November 5, 2025

Making Mental Health Care More Accessible to Everyone

A recent study from the Canadian Medical Journal looked at 12,000 Canadian middle and high school-aged students from across Canada and found that Black youth living with mental health concerns are less likely to access care than their white peers. The reluctance could stem from many things including barriers to accessing care, experiences of marginalization and racism within the healthcare system, or concern about whether their care providers will understand how race, trauma, and lived experiences can intersect with one’s mental wellbeing.

At St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Youth Wellness Centre (YWC), there’s a stream of care specifically designed to support Black, Indigenous and racialized youth seeking help for their mental health or substance use concerns. It’s called YouThrive and the program uses an intersectional lens and a holistic approach to emphasize physical, mental, emotional and spiritual connections with the environment.

What’s more, is that YouThrive is led and delivered by clinicians from the Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) community. Because our care teams know from experience that it’s easier to talk to someone who looks like you do…someone who’s had similar experiences.

“My role contributes to building safer health systems and services for Black, Indigenous and racialized peoples while empowering collective hope, recovery, and care amongst the youth I work with,” says Téana Vickers, a peer support worker within the YouThrive program at the YWC. “Within these communities is where I am able to find the intergenerational resilience that I need to do my job and contribute to fostering communities of healing.”

Téana and her colleagues provide peer support, trauma-informed and culturally adapted care to help BIPOC youth in dealing with issues specific to racial marginalization. Their efforts recently received a boost in funding through a $25,000 gift from The Lewis & Ruth Sherman Foundation. The gift is designed to help fund increased staffing and community outreach, the creation of additional social opportunities for youth, and the expansion of clinical services.

Having funding like this enables the YouThrive team to respond to community crises, too. Recently, members of the YouThrive team travelled to Niagara Falls to provide mental health and addictions support to more than 2,000 Indigenous youth and families who had been evacuated from their homes due to wildfires across Northern Ontario and Manitoba.

This $25,000 gift is the latest donation in a 35-year relationship our Hospital and Foundation have shared with The Lewis & Ruth Sherman Foundation. Cumulatively, their giving totals more than $3 million, just over half of which has been dedicated to supporting the Mental Health and Addictions Program at St. Joe’s.

“The Lewis & Ruth Sherman Foundation has a long history of supporting the programs and services our community truly needs. We’re grateful for their generosity, but perhaps even more so, for their foresight and belief in funding programs that enable us to care for the underserved and vulnerable populations of our region,” says Sera Filice, President & CEO, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Foundation.