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Harvard and UBC-educated Dr. JJ Sidhu, Medical Director, Mental Health and Substance Use at Vancouver Coastal Health, offers his expert tips on how to maintain mental wellness during challenging times.
Mental wellness is more than just the absence of mental illness. It is an active process – not a definitive or necessarily permanent state – that involves healthy ways of managing our emotions and behaviours, enabling us to cope with life’s stresses.
Mental wellness falls at the positive end of the mental health spectrum, encompassing our emotional, psychological, and social well-being and affecting how we think, feel, and act. When we are mentally well, we feel equipped to react to stressors in a healthy way, and in turn, our relationships with ourselves and others strengthen and improve.
Taking care of our mental and physical health is crucial to our overall well-being. If you are struggling to maintain mental wellness, you are not alone. Help is available.
For medical emergencies, please call 9-1-1. If you or someone you care about is experiencing suicide-related thoughts and behaviours, there are many crisis centres available 24 hours a day to talk. Call 1 (800) 784-2433 for support.
VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation raises crucial funds to ensure that British Columbians have access to exceptional care when they need it most urgently.
Donor gifts have helped fund research by physicians like Dr. JJ Sidhu, including his ongoing study on supporting patients with mental health conditions through virtual care following hospital discharge. Donor-funding has also enabled larger projects, like the construction of the Joseph & Rosalie Segal & Family Health Centre, an eight-storey mental health treatment facility located at the VGH site, in addition to other areas across our hospitals and health care centres.