page 8
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Looking past the puppies: Mental Health Awareness
Week 2013
TOBY SAMSON
Contributor
On Monday, October 28th, Osgoode will kick
off its second annual Mental Health Awareness
Week. The Mental Health Law Society and
Legal and Lit’s Equity Officer, Ebony Rose,
have been working hard with the support of
Melanie Banka Goela, Osgoode’s Student Success and Wellness Counsellor, to plan a diverse
set of events. This year, MHAW aims to strike
a balance between promoting student wellness
and contextualizing mental health more generally.
I know what you’re thinking: “Mental Health
Awareness Week? Does that mean there will
be…puppies!?!”
Yes, there will be puppies.
But there will be more than puppies. There
must more than puppies, a lot more than puppies, to even begin to change the culture around
mental health at Osgoode. The therapy dogs
that were part of MHAW last year did help student’s de-stress (that, and other, less obvious,
benefits are why we are bringing them back).
However, it seems that many people walked
away from last year’s inaugural MHAW with
the message that “puppies + acknowledging
the existence of stress = a solid mental health
approach”.
It doesn’t. Although Osgoode has recently
made a tangible commitment to improving
mental health for our students, embodied by
Melanie’s presence and that MHAW exists at
all, I find the conversation about mental health
incredibly lacking. We continue to frame
mental health issues as either anxiety-ordepression-related-to-being-a-law-student or
serious-scary-pathology. This is an unfounded,
stigmatizing dichotomy. It nudges us towards
“ranking” the severity of mental health problems based on what we name them, rather than
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