Yellowknife (July 25/03) - Kathryn Youngblut just dropped off the last visitors at the airport and laughingly acknowledges dehydration brought on by the weekend's activities.

Kathryn Youngblut

The president of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in Yellowknife has a right to be tired.

After 10 years, she convinced the national association to bring their annual conference to the North. She and two other CMHA volunteers spent the weekend running the event, here for the first time in its 85-year history.

The CMHA National Conference 2003 happened July 18-21, with 152 delegates, family members, and consumers flowing into Yellowknife for the weekend.

Youngblut came up with the theme "building community supports" to reflect Northern specific problems she and her staff deal with daily.

"A lot of our problems are different than the south. I wanted them to see the innovative ways we deal with them, " she says.

The lack of support in Yellowknife and surrounding communities is the biggest problem she faces. Most delegates came from urban centres, with treatment centres and resources at their fingertips, according to Youngblut.

She says there is no programming in Yellowknife. Apart from a branch of the CMHA in Inuvik, there are few facilities for the mentally ill.

"We can treat people with mental problems, but when we ship them back to remote communities, there is no support," she says.

Bringing southern counterparts to her town gave Youngblut a chance to showcase the traditional ways mental illness is dealt with in the North.

In the conference welcome notes, participants were urged to open their minds to the combination of Northern culture with contemporary treatments.

Workshops on suicide prevention, and depression, brought forth issues prevalent in the North.

Youngblut deals with depression regularly at the CMHA office in town, which she credits to the darkness that envelops the North for much of the year.

Everyone who came to the city for the conference walked away more knowledgeable about Northern life, according to the hard-working volunteer.