About Us

Founded: 1993
Independently Incorporated: 2006

Lessons Learned: It is really best when consumers work in pairs or small groups to support one another; Consumer and Board unity is the single most powerful force to get you to achieve your goals; we need travel funding sufficient to truly meet the needs of our people in remote areas – a one time class or weekend workshop is not sufficient to meet the intensive support needs for the consumers to develop groups on their own. As well, increased costs mean we also need more resources for service in our regions. What we have learned also from our experience as well as our international counterparts, it is vital to have our own place or centre where we can conduct our activities.

Successes: We have been the third provincial mental health consumer driven network to become independent in the history of Canada . We are one of the largest provincial consumer driven organizations in Canada with 2200 members. We testified before the Senate Committee of Social Affairs, Science and Technology; we were given a half hour interview by CBC before the presentation; Our Board members took part in a promotional project in the Alberta Mental Health Board that featured several of our members and was quoted in MacLean’s, our representatives worked very hard to give service to their areas and have contributed to many government initiatives with respect to public policy. The most notable of these are the policies related to Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped and the Provincial Mental Health Planning Project.

Challenges: Funding and the rate of speed at which our demand for service is increasing. Though we are voluntary, we are also living in very straightened economic circumstances, and our organizations are no exception. It is necessary to ensure our workers and our volunteers are protected economically while we are providing service to our communities. We want to be able to be truly available for our mental health consumers and have the resources to put in their hands to help them develop in their own communities and reflecting their unique needs. We are especially concerned with being able to provide consumer driven solutions to mental illness as it is becoming a pandemic. Consumer driven support is an important support that can be with a consumer before diagnosis, during treatment and beyond. Even those of us on medication need practical and real life solutions to the problems and issues we face that can only be provided by people who have been there before us. We need mental health consumers who also have achieved a level of wellness who want to give back to their community. We would like to leave you with a quote by one of the founders of our consumer movement in this country, the late Vince Van de Pol: “It may be really hard to bang your head against a brick wall, but if enough people do it, eventually the wall will fall down.”