Our mental healthcare system isn’t doing enough. Moving Forward Family Services is determined to change that.

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(This story is sponsored by Moving Forward Family Services)

According to a 2022 Statistics Canada survey, there are more than five million people in Canada who experience significant symptoms of mental illness, with youth and low-income Canadians up to four times as likely to report having poor mental health than other groups. Concerningly, a growing number of Canadians are struggling to get help—barriers such as financial costs, long wait times and strict eligibility requirements cut many off from the services they need to get better. 

Gary Thandi, founder and executive director of Moving Forward Family Services, describes it as a “fragmented and individualistic system of care,” established by a 20th century system that fails to address the diverse and complex needs of today’s communities, and one that is in need of extensive remediation.

With over 25 years of experience in mental healthcare, Thandi is determined to challenge that system. Increasingly frustrated with traditional approaches not suited to meet the demands of patients today, he set out to create his own care centre—Moving Forward Family Services.

Opening its doors in 2015, Moving Forward Family Services is a non-profit organization that offers free short-term and affordable long-term counselling options to both people across British Columbia and anyone in Canada who is unable to access local support.

Offering a new service model that stands out from most traditional approaches, Moving Forward offers services delivered by both supervised students in social work and counselling psychology as well as registered therapists, giving their patients more opportunities to receive care regardless of financial costs, cultural barriers, and overwhelming paperwork imposed by government institutions, ultimately providing help to those who need it most. 

“We have a no-barrier service where you want the help, we’re going to provide it—regardless of your age, where you’re located, what your diagnosis may be or if you have one or not, what your identified gender may be—if you want the service, we’ll provide it, and we’ll be very clear what service we can provide,” Thandi said.

Along with around 300 registered therapists, Moving Forward currently works with nearly 200 graduate students who can provide service for very low fees. Thus, offering award-winning internship opportunities, the centre not only increases their own outreach, having more staff to meet the demand of an ever growing patient population, but gives students incredible opportunities to practice in the field. Internships aim to be an extension of the classroom, allowing students to practice what they’ve learned in school in a holistic learning model that has them interacting with a variety of unique people and backgrounds and gain system-based knowledge.

“I was impressed not only by what I was observing, but by a good amount of evidence that suggests these students show outcomes that are comparable to [more experienced] people in the field. In therapy, it’s less about how many years experience you have—it’s more about how skilled you are at creating a safe space for clients to process what they’ve been going through, your ability to engage,” said Thandi, adding that while students show exceptional skills in their practice, the centre is very transparent about the amount of experience they have under their belts. 

“I let them practice in the way that they’ve been trained to practice, yet stay within our wheelhouse and be very clear that these are student therapists and let clients decide [what’s best for them.]”

By operating differently than most other mental healthcare services, Moving Forward opens up new possibilities in healthcare—through innovation and inclusion. With current approaches failing to meet people’s needs, new ideas are crucial in order to break free from a system that is, according to Thandi, “prohibitively expensive, restrictive and ultimately ineffective.” He emphasizes that while risk managers are doing important work to ensure new methods of care are approached safely, many innovative ideas are being shut down, inevitably forcing mental healthcare workers to work in an outdated system that doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. 

“I hate the word insanity, especially when it comes to mental health, but there’s this saying—the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. That’s what we do with mental health,” Thandi said. 

With enough support, he hopes to expand the centre’s reach by working with businesses to offer mental health care to their staff, as well as to teachers, nurses, lawyers, and other people who experience burnout, often neglecting their own mental health needs while looking after others. 

Thandi asserts that the financial commitment on behalf of any potential sponsors would not have to be prohibitively expensive. The centre is designed to run at a significantly lower cost than other comparable centres. “It actually takes a lot less money than what’s already being spent, and it’s transformative.”

For more information about Moving Forward Family Services, the services they offer and where to donate, you can visit them on their website.