The Weyburn branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) has been able to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic, and the experience has made them more resilient and flexible as they continue to offer services and programs to the community.
This was the thrust of the message provided to the Weyburn Rotary Club by Tasha Collins, executive director of the CMHA in Weyburn, as she explained the range of programs they offer and talked about how the pandemic affected them.
As Collins explained, they are a volunteer-based organization that promotes the mental health and well-being of all members of the community, provides advocacy, social and recreational programs, and provides a vocational program.
The CMHA provides public education, such as through events like the annual Mayor’s Luncheon, presentations to groups and organizations, and programs for suicide prevention such as the Safe Talk workshop.
Collins notes the Safe Talk workshop is a 3.5-hour workshop to help people to recognize the signs of suicide. She also provides ASIST training, which is applied suicide intervention skills training, a two-day workshop.
“I do have a passion in talking about suicide awareness and prevention,” said Collins, noting she has done interventions with members of the community and with family members.
She spoke of one family where she did an intervention with a young man a number of times, and on the sixth time she intervened with him, “he didn’t have that connection to life.”
There were very difficult conversations had with other family members of that young man, and after this intervention, she didn’t hear anything more until six months later. Her husband came home and said the young man’s mother came through the till at his work and told him to pass on thanks to Tasha for her interventions which helped to save her son’s life.
“It just made me so proud to be able to help someone in some way,” she said, noting stories like this are what make suicide prevention and awareness worth all of the effort, as “it really can save someone’s life.”
Describing how COVID impacted the CMHA, Collins described how at first it shut down all of their programs and the centre at 404 Ashford Street, but they found ways to still provide some help to people.
In April they were able to provide weekly phone calls to their participants, deliver lunches to their clients, and they made their library of over 400 DVD movies available to the public during the lockdown.
By mid-April, the Saskatchewan CMHA organization had a wellness support response line in place to help anyone who needed it, and they started to offer one-one assistance. The vocational program resumed some of their services in mid-May, and by June they were able to resume most of their programs at reduced hours, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day.
Those hours expanded further in August to 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., which they have been able to maintain to the current time, noted Collins, which allows staff time to do cleaning and sanitizing after a day of activities.
The CMHA branch was able to get some government grants to help with staff wages and to buy cleaning supplies, and to develop and implement a new tablet program.
For the vocational program, with support from groups and individuals in the community, they have been able to buy a new truck, which will enable the work crew to be out and about this spring and summer, doing yard work and refuse hauling.
“It certainly was a great accomplishment for us and will help us with the vocational program to sustain our programming for many years,” she said.
Collins added that one year after the start of the pandemic here, the CMHA has been able to stay strong and active.
“If COVID has taught us anything, we’re resilient, we’re flexible and we’re able to adapt in order to provide the best programs and services for the community,” she said. “CMHA is here for the community, and we’ll do what we can to help them.”
