We are a place to be, both in wellness and when people aren’t at their best.
We are an autonomous Consumer-Survivor Initiative created, led and governed by people with lived experience of mental health and addictions challenges.
We are the evidence that people can and do recover.
Krasman Centre is both a complement to mainstream, clinical services and ‘an alternative’ when needed. We support many who might otherwise ‘fall through the cracks’ in the mainstream system. We bridge gaps within the system by building and maintaining strong partnerships with a range of agencies. We promote social connection by building community and seeing people as whole, rather than a label they may have been given. We play a major role supporting people in maintaining wellness and preventing distress – reducing potential harm for people with mental health and/or addictions challenges and reducing the need for more costly services such as emergency departments.
Many of our staff members were once visitors to our drop-ins, or participants in our various programs.
Recovery-Based Services
Recovery-based services or programs means that the foundation is on mental health recovery as a paradigm, much different than the more dominant and mainstream services models based on the bio-medical (“medical model”), psychosocial or rehabilitation models of mental health services and thinking about mental health challenges. We believe that people will and do recover from mental health extremes, and can lead fully self-determining and actualized lives with or despite mental health labels. We also recognize that what is difficult to overcome is the poverty, food and housing insecurity, racism, homophobia, and myriad oppressions that many people face who also live with mental health extremes.
How we offer recovery-based services:
- Respect self-determination and autonomy without conditions
- Do not involve coercion or coercive service delivery paradigms
- Expect recovery and wellness, and do not believe inherently on lifelong disability or illness
- De-pathologize mental health struggles and struggles as a result of poverty and oppression
- Recognize the social determinants of physical and mental health
- Provide for the affirmation of our social identities and opportunities to develop learning for the provider as a learning relationship
- Facilitate connection and relationship with the broader community
- Recognize the civil rights movement behind the consumer/survivor movement, and work to develop leadership, peer support opportunities and service-user empowerment