January is Mental Health Awareness Month, and it’s no secret that January is one of the most difficult months of the year when it comes to mental health. Recent studies show that 1 in 3 Manitobans are impacted by mental health challenges, and the number of sick leaves related to mental health are on the rise across Canada.
Peer Connections Manitoba is combatting those mental health challenges through their programming, including their Peer Support network.
“Quite simply put, Peer Support is connecting over shared experiences,” says Julia Hoeppner, Peer Connections Manitoba’s executive director. “When we look at our own lives and we’re looking at who do we go and talk to on a regular basis when something hard happens, we often seek out that person who has a shared experience. We think about that person in our life that has gone through it before because they truly understand.”
Through their Peer Support program, which has streams for individual or groups looking for help, Peer Connections Manitoba offers the chance to speak with a trained, certified individual to have conversations based on a shared experience, which is a powerful tool in addressing mental health challenges.
One of the people who have taken advantage of the Peer Support program is Shelley. “I basically needed something a little more than just picking up a phone and calling a stranger and not getting the same person each time I needed somebody that had lived experience along with myself,” she said in an interview on Morning Light. “When I found my peer supporter, she had quite a lot of lived experience and she understood what I was going through and how it felt.”
“This amazing resource has kept me alive in my darkest hours.”
With demand on the resource for this resource and others on the rise, Peer Connections Manitoba is putting out a call for support called Bridging the Community. Monique Levesque-Pharoah, the organization’s director of development, says that funding these resources can help ease the burden on frontline healthcare by addressing mental health concerns before they grow into a crisis.
“It’s that ounce of prevention [that’s] worth a pound of cure,” she says. “There’s a saying that a healthy person has a myriad wishes and an unhealthy person only has one, and that includes our mental health. So, when we think about bridging the community with that peer support, that’s what we’re doing: we’re meeting Manitobans where they are.”
You can learn more about the Peer Support program and how to support it through Peer Connections Manitoba’s website, or by following them on social media. They are also available by phone toll free at 1-800-263-5545.