Mental Health Articles and Blog

Making the decision to reach out to a therapist can be nerve wracking. When you start to the process of finding a therapist, it’s likely you’ll come across several different kinds of professionals, each one with their own therapy speciality, such as anxiety therapy, and method (known as a therapy modality), such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). You might start to worry you’ll choose the wrong “kind” of therapist or counsellor. 

First Session’s founder reflects on a decade of working on his mental health

The season of love is upon us! More accurately, that one day of the year laser focused on romantic love—Valentine’s Day.

Do you ring in every new year with a laundry list of life-changing resolutions? Then, by mid-January you’re already feeling behind, you’re disappointed, or you’ve simply forgotten about them?

Sara Jones, First Session staff member, shares about anxiety, depression, fear, and loneliness during the Christmas holiday season.

In light of the women’s protests in Iran after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, we reached out to one of our therapists who grew up in Iran.

Are you someone who kept a diary as a teen? Maybe as an adult, you live by your to-do lists. There are reasons we turn to writing down ideas and tasks — it gets thought clutter out of our heads and allows us to see it in a more organized way. The same applies to keeping a journal for therapy or for overall better mental health.

You may have noticed some colleagues around you or, yourself, ‘quiet-quitting’ - just doing your duties, the bare minimum to coast through, a lack of engagement in work or reduced engagement in work.

It’s hard for everyone to ask for help. But, the idea of asking for help creates intense vulnerability for the man who has been attempting to do his best impression of “classic masculinity.”

For Mental Health Awareness Month, we are crowd-sourcing real stories like yours—meaningful moments, breakthrough moments, transformational moments.

It’s been just over a month since Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions of people have fled the country, thousands of people have died, and those in Canada (home to some of the largest populations of both Ukrainian and Russian diasporas) have watched the conflict progress.

A letter to my 2-month-old, Anderson. This is my personal story about struggle, asking for help, and the power of support.‍

One of the reasons therapy is so effective is that it’s a space where you are talking to someone who is trained to listen. 

It’s important to know that mental health and mental illness are not the same thing. Think of it in terms of your body health: everyone has physical health but not everyone has a physical illness. Still, you can take action to build strength and practice good health habits to keep yourself functioning day-to-day and to prevent more serious illness later in life.

Feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt are totally normal in life, especially when we’re striving for something new or are levelling up in some way (e.g. working toward higher education, preparing for a promotion, or training for a competition). Sometimes, though, those thoughts are so constant that we have trouble getting through regular tasks, and it can be really discouraging.

Mental health belongs to everyone; no one exists without it. Mental health can be strained when there is increased stress, when underlying mental health issues are not being addressed, and many other reasons

As described by sociologist Cory Keyes, languishing is the opposite of flourishing. In the context of mental health and individual wellbeing, to flourish is to feel good, function well, and pursue an authentic existence.