We are a group of four or five graduate students, along with one staff member, who run peer-led programming that seeks to enhance and support graduate mental health through workshops, regular informal gatherings and invited talks in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. We understand that a student’s needs are unique and are influenced by their identity—including, but not limited to, their race, ethnicity, cultural identity, citizenship, residency status, socio-economic status, disability, gender, and sexuality—and we try to develop programming that considers how identity shapes a student’s mental health.
Our workshops, talks and gatherings seek to build community by destigmatising topics such as mental illness, disability, neurodiversity, chronic illness, intersectional identities, experiences, and cultural differences. Our peer-led programming aims to build social interactions, improve professional interactions and create a safer environment for our community by educating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty about how to build healthier brains, bodies and relationships. For graduate students and postdocs in need of support by referring them to appropriate resources both within and beyond the University. If a graduate student or post doc’s needs are not within our scope, we will work with them to connect them to the appropriate support.
What’s not in our scope is to provide therapy for individuals, but we can direct you to how to access it. Nor can we directly change policy within the department or university, but we can collect testimonials around the impact that policies have on students’ and postdoctoral fellows’ mental health, and use these experiences to inform our regular questionnaires and push for policy change based on the data we collect.
We serve the needs of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows within the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. We also are dedicated to helping faculty and staff better support graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
We hold three to four events a month throughout the academic year and over the summer. Some events are informal in nature, such as our mindful tea sessions, coffee crochet or cryptic crosswords breaks, and community walks, where we meet outdoors to learn about the architecture, archaeology, history, geology and nature in Toronto and beyond. Others are more formally-led talks, such as skills-based workshops that help with suicide awareness, sexual harassment prevention and discuss people’s disasters in grade school and how they learned from them. Aside from these, we run peer-to-peer workshops where graduate students and postdocs can share their experiences and learn from each other’s experiences of struggling with anxiety, depression, impostorism, and navigating academia with a neurodivergent brain. Details of these events are laid out in past events page.