By Sheldon Spackman

Celebrating 100 years of the Canadian Mental Health Association

Apr 26, 2018 | 3:50 PM

The Canadian Mental Health Association is celebrating its 100th Anniversary this year and CMHA – Central Alberta marked the occasion with a special luncheon at the Radisson Hotel in north Red Deer on Thursday.

Roughly 50 people turned out to hear from guest speaker and event sponsor George Berry, who spoke about his long term involvement with CMHA and, as a local businessman, the need to acknowledge the issues surrounding mental health and getting them out of the closet.

“For men it’s harder to speak about mental health issues than women often find because it’s a negative construed and we have to break that stereotype,” says Berry. “Support each other stronger, give everybody a hug, a friendly smile, a greeting that can come into it that we can bring that in and acknowledge that a mental health issue is no different than breaking your left clavicle as I’ve done.”

Berry challenges local businesses to help sponsor The Berry Architecture Community Wellness Ride coming up in August with a $1,000 donation.

“I’m looking for at least 100 individuals or organizations or businesses that are prepared to do that,” he explains. “That will bring $100,000 into our local community.”

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Christine Stewart, Executive Director, Canadian Mental Health Association – Central Alberta Region says the treatment of mental illness has changed significantly since CMHA’s inception 100 years ago, but the fight against stigma continues.

“Originally, they wanted to fight stigma. People were afraid of people with mental illness or thought it was everyone else’s problem, and that isn’t much different,” says Stewart. “[Now] we have much better science around it, much better support, much better medications for people who need that, treatment options, that kind of thing is here now and there was very little of that 100 years ago.”

In terms of stigma, Stewart feels we are making progress as a society but acknowledges there’s still more work to do.

“The kids in the high schools these days have done a tremendous amount of work on stigma in our community at least, so people are definitely talking about it more. I think there’s still some stigma about talking about yourself. There’s lots of comfort level with talking about other people’s mental health and as a community what we need to do but I think we’re still working on the individual struggle piece.”

Graham Barclay, Board Chair, CMHA – Central Alberta Region adds it could take a long time before we get rid of the stigma surrounding mental illness.

“It is becoming easier to talk about, it is becoming more open, it is becoming more prevalent in a workplace,” Barclay explains. “However, there are still people that hold back from saying it out of shame, out of lack of support or the family unit is just not able to give them the support that they need or they just don’t know how.”

Barclay feels, however, that through new education, new programming and through organizations like CMHA, there is definitely help available but it takes volunteers, funding and staff to ensure the help is there.

“On the bigger scale, the hospital needs more mental health workers, more mental health beds and we need more crisis intervention,” he notes. “There are still people committing suicide in town because of mental health. There are still addictions related to mental health and that’s the cause. We need to do more through funding, through awareness, through help.”

Barclay says they have stats which show one in five people are affected by mental illness.

“If one has it, other family members are affected by it,” says Barclay. “So I think everybody is affected by mental health. In one way or another, they know somebody or has been affected by work cause somebody’s off and they have to cover.”

“We’re all in this together, it’s not us vs them, it’s all of us,” concludes Stewart.