All across Canada, wildfires are burning out of control. Six provinces and territories have been affected so far. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes. An area equivalent to five million football fields has so far been destroyed. This is a tragedy, but we need to understand the greater implications of […]
We’re living in challenging times. The environment, political polarization, the online world, social injustice – all are factors in the mental health struggles of young people today.
I’ve been thinking about the state of our city a lot these days. Toronto has always been a very safe place to live. It used to be called, “Toronto the good,” but now, things have changed. Over the past few years, our city has become increasingly dangerous.
I know of at least four instances of drivers running down pedestrians in Canada over the past five years. And the last two were just in the past couple of months. The mental health aspects of these crimes cannot be underestimated. If we don’t want more of such terrible tragedies, we need to invest more in prevention. We need to have more mental health services available to people before these incidents take place so that we don’t need to mobilize these services in the aftermath.
This International Women’s Day, let’s stand up especially for trans women and give them the love and support they deserve, now and moving forward.
The topic of anger comes up fairly often in my psychiatry practice. Recently, I saw the movie, Turning Red, and I started thinking about the different ways that people deal with their anger. I’ve noticed over the years that there are three different dysfunctional ways that people manage their anger.
People tend to tell us things or ask questions based on their own experiences and biases. These remarks might seem perfectly reasonable and benign to them but they can be upsetting to those of us on the receiving end. My approach to dealing with these types of remarks is to avoid defending, justifying or explaining ourselves and instead, go to the meta level.
As Valentines Day approaches, you should seriously consider the dark side of love-bombing. If a potential new partner comes along and tries to shower you with too much affection, too intensely and too quickly, and if you feel like you’re being swept off your feet, recognize this for what it really is and get yourself away from this person as fast as you can.
The only thing that anti-Asian sentiment does is to cause harm to individual Asian people like me. Hatred did not cure AIDS and it won’t cure COVID.
Monday, January 16th, is known around the world as “Blue Monday.” It’s supposed to be the saddest day of the year. With the shape of things these days, I’m not surprised if people are feeling more down than ever.
