One In Five Anchal Sharma

Candide Uyanze interviews Victoria Marchand, the coordinator of the Indigenous Resource Centre at uOttawa about her experiences with mental health as an Indigenous student in the nursing program. This is part of a series of unedited interviews we are releasing over the next few weeks from an unfinished episode on BIPOC mental health we started working on before COVID-19. Art by Moira Wilson.

In this interview, Candide Uyanze interviews Emmanuelle Auguste and Wina Darius, two students working with uOttawa's Vtrac or Vulnerability, Resilience, Trauma and Culture lab on a research project centred around Black mental health. This is part of a series of unedited interviews we are releasing over the next few weeks from an unfinished episode on BIPOC mental health that was started before the pandemic began. Art by Moira Wilson.

In the coming weeks, we want to highlight interviews from an episode we started working on before lockdown. We will be sharing a series of unedited interviews conducted by Candide Uyanze with students from BIPOC communities to gain insight on the unique challenges of trying to access intersectional mental health services. Images by Christine Wang and Moira Wilson.

In this episode, we talk to students and student groups about getting support for mental health in a peer setting and hear the university acknowledge that mental health is in fact a crisis on this campus.

To mark the final day of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, this episode deals with the realities women face in their day to day lives and how it impacts their mental health, years later. Featuring local activists and organizations, this episode looks at ways we can change the discussion on gender-based violence to better address the issue.

In our first episode, we talk to a former U of O student about her difficulties in accessing mental health care in Ottawa, and to the university administration about what they’re doing to tackle the growing concern of mental health on campus.