically anti-black racism. From those conversations, there was a clear need and desire within our network to continue this conversation.
Since we do mental health advocacy work in Ontario, we must ensure that our practices are embedded in anti-oppressive and anti-racist frameworks. The New Mentality is committed to hosting conversations with our network to talk about racism within the mental health system in Ontario. We will focus on providing recommendations for change in the provincial system, in addition to examining our own network’s practices. We know we need to do better and are committing to a shift in our practice.
We are taking this moment in history to switch up our DTL programming to be responsive to the needs of our network and for those we advocate on behalf of. This work has been a priority to us but we did not think that the virtual platform would support the depth of conversations needed to be had. With the support from our hosting team and network, we have been able to. We are so proud that we are able to do this work.
With that said, we will be taking a new approach for the remainder of this year’s DTL.
Our approach moving forward:
On Monday’s we will check-in as a collective group and have a facilitated guided discussion.
On Wednesdays, we will work in our Affinity Groups (also known as Caucusing) to debrief and have more conversations. Affinity Groups intentionally create spaces to explore, share, heal, and unfold what is happening in a larger group by working in a smaller group of people who share similar experiences. As people of color and white people each have work to do separately (and together), we will create sub-groups based on racial identity called “racial identity affinity groups.” These caucuses provide space for people to do work within their racial/ethnic groups prior to coming together as a larger group to continue our work. In full transparency, we want to note that putting our racialized group into one group isn’t the best solution, as there are actually many sub-groups within that group. But as a team and with the knowledge and training we have as a hosting team this is how we have decided to move forward.
On Thursdays, we will host a wellness night to hold space to have fun and relax. Together, we are doing important work that takes a lot of emotional energy, we need to make space to take care of ourselves and connect with others. Our intention is to have a space where we can come together as a community to laugh and feel joy together.
We unequivocally stand by the #BlackLivesMatter movement and have made the commitment and promise to ensure that there is an anti-racism approach permanently engraved into the work of the New Mentality, not just for a couple weeks, not just for a month or a year, but forever.
If you have questions and or feedback please reach out to Mary-Anne Leahy, TNM’s Program Manager, mary-anne@thenewmentality.ca
On Monday I got to visit our amazing youth in Burlington, who are with our partner agency Woodview Mental Health and Autism Services! Getting to see our different groups, and the incredible work they’re doing in their communities has always been the most rewarding and exciting part of the work I get to do. Every group is different and brings their own unique twist to advocacy. Visiting the young trailblazers apart of the youth 4 youth New Mentality group in Burlington was an absolute blast! We started off the meeting getting to know one another, and I got to share some of the exciting work the New Mentality will be doing this year, along with sharing our network’s favourite summer leadership retreat – Disable the Label, which is only a few months away!
The youth shared with me the Coffee House they are planning to have during Children’s Mental Health Week, where they will share the work they do as a New Mentality group in the Halton region. This Coffee House will have youth bands, artwork, and so much more! The youth also shared with me that they have been working on creating a video that will showcase how to navigate services at Woodview. It can be challenging and a bit daunting trying to navigate the child and youth mental health system, and this video will provide an opportunity for young people to better understand services, and how to access them.
After sharing a bit about the work the New Mentality has been up to, as well as hearing the projects the youth are working on, we started painting artwork for the Coffee House! It was a lot of fun, just painting and laughing with one another. It was also an opportunity to hear about what is needed in the system. One youth shared that there needs to be more discussions around anti-oppression both within the system, as well as the New Mentality as a network. The lack of overall diversity and equity in the system, has created a lack of conversation at both a service provider level and at a government level. This was an opportunity for all of us to have an open and honest conversation around some of the big challenges within the child and youth mental health sector. One statement that stood out right from the start was when a young leader in the group shared the impact the group has had on him. He shared that he feels empowered when he helps other youth who may be experiencing the same challenges he is currently facing. The New Mentality group has allowed him to feel a sense of hope about the future. I always leave New Mentality groups feeling incredibly proud, and genuinely excited to see how these young people will help to shape the future of the child and youth mental health system. It is always a privilege getting to meet such amazing and enthusiastic youth across the province. Looking forward to continuing to see the magic these young people will bring to their community! Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator fizza@thenewmentality.ca
Last and final stop of my mini New Mentality tour, our New Mentality group at Children’s Centre in Thunder Bay!
It has been an exciting last few days, getting to meet many of the wonderful youth from across our network, and what better way to end it off than with our youth in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Started off my day bright and early arriving at the airport at 6:30am, and it was exactly how you would imagine one would feel… tired! However, I really enjoy flying and the airport because of all the different people you meet along the way, and new places you get to visit.
After a much needed nap and pretzels on the plane, I landed in Thunder Bay! I checked into my room, and shortly after headed to meet our New Mentality group, which was a quick cab ride from the hotel. The location where the New Mentality in Thunder Bay’s meeting takes place is beautifully decorated with indigenous art everywhere.
After exploring the building a bit, I had the chance to meet the two adult allies, youth and program manager of Adolescent Services. What I particularly liked before I even had the chance to meet everyone, is how the adult allies break one of the biggest barriers when it comes to youth engagement – transportation. The youth are picked up and dropped off by their adult allies, making accessibility to meetings much easier!
The meeting started off with all of us getting to know one another. The youth and adult allies were so energetic, fun and friendly. The overload on chocolates definitely helped keep the room energized!
One thing that was clear from start to finish, was how much the youth loved their adult allies, as they kept advocating to the program manager, for weekly New Mentality meetings instead of biweekly. You could genuinely tell how much they loved being there, and how connected they all were. It just goes to show the impact that great youth engagement and positive adult allies can have on young people.
The youth and adult allies shared what their group has been up to recently, with receiving tokens of appreciation from Bell for their Bell Let’s Talk post, to volunteering in the community, to creating youth friendly artwork for Children’s Centre. These young leaders are always looking for ways to meaningfully contribute to their community!
I want to thank the youth for their vulnerability as they shared the crisis their community faces when accessing child and youth mental health services. Some youth have had to wait 2-3 days in the emergency room before seeing a professional. This is unacceptable and incredibly disheartening. Youth shared that many young people have had to pretend they’re feeling “better” just to escape the emergency room and hospital because waiting for services was making them feel worse. The hospital is the last place a child with a mental health concern wants to be.
I commend these young leaders for their courage, honesty and vulnerability sharing the horrifying stories of the current child and youth mental health system.
Thank you to the youth and adult allies for the warm welcome and laughs of course. We will definitely have our photo shoot in the snow and make some mukbang videos next time I visit!
I’m currently on a mini New Mentality tour visiting 3 of our groups across the province. First on the stop, our New Mentality Halton group, who are with our partner agency Reach Out for Kids! After somewhat of a long commute and listening to some Bollywood music along the way of course, I arrived to the Halton Regional Building in Oakville, Ontario where our youth were meeting this week. My favourite part of the work I get to do, is meeting our inspiring youth who do some incredible work all across the province! When I arrived, I noticed how beautiful the meeting space was set up, and of course the snacks helped – especially the brownies! There was a warm and comforting feeling being in the space right from the start. Before the meeting began, we all of course discussed the phenomenal Shakira and Jennifer Lopez half time show during the Super Bowl this past Sunday.
After some laughs and sharing a bit about ourselves, the youth got right into the project they’re working on this year. Launching season 2 of their podcast Youth Minds Matter, which will premiere during Children’s Mental Health Week this May! One thing I’ve noticed and love about all my visits to our different groups is how dedicated our youth, and adult allies are when it comes to advocacy work around the stigma associated with mental illness. These youth were incredibly driven, organized, and focused. They all had roles and took the initiative to work on 1-2 episodes each, from writing the script, ensuring that each episode felt authentic, to creating a recording schedule. You could tell right away how much this project meant to the youth, and the amount of work and effort they had put into it. There was a great discussion around one of the episodes that’ll be apart of season 2; the cultural barriers to mental health. We took some time to have an in-depth conversation on how we need more diversity and ways we can outreach to communities where mental illness is extremely stigmatized. This was an important conversation to be had, as the New Mentality has been focusing on how we can be more inclusive, be better allies, and host conversations around race and identity in the mental health system and how they intersect. After the meeting, I left feeling eager to bring all the amazing ideas our youth shared on how we can grow as a network. Thank you to the wonderful adult allies and youth for having me join in their first meeting of the new year. I’m looking forward to the incredible impact you will leave on everyone through your podcast. I can’t wait to visit again! To keep up to date with everything our New Mentality group in Halton is up to check out their Instagram @tnmhalton
