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.

What is mental wellness?

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.

Mental health supports

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.

Together, our health care centres provide day-to-day mental health care in Vancouver and across BC. Mental health and substance use services from Vancouver Coastal Health include:

Mental health & substance use services in Vancouver
Programs and services to support children, youth, adults, and older adults in Vancouver through their journey with mental health.

Addiction & substance use
People use substances for different reasons, but for some people, it can affect their health and lead to dependence. View a list of services made available by VCH.

Depression, mood & anxiety
Programs and resources to help people manage the spectrum of mood disorders, including anxiety, depression, Dysthymia and bipolar disorder.

Seniors mental health
Services and resources to support seniors and older adults to be happy, healthy and independent.

Mind Health BC
Take Mind Health BC’s screening quiz to uncover what mental health and substance use challenge you may be struggling with and get help.

BC Brain Wellness Program
A nice and interactive donor-funded program establishing clinically relevant lifestyle approaches to complement medical treatment in the clinics at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health.

BC Government – Virtual Mental Health
Virtual services available for British Columbians who are experiencing anxiety, depression or other mental health challenges.

Mind Map BC
A custom-made database of outpatient mental health services including professional counselling, peer counselling, support groups, and others.

For more wellness resources, visit VCH’s mental wellness page.

Donor support and mental wellness

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.