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Laing House

Laura Burke named a 2010 Champion of Mental Health

From the 2010 Mental Illness Awareness Week website:

Champion - Youth

Laura Burke
Concordia University, Master's in Drama Therapy student



Ms. Burke [pictured above] has made outstanding contributions to the field of mental health in Canada, working to raise awareness, fight biases and stigma, and contribute to community organizations. She has given talks on recovery for the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program and acted as a peer support worker at Laing House, a drop-in centre for youth living with mental illness. When at Laing, she also ran a drama group and a writer’s circle, and was constantly inspired by the courage, resilience and determination of the youth she worked with.

In 2008 she recorded an album of her spoken word poetry about her journey through schizophrenia and recovery, and in 2009, she began her role at the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia as a peer support facilitator. Ms. Burke has showed continued dedication to the field of mental health, and has bravely drawn on her own experience with schizophrenia to positively impact her community.

Ms. Burke strongly believes that social inclusion, unconditional acceptance, and the opportunity to use creativity as a force of healing are invaluable, too often overlooked components of recovery. After graduation, Ms. Burke hopes to research and practice drama therapy to improve negative and cognitive symptoms in youth experiencing first episode psychosis.

Also see:

2010 Mental Illness Awareness Week (October 3rd to 9th)

2010 Champions of Mental Health

About the Champions of Mental Health Awards

Superhero - A Visual Poem

Laing House Family Support Group

The Laing House Family Support Group is a self-help group for family/friends of an adolescent or young adult up to the age of 30 who has a mental illness (not restricted to any one illness in particular). Since January 2008, the Laing House Family Support Group has operated as a stand-alone group, at arm's length from Laing House, but with Laing House's support.

Because the Laing House Family Support Group it is now run BY family members FOR family/friends, it is meant to be inclusive rather than exclusive and there is no requirement for the youth themselves to be members of Laing House or for families to have the youth's permission to attend.

The goal of the Laing House Family Support Group is to provide support and education according to the needs determined by the Support Group members. Meetings always include a time for sharing and support amongst the Group and we invite speakers when a specific interest is identified by the Group.

The Laing House Family Support Group meets on the first Monday evening of each month at 6:30 pm.

There is no commitment to attend group meetings beyond what families find is helpful or convenient. Laing House is located at 1225 Barrington Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Contacts:

Dani Himmelman, parent facilitator: phone (902) 826-224 or email dhimmelman@eastlink.ca.

Judy Bell, Team Leader, Laing House: phone (902) 473-7743.

Climbers to scale African peak to benefit Laing House

An article published in the August 9th edition of The Chronicle Herald:

A group of six Nova Scotians is on its way to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro as part of a fundraising effort for Laing House.

The group — Henry and Rena Demone, Hans and Dani Himmelman, and David Kirkpatrick and Paula Taylor — is paying all its own expenses so that all of the more than $60,000 that’s been raised will help support youth living with mental illness.

The idea for the climb was born at the Laing House masquerade ball fundraising event in 2007. Each member of the group has had a friend, family member or colleague experience mental illness and wanted to come up with a unique way to support Laing House.

The house is a peer support organization for youth with mental illness. It opened in Halifax in 2001 and has helped hundreds of young people. It’s the only organization of its kind in Canada.

Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, is the world’s highest free standing, snow-covered equatorial mountain. The climb will begin on Sept. 11. To learn more, visit www.lainghouse.org.

Photograph by Paul Shaffner. Photograph used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Laing House is all about healing

From the November 13th edition of the Community Herald Halifax:

Unique facility helps teens, young adults deal with mental health issues

By Pat Lee, Staff Reporter

Early November is a sad time of year for Hans [pictured] and Dani Himmelman. It’s the time of year when their 23-year-old daughter Genna took her own life.

But the couple have found a way to channel some of their grief by becoming avid supporters of Laing House, the only centre of its kind in Canada offering critical support to teens and young adults dealing with serious mental health issues.

"It’s very rewarding for us to be involved with Laing House," Hans said recently.

"It’s a way for us to deal with our own grief and to help other kids."

Along with being active volunteers at the house — Dani works with parents, and Hans is the incoming chairman of the board — they were involved with the home’s annual fundraiser UnMasked Mental Health Masquerade, held just a few weeks ago.

Last year, the event raised $150,000 for Laing House.

Hans, a 30-year employee at CIBC Wood Gundy, got people in his workplace involved and secured $16,000 for the cause, half from the investment firm and the other half from seven colleagues.

"Our Halifax office has been a major supporter," he said.

Hans said that although his daughter lost her struggle with mental illness four years ago, it’s been healing to see the success stories that happen at Laing House every day.

"She was one of the few who didn’t make it through," he said of his daughter’s struggle with schizophrenia and depression from about the age of 12.

"But Laing House was instrumental in getting her back on her feet."

Located in a Victorian house on Barrington Street, the centre was established in 2001 by his friends Keith and Rosemary Hamilton in honour of Rosemary’s mentally ill mother and a child of their own with mental illness. The centre offers a wide range of programs and supports for teens, young adults and their families.

Hans said that through Laing House, Genna was able to find jobs and activities she enjoyed.

"There’s a real void in our mental health system that doesn’t provide for peer support or the support that Laing House provides," he said.

"When kids are recovering from, or living with, a mental illness, they need to know that they’re not in isolation."

Next fall, the Himmelmans and four other couples will climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for the house.

Photograph by Christian Laforce of the Community Herald Halifax.

Idea of suicide ‘always there’

From today's edition of The Chronicle Herald:

Laing House a safe haven for youth with mental illness. It’s where John Goodwin found health, hope

By Lois Legge, Features Writer

JOHN GOODWIN has thought about killing himself most of his life.

He wrote his first suicide note in elementary school. And lying in bed each night, he still imagines a bullet travelling toward his head.

"It’s kind of always been there," he says of the depression that’s plagued him since childhood.

It’s still there. But about four years ago, Goodwin found a little hope at a little-known house in downtown Halifax that’s trying to help him and others stay alive and thrive.

"I probably would have committed suicide" without it, he says on a recent day inside Laing House, an eight-year-old day-time support centre for youth with mental illness — most commonly anxiety, but depression, too, and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and psychosis.

Youth is defined here as ages 16 to 30.

It used to be 17 to 24 but staff expanded the age range as membership grew. The three-storey house on Barrington Street — with meeting rooms and lounging areas; a painting room and full kitchen — now serves about 80 members who have often struggled with ostracism and poverty in addition to their conditions.

Goodwin’s been denied an apartment because of his mental illness and sees plenty of judgment elsewhere, a stigma he believes is intensified by media coverage or TV shows connecting mental illness with violent crime.

"Statistically we’re much more likely to be the receivers of a violent act; the receivers of trauma than we are . . . to cause a violent act," says the 26-year-old, who traces his own mental illness to a combination of genetics and being bullied repeatedly as a child.

But Laing House, he says, is a safe place, free of ridicule; a place that helps lift the "trance of unworthiness" he feels almost everywhere else.

"When you’re young and you’re struggling with an illness you feel so isolated and so alone," says executive director Shaleen Jones. "Everyone knows that if you’re a member here it’s because you have a mental illness so you don’t have to pretend anymore. When you’re here you can really be yourself . . . . So people form very fast relationships and really strong friendships here and that’s the core of what we do — creating opportunities for youth to connect with youth."

The centre also creates opportunities for education and employment and independent living, all often interrupted when mental illness takes hold.

The non-profit’s 14 staff work individually with members to help them find apartments or fill out resumes or apply for university. They’ve also organized things like cooking and painting classes or just been there to provide, as Jones puts it, "encouragement and cheerleading" — the kind of support founders Keith and Rosemary Hamilton envisioned when they set up the facility.

The Halifax couple — now retired and travelling around the world on their boat — created the centre after their son became mentally ill and they discovered how limited resources were for people like him. And they named the house after Rosemary Hamilton’s mother Nora Laing, a nurse who suffered from schizophrenia most of her life and left her family an unexpected inheritance when she died.

Stationed in Hong Kong during the Second World War, Laing had purchased shares in a bank there and forgotten about them for years. But when the Hamiltons inherited the shares, they used the money for Laing House, a place — Jones says — “where young people living with mental illness could go and be supported and en­couraged and take steps to rebuild their lives."

The members themselves have direct involvement in how the programs work and often help create them, which is cru­cial, Jones says, for people “who have had so many of their decisions taken away from them due to the fact that they’ve been ill."

Goodwin can’t remember ever not being mentally ill, although he’s tried to block out some of the early childhood experi­ences he thinks played a role in his chron­ic depression.

But he recalls being hit in the temple with a pool cue by a high school student who was trying to get into a gang. He re­members a girl trying to run him over with her car. And he remembers plenty of other confidence-destroying words and deeds he doesn’t want in print.

Even as early as pre-school, he says, “I can remember . . . sitting alone; that I was scared of the other kids."

“Around Grade 2 or Grade 3 I was writ­ing a suicide note at my babysitter’s, which is really early for most people be­cause usually it comes along at 16 or 17 . . . . (It said) just that I was worthless and . . . I didn’t deserve to live, stuff like that." By the time Goodwin reached high school, he thought about killing himself all the time.

“I felt worthless and I felt I wasn’t worth being around and I was quite frankly a piece of shit and that I didn’t deserve regu­lar things . . . .
“I spent . . . at least half a year that I just dropped out of school completely . . . in the late ’90s . . . 2000, something like that. I would have been in high school. I sat in my room all day. Well, I’d sleep all day and I’d stay up all night because then I didn’t have to deal with people . . . I’d just play on the computer for probably six months straight. I’d leave the room to eat and use the washroom but other than that I stayed in my room all the time."

Goodwin eventually went back, gradu­ated and started university, studying at Mount Saint Vincent. But he dropped out and is now — thanks to three different medications and support from Laing House —in the process of trying to start a public relations degree through distance education.

He’d just finished day treatment at the Abbie J. Lane Memorial hospital when he first came to Laing House (www.laing­house.org) four years ago. And he says the timing saved his life. He’d been in a major car accident (a car hit him while he was riding a bike) and broken both wrists. He didn’t have any friends. But the people he met here, including his now ex-girlfriend who is still a friend, helped him with ev­erything from eating to opening doors.

“If I hadn’t had those people then that depression would have continued, that de­pression would have got worse . . . and I would have fallen back . . . and I would have probably committed suicide."

Goodwin still has dark thoughts. But these days he gets some of them out on canvas, painting brilliantly-coloured mo­saics that everyone tells him they love (al­though he wonders if they’re just being nice); and speaking to school and univer­sity students about mental illness — which Jones says affects one in five young Canadians.

“The earlier mental illness can be dealt with, the less likely it is to have a debilitat­ing effect (and) of those five kids, only one of those five kids is going to get the help they need."

But 80 per cent of those who do receive support, she says, go on to live productive lives.

Goodwin hopes speaking publicly about his struggles will encourage others to get past the stigma and get the support they need.

In the meantime it’s helping him feel things he’s never felt before.

“I personally have spoken to about 4,000 students . . . . It’s a kind of a confidence builder because people are hanging on your every word while you’re telling your story, and for someone who at one point . . . had failed classes because I had to get up and speak . . . it’s kind of empowering."

More help for people with mental illness

From the June 27th edition of The Chronicle Herald:

People living with mental illness in Halifax will soon have more resources at their disposal, thanks to a $46,000 investment from the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia.

The foundation said Thursday that it will provide new funding for three programs in metro through its provincial grants program.

Grants will be awarded to the YWCA of Halifax, the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia and Laing House, a local youth support centre.

"Thanks to these organizations and the quality programs they offer to mental health patients and their families, we are changing the way people think about mental health," Myrtle Corkum, the foundation’s executive director, said in a release.

"Slowly, we are seeing a shift from stigmatizing, silence and isolation to acceptance, inclusion and understanding."

The grants will be used to fund educational initiatives, housing programs and support groups for family members and friends of people [living with] mental illness.