#279 Sikh Research on Mental Health

We look at what mental health research is saying about Sikh communities, and why getting help can feel harder than it should. We connect stigma, racism, migration stress, and identity to practical barriers in Canada’s mental health system, then talk about what culturally safe care can actually look like. 

• The difference between “Sikh” and “sick” and why naming matters 
• Stigma in families and the pressure of reputation 
• Low use of mental health services despite real need 
• The gap after diagnosis when people still cannot access care 
• Loneliness and disrupted spiritual practice for Sikh migrants 
• Evidence of implicit bias affecting counsellor callbacks in Vancouver 
• Public stigma versus self-stigma and how both block help-seeking 
• Collective trauma from Partition and Operation Blue Star shaping the present 
• Racism and hate crimes as measurable mental and physical health stressors 
• Sikh youth stress from being visibly different plus intergenerational tension 
• Why Western therapy can fail without cultural fit and language support 
• Punjabi language as access to emotions and meaning, not just translation 
• Help-seeking pathways that start with family and gurdwara before clinicians 
• Culturally safe models including Sikh-informed counselling frameworks 
• Empowerment and peer education approaches that reduce self-stigma 

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Sikh Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Happy Universal Radio Network Podcast Day! Okay, it's not officially the Universal Radio Network Podcast Day, but maybe we should decide one. This is the Universal Radio Networks Podcast. My name is Grigit, and in today's episode, we're discussing mental health research specifically around the sick population. So if you're unfamiliar, sick doesn't mean S-I-C-K, okay? It means S-I-K-H. Because gone are the days of saying sikh to anglicize the pronunciation because the word sick, there's nothing wrong with it. Alright, it's sick key, it's sickism, and we're talking about the sick population and mental health research. What is out there right now. Happy well-being Wednesday. I'm super stoked to be here because April is Sick Heritage Month. It is a wonderful initiative placed by the government of Canada to honor just how many sick people there are in Canada and how much we contribute to the fabric of Canada. So if you're new here, my name is Grigit. I'm the host of, or one of the hosts of Wellbeing Wednesday. And this Wednesday, you'll be hanging out with me as we talk about themes in research around the sick population when it comes to mental health. This is something I've been wanting to do for quite some time because I feel like when people are doing research on Indian populations, it really does kind of need to be subsected because India is such a big country, and each pocket has such a unique cultural background. There's definitely some larger themes that cover the whole subcontinent. Um and also South Asia. Oh, sorry. Spring, man, it's catching up to me. All the extra light we're getting. It means I'm getting less sleep. But yeah, whenever we talk about like South Asian research, it does group a lot of people into one. And people like to do research on smaller and smaller subsects. So one that we see really often is the Punjabi sick subsect of population. And even within that, there's a lot of diaspora. And you could be Punjabi without being sick. You can also be sick without being Punjabi. But it's just so combined. So I just want to kind of get ahead of that and say if I mix up the two, I apologize. The intention is to talk about the sick population. And you know, sick people, although they are very concentrated in Punjab, it doesn't mean that there's people in Punjab who aren't Muslim, Christian, Hindu. That doesn't matter. So if I say Punjabi, I apologize, but it is a common mistake that can be made. And I just want to be able to have a conversation uh about the current themes of research. And of course, the research is coming from likely a Western lens uh for the majority. So also a little bit disclaimer on that there. So to get into a conversation about sick mental health, we do have to kind of look at where do we stand with mental health in the sick community? Uh, very clearly, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out, but there is a lot of stigma. And researchers have done studies on South Asian Canadians and found that there's really low rates of mental health services being used compared to other populations. Now, yes, this research is looking at South Asian Canadians, uh, but given that it is looking at Canadians, a large portion of that group includes sick people. So another Canadian study found that nearly one in three South Asians diagnosed with major depression cited no access to care. So they've been diagnosed, which is already a major hurdle, very difficult to do, and also very hard for someone who maybe not has all the education about mental health or all access to resources as a white Canadian citizen does. So to be diagnosed already is like a huge thing, right? And then to not access care afterwards, even though anybody who provides a diagnosis is required to kind of hook you up with resources, it must mean that the resources aren't accessible or the resources aren't uh available, or they're just not the quality of resources that someone might need. So these are some possible extrapolations you could take from that. So it's not that people don't want help, right? Like it's not saying that they know access to care means that you know they didn't take the initiative, they didn't try. I mean, they tried enough to get a diagnosis, right? Because it's not everybody's diagnosed against their will, either through like an involuntary cycle or through like an ER visit. It's just that they didn't get that help, right? And we can do better. We can kind of look at, okay, well, after diagnosis, what happens? Why is it that they're not getting help? Is it like a personal thing? Is it a community thing? Is it a systems thing? Let's look at those barriers and address them. Now, that gap also doesn't exist because we don't experience mental health challenges. Again, it's because these people are diagnosed with major depression and then they don't get care. It's not that we're looking at an entire population and seeing that they access fewer mental health services, right? So it doesn't negate us from having bad mental health. So it also, if you don't know, my name is Gruji. So I am like Binjabi sick by uh by birth. I'm not the most sick ke person out there. I I know a little bit, I don't know a lot, I'm not super religious. Uh so I do take that with a grain of salt. And I will say a lot of us and our, but I am trying to look at the sick population as a whole and not as a participant. Although a participant, uh, a member of that population does give me a unique insight that maybe not everybody who's looking at this population that isn't a part of the population would have. Another recent study on sick migrants across countries, including Canada, so not just Canada, found that half of participants reported loneliness and nearly half struggled to maintain spiritual practices after moving. So that's also a real mental health burden and a real signal that something needs to change. Uh, religion is a really important protective factor against poor mental health. And if it's important to you before migrating, it still remains important to you. Just access to a community that practices that religion and access to a goddura, access to like faith kind of sprinkled throughout your community gets more difficult. Now, this study that was done in UBC is a really interesting one, okay. Um, so they okay. First, I gotta preempt this with I have a belief that South Asian and JBC racism is at like an all-time high in Vancouver and BC because of the high immigration that happened there. And also just the fact that like people have been immigrating there for so much longer than people have been immigrating to like Winnipeg or Edmonton or uh I don't even know where else people and people immigrate to in Canada, to be honest. Uh Calgary, right? And but I feel like in Vancouver it's just a different breed. And if you meet like specifically like Punjabi Sik men or South Asian men there, they'll have a very different experience because of that bias and that prejudice against Indian people, or visibly Indian people, visible minorities who are South Asian, like sick people. So this study from UBC was done in 2023 and it looked at how likely they were to hear back from a counselor or psychologist in Vancouver based on their name and religious identity. So researchers looked at 853 licensed practitioners, and who would have guessed it? Being visibly sick did affect access. The research points to implicit bias because sick people were getting fewer callbacks than non-sick clients of theirs. I thought this study was crazy. I could not believe my eyes when I read this. But it also isn't too shocking because it's just another piece of evidence for something that we already know, which is racial bias exists. Whether we try to combat it or not, it can exist at a subconscious level. It doesn't necessarily make people bad people, it just means you have to work better or work harder to be a good person. Uh, it also shows that there are biases in the system, which again, not shocking, but also surprising to find another piece of evidence pointing towards it in the good little good year of 2026. Now, it also doesn't mean that the system isn't worth repairing or it's just broken and we shouldn't do anything about it. The barriers exist and we can work to dismantle those barriers. We can work to create pathways that don't hit that barrier. So it's not just about willingness to seek help, the system that people are seeking help in also has to change, and that's why we're having this conversation. It is Sick Heritage Month, it is a great month to have these conversations, so I think it's worthwhile. Something else to discuss is mental health stigma. So research up with WSIC communities found that mental illness isn't discussed openly within families, and one thing that people really talked about really often was about reputation, and that word carries so much weight and it really limits us. It can be a huge positive factor in driving us to be successful and really fight for the things that are important to us and be kind and good and generous. However, it does limit us in that we don't discuss certain issues, we don't open up about certain issues, and it makes us fearful of help seeking. So, reputation is it's something that goes both ways here. So, researchers who study South Asian diaspora communities, uh, they kind of note two kinds of stigma at work. And before we get into that, I just want to share what diaspora means. Again, it's something that a lot of people talk about, but it really refers to a certain population, for example, Punjabi people or sick people, but kind of scattered throughout. Because as we immigrate and globalize even further, there is gonna be diaspora. So there's Chinese diaspora, Korean diaspora, Iranian diaspora. It goes on, right? Like any country that has immigration uh has diaspora scattered throughout. So the sick community then becomes not just people in Punjab, where yes, there is the most amount of sick people, but it also includes places like the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, and so on and so forth. Again, I don't know too much about the immigration patterns of sick people, but those are kind of the first couple countries that hop into mind. So diaspora refers to not just Punjabi people or sick people in Punjab, but sick people throughout the world, but identifying with that religion that is congregated in one physical location in the world, which is Punjab. So the two kinds of stigma at work come from public stigma and self-stigma. So public stigma is obviously what the community thinks, and self-stigma is those judgments we internalize and believe about ourselves. Both are equally real and both are equally powerful in stopping us from doing things that could be potentially beneficial or harmful to us. For example, there's public stigma around leaving your grocery cart in the parking lot instead of putting it away. And then there's self-stigma. You know that that's the right thing to do. Nobody told you that that's what you have to do. Honest to God, no one has ever come up to me in my life and told me that when I go grocery shopping, one of my requirements is I put the cart back. But that's self-stigma. I've internalized this judgment that if I leave this cart out in the parking lot instead of putting it away, I am not doing my job and I haven't properly grocery shopped. Like my trip is unfinished. So that's an example of stigma working for positive, but often when we talk about stigma, we talk about it working for the negative, in which case, that's kind of today. There's this deep cultural script of saving face and keeping your reputation and not having any problems and just being perfect and shiny, and nothing is ever going wrong for you, and you're never sad or angry or upset, you're always happy, and just keeping the peace. So researchers describe it as making many sick reluctant, many sick people reluctant to discuss personal prior problems. And this can include problems in your family, problems in your family members' behaviors, um, it stops help-seeking behaviors, and suffering tends to kind of get framed in like collective philosophical terms, which isn't always unhealthy, but it can make it hard to say these problems out loud. For example, like I am struggling, I need support. Have you ever heard if you're sick yourself, have you ever heard anyone say that to you? If you have a lot of sick friends or family, have you ever heard them say something like I need help? I need support. It's it's very rare. And the part that's get the part that gets me that even anonymous surveys show underreporting of depression, which is crazy because it's anonymous, there's no consequences, but people have that self-stigma. So even when reporting in anonymous surveys, there's under-reporting happening. Now, it's really unfair to look at problems within a community without acknowledging the context under which those problems exist, and that cannot be any less true for the sick population because being a sick person has not been a peaceful existence historically, it's a fairly new religion compared to other religions. It started in the 1400s, and its relationship is quite violent and has a history of trauma. And a lot of sick families feel it and experience it and face the consequences of it, but don't know how to name it. So with partition in 1947 and Operation Blue Star in 1984, these are quite recent incidences of violence and state-sanctioned violence against sick Punjabi people. And what that leads, especially with the timeline being in 1947 and 1984, is it means that we are the first generation to not experience recognized state-sanctioned violence against sick people. That isn't to say that there isn't biases within India and outside of India's context where there is like people in power who are greater or greatly more violent towards sick people. Like there's still bias. It hasn't gone away. And the farmers' protests themselves, I feel, will be kind of recognized as some form of state-sanctioned violence, like the way that the Indian government retaliated against the farmers' protests. Because the farmers' protests were organized in Punjab, and I don't know for sure if there was other neighboring provinces, uh, but a majority of the people were sick. And that was violence organized by the state to kind of quell the movement. And only time will tell if it becomes a part of like that history of violence. Like, we don't know where things will go with that. Decades of migration, displacement, and rebuilding definitely are traumas, and nobody can argue that the partition and operation of Blue Star were incredibly traumatic events that happened to the sick population. And these aren't history lessons. Like, our grandparents were alive for this. Some of you may be younger, maybe maybe not your grandparents, but like there are people right now who are alive during partition. So it's not that far away. It's not ancient history, it's very recent near history. And trauma researchers consistently find that emotional effects of collective traumas don't stay in the past. They're not a part of the history, they're a part of our present. They shape our identity, our safety, and our help-seeking behaviors. And there's this ongoing reality, like since the Air India disaster and the aftermath of 9-11, sick Canadians have faced elevated rates of hate crimes and discrimination. And experiencing racism, again, shocking, leads to measurably worse mental and physical health outcomes, even when you account for all factors, including class, so the amount of wealth that you have. The turban, the bug, has been a visible target for misidentification and abuse, and that stress accumulates. That's why the stress is also disproportionate towards sick be men. Something that's important to note when we're talking about generational trauma and the fact that, you know, when you are a part of a population that has faced historic trauma, that again isn't all that long ago, but also it's not a personal failing, right? Like it's not my fault or your fault if you're sick, or your sick friends or family members' fault, or your co-workers' fault that this happened to them. But it still impacts them. We can't control the circumstances around which we're born, uh, around which we're raised. But when we're adults, we do have a lot more say in our lives. And that's where we can take personal uh responsibility in fixing those cycles and healing and making sure that the next generation of Punjabi sick people are better off than we were, right? Like, isn't that the whole goal? When a community has faced this level of systematic violence, displacement, misidentification, harassment, and then on top of that, you layer migration stress because, yes, people do consider migrating from one country to another country a trauma, especially when you're not necessarily familiar with the language. And think about it, it's so much easier to immigrate now because you have the technology and tools to assimilate, and you're so globalized, you can kind of get a feeling of what Canadian culture is like off of like TikTok and Instagram and Facebook before you get here, versus when I don't know about you, but my when my parents came, like cell phones weren't a thing. To access the internet, you had to have a computer. Actually, pull up. When was the internet invented? Were my parents here before the internet? This might sound like such an ignorant question. But like genuinely, I remember being a kid when we got our first like home desktop. Okay, modern internet was invented in 1983. So okay, I'll be honest, like, we didn't have maybe I was like a toddler when we got a home desktop. But my parents were driving around Edmonton with a full-on map pulled up on their dashboard because they couldn't Google maps how to get to work or how to get to the library to take English classes. Like that just didn't exist. So they went through a lot, and you can understand why migration stress is considered a form of trauma. And knowing who you are can kind of protect against these factors. The mental health impacts on a community are not individual problems, they're community problems. Like we as a collective. Can work to better this, right? It's not just about all doom and gloom. And that identity piece is resilient. Like research finds that cultural pride is a genuinely strong buffer against mental health effects of racism. So knowing who you are, being proud of who you are can protect your well-being. And that's just not like fluff thrown in. Like that's in the data. Like it's shown that that is helpful. That's why it's really important to pay attention to sick youth mental health because these are people who are growing up between worlds, especially if you're part of the diaspora, where you're balancing being Sikhi or being um a part of Sikki, and then also being in Canada where it's a majority Catholic religion, Christian religion, or agnostic or atheist or whatever. And there's this kind of weird battle, like navigating two different cultures at once. Now there is like a weird balance that comes with growing up sick in Canada because you're navigating two cultures at once, and sometimes your home life can be very different home life from your peers, and it also depends on where you're growing up. Uh, at the time I was growing up in North Edmonton, and there was not a lot of sick people around. The population has grown so much since I was a child, but like let me tell you, there was nobody who was sick who lived within like a 10-minute drive of me because everybody was congregating in the south side. So it's very difficult to kind of navigate life up here. So research on South Asian youth, including Punjabi sick youth, but again, grain of salt, this is all South Asian youth. Um, these youth in Peel region, Ontario identified some pretty specific stressors like peer pressure, academic expectations, and the challenge of being visibly different. So for youth that are wearing vodka or bug or zesta, like other articles of faith that kind of single them out from their peers, it can be a very difficult time. It can be a documented source of stress and can even involve bullying from both inside and outside of their cultural group. Because let's be honest, like we inside our cultural group aren't exactly like we we love a good ribbing. Like we love to bully, we love to tease. But when you're a young person growing up, that teasing can be really othering. On top of that, there's that intergenerational tension that researchers describe quite often, where immigrant sick parents tend to carry more stress from navigating the outside world, like work, language barriers, belonging, all these really, really tough things that come with migration. And then their Canadian-born children, on the other hand, face a different level of stress. They face stress from inside the family, community, and also outside. These expectations, these comparisons, having a different value system at home versus school, where you're told, like at school, that you know, you're supposed to do things a certain way, and then at home, you're told you're supposed to do things a different way. It can make it really difficult for kids to kind of figure out like how to behave, what to do, what is right. And when we know that being like proud and being like very resilient and identifying with your culture strongly is a protective factor. When you're a kid, identity is so difficult. Like knowing who you are and what's important to you is a part of the learning curve. So it can be incredibly challenging for these kids to figure that out right off the bat, as if nothing happened. And it can be really difficult for parents and children to relate to each other, where parents are fighting to prove belonging and show that they belong, and then children feel entitled to it because they were born here. One of the harder findings from that Peel Region study was that youth felt like they couldn't talk to their parents about mental health because of stigma. And then there's this painful loop where the family is both the primary support system for children and also a source of shame around seeking help and be preventative. And that's incredibly difficult for a young person to be in because if you're under 18, your abilities to support your own health are very limited. Oftentimes you do need parent permission to do things. So if you were to even try and access a counselor without your parents' permission, you wouldn't be able to because parents have to sign off on it. It's a healthcare service. So the research also shows that young people aren't passive though, right? They call for culturally safe models of mental health care. There's ways for children to get involved in politics and government and healthcare spaces. For example, Kickstand is a great resource. They have a youth advisory board that children can join and help advise practitioners on how to support young people with their mental health care. Isn't that beautiful? I thought it was so cool. And it's honestly amazing. I'm really sad that this program came out as I've aged out of it, but it's really, really neat that it's there. And I really hope that a lot of youth take advantage of it and contribute, contribute to youth mental health care because your voice matters. Why would it not? Right. So, with this involvement of sick youth in mental health care or this opportunity for youth in general to be involved in mental health care, we also kind of have to look at that system we were talking about earlier and how it does fail sick people sometimes. For example, I myself am sick, but I'm not super religious. I've just kind of grown up in the culture, I've grown up going like all day. As I got older, I got to make my own choices and I became less interested in it. It just kind of happened for me that way. And maybe I find it again later in life, maybe I don't. Who knows? Right? But I have had success in the Western therapy system. I've had my challenges as well, don't get me wrong. But I have had success. So just because a system isn't perfect doesn't mean we don't use it, and it also doesn't mean that we don't try to make it better. So there's this real tension that keeps surfacing that there's strong evidence that therapy works, but people aren't accessing therapy. And there's equally strong evidence that for many people in our community, this Western style of therapy just doesn't work. And if it does, it has to have some serious adoption. For one thing, a lot of sick Canadians, especially first-gen immigrants, come from Punjubi backgrounds where talking to a stranger about your personal problems is just not something that happens. You talk to your trusted friends, family members, your parents, friends, somebody close to you who knows you in your context. You go to them. You go to someone who you have a lot of respect for, and going to a stranger, even if they're professional, is just not something that a lot of older people are comfortable with, or a lot of people who immigrate are comfortable with. It's not how like typically these things have been treated in the past. You went to family, you went to the godra, you meditated on it, you prayed on it. Booking an appointment through the Jane app to get mental health help is just not something that happens in the bing. Okay, maybe not yet. There's also this big language piece where talking in your mother tongue, your ma bodli, is the easiest way to communicate. You have the most amount of vocab, you can tune in with your emotions, and you can just speak better, communicate better, and explain how you feel and think better. So now trying to do that in a language that you've maybe like studied in high school and then now are speaking like fluently all the time because you immigrated to Canada or the US or the UK or Australia, it's really difficult to communicate your emotions, thoughts, feelings, behaviors in a second language. Sick immigrants preferred Punjabi over English consistently, and they actually also reported high levels of depression and lower life satisfaction. So language isn't about communication, it's how you access your inner world. And if you can't communicate your inner world to someone else using that language, it's really difficult to tap into. So language is a huge barrier to accessing therapy. And even if you're a Punjabi speaking person and you become a therapist, psychologist, counselor in Canada, you've learned all your practices in English. So you're still using English words or roughly translated English to Punjabi words. Like, I don't know how to explain cognitive uh what are the words? Cognitive dissociations. No, what are they? Oh my gosh, how is this escaping me? Okay, it'll come back to me pretty soon here. But they're like the cognitive distortions. That's what they are. Cognitive distortions. How do you explain that in Punjabi? I have a very rudimentary sense of Punjabi, but I don't know how to explain like high-level things that I learned in university or in years of therapy at Punjabi. It's just a very difficult thing. So language is super important. When that language isn't available in a therapy room, real stuff gets lost. It gets mistranslated, it gets diminished, it gets watered down. And if you can't share everything, I'm sorry, but that's uh it can be a huge waste of time and money, especially with high-expensive therapies now.$235 an hour as a standard rate in Alberta. Yikes. Yeah, I ain't doing that if I can't fully express myself. There's also help seeking pathways that are difficult. Uh, help-seeking pathways are kind of the line in which people can follow to get towards mental health care. So for a lot of people, it looks like talking to your family doctor, and the family doctor referring you to a counseling service, and that counseling service intaking you, and that's it. Studies show that when sick people are struggling, they typically turn first to family, then to the godra, then a trusted elder. And professional help mental health services come much later down that road. And often after a crisis point, like suicidal ideation, or like it could be being hospitalized due to risky behaviors. It's it's just really tough when it has to get to such an awful point in order to receive that professional mental health support. When, you know, it is sometimes it does work for people to use community supports like going to the condo, talking to someone that you trust, talking to a family about it, talking to friends about it. Like for a lot of people, that does get you by. But being able to recognize we need professional support is what separates us from a crisis point and that end of the help-seeking pathway. The question is, how do we build that bridge between kind of the traditional system of leading on our personal resources and those clinical services that are there? They're part of our infrastructure. We deserve them and we're entitled to them. And how we do that is through cultural community trust. Those services have to get better, they have to have more culturally appropriate supports, more Punjabi language supports or Hindi language supports or Urdu language supports in order for people of that population to access it. So when we talk about culturally appropriate care, we kind of have to look at how counseling models incorporate sick spiritual frameworks, especially if you're trying to speak to sick people, you have to be able to account for their religion and use that as a tool to help better their life. The sick life stress model, developed by Canadian researchers, integrates teachings from Sikh Key from the Guru Grand Saab into counseling process processes themselves. So they work through empathy, explore sources of stress through a sick lens, develop targeted interventions and following through on those interventions. And so far, early clinical trials show a lot of promise. There's also work being done through helplines, specifically for depth sick communities. Um, although I will say that these helplines seem to be kind of non-emergency so far, but a lot of regular counseling supports do really prioritize being able to provide equitable care to people of all language backgrounds, all religious backgrounds, all ethnic backgrounds. So on stigma reduction, a Toronto-based study with Asian men, including South Asians, so again, even wider. So we're looking at sick people, but we're also looking at South Asians, and now we're looking at all Asian men, uh, found that approaches combining acceptance and commitment therapy with peer education were effective at reducing self-stigma. So kind of removing that personal same, personal shame. And the big media mediating factor on this was empowerment. So helping people see help seeking as something a strong person does and not a weak one, right? Like seeking help is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength and it's a sign of knowing yourself. And that's really promising. So there is always promise, and I know a lot of talk about like ethnically specific or religiously specific groups within mental health care can be pretty doom or gloom. Because things, like like I said, there's so much research showing that when you're a minority, uh, and specifically in this context, you're talking about sick people, less likely to reach out for help, less likely to get appropriate help, less likely to stick with that help when we do get it. And as we're on the kind of the final search of today, I do want to share that like it is hopeful. I've said it many times before, and I will continue to say it, just because a system isn't perfect doesn't mean that we abandon it or we refuse to fix it. Because this system, I believe, has so much potential to help all people, and it's just a matter of giving people the opportunity to do so. So having more Punjabi Sikh practitioners, having more people who speak the same language as you, who understand your religious context, and that is happening. We've covered a lot of ground, and a lot of that ground shows that you know why, like things can look good. Having a strong sense of identity, being proud of who you are, being able to recognize all the contributions that Sikh people have made to Canada despite the rise in South Asian racism, is a really powerful thing. Continuing to carry your head high as you do face everyday life struggles and the life struggles that only happen to you because you are a visible minority, because you are a part of minority religion. All of that takes strength. But not pride in a way that overpowers others or undermines other religions and other cultural backgrounds, but shows a strength and freedom and power to practice what you believe in and just carry on that tradition forwards. Like remember, Sikhi is all about compassion and equality and caring for those that can't care for themselves. So Langar is about feeding people who can't. Like being like a part of the saint, soldier, warrior religion is about protecting those that can't protect themselves. So if you see people around you who are struggling, remember your role is to protect them if they're not able to protect themselves. And with mental health, your ability to support yourself is impaired. So be that support and be that warrior for the people around you, but not necessarily always in a violent way or in a way that has to fight and like a struggle. You can be a listening ear and be somebody's protector. You can be somebody's support, you can be strong for them and let them lean on you by being there for them. And seeking support is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. Being able to be at a low point and still fight through that to get yourself help is an immense strength that people will only understand if they've been there. Not being able to shower or brush your teeth or be able to focus in school and then still be able to get up and go to your doctor's appointment or talk to your parents about how you're feeling. Oh my gosh, next level of strength. Remember, there is always help out there for you. Canada's National Suicide Crisis Line is 988. And if you're just looking for resources on mental health supports, you can call 811 or 211 for any of that there. And if you find that you've been having a hard time lately, reach out to a friend. Just let them know what's going on, let them be strong for you, and let them help you be strong back. Thank you so much for everyone who has tuned in. If you're not already following us, you should follow us on our socials at the Universal Radio. You can stay up to date with all of our podcasts. You can see them we go live and stream us wherever you get your podcast. Recommend us to your friends, okay? Because we're pretty awesome. This has been Grigit and keep turning it up with us.