Photo by HAPPYRICHSTUDIO via Adobe Stock

When I learned I had precancerous lesions on my cervix and that my doctor was recommending I remove them surgically, my reaction went as follows: One, muted panic. Two, I’m definitely going to die. Three, Wait, what does that even mean?

So I did what anyone in possession of an Internet connection in 2021 would do: I went online to do my own research. The Internet confirmed what my physician had told me: the procedure, called a loop electrosurgical excision procedure, or LEEP, is a common one, in which a heated wire is inserted into the vagina to remove the offending cells.

I also found a host of women complaining of unexpected side effects. One article, in Cosmopolitan, was particularly concerning, full of stories of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction from women who had fully healed, yet who were unable to orgasm, feel pleasure during penetration, or have pain-free sex.

I mentally rehearsed the discussion I’d had with my gynecologist. He hadn’t warned me about any of this, which worried but did not surprise me. He had seemed more concerned with protecting my ability to get pregnant, even though I had repeatedly told him I was uninterested in bearing children. With scant scientific literature available—studies on post-LEEP outcomes were mostly focused on the procedure’s efficacy in preventing cancer, as well as pregnancy outcomes—it felt impossible to assess whether these risks were real. Was I about to subject myself to a procedure that might save my life, but at the cost of one of the things that brought real joy to it?

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The disconnect between our experiences with medical professionals and what women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB) hear from our peers has been a central concern for feminist health activists for decades. When it comes to understanding what’s going on with our bodies, who can we trust?

For much of the twentieth century, the health-care system overtly treated AFAB people as unable to make decisions about their own bodies. Contraception was not decriminalized in Canada until 1969, and limitations on abortion were struck down even later, in 1988. Birthing people often had to endure labour alone, without partners present, and without the freedom to decide on pain relief options. Many women were ignorant of even the basic anatomical realities of their bodies.

In the 1960s and ’70s, activists dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by a misogynist health-care system, regressive laws regulating their bodies, and chauvinist doctors began to organize. They formed self-help groups, opened community clinics, and ran underground abortion networks. They performed vaginal self-examinations using a speculum, a flashlight, and a mirror.

What became known as the women’s health movement was grounded in a belief in empowering women with access to information about their own bodies and their sexual and reproductive health that was being denied to them by licensed health-care providers. In the U.S., the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published revolutionary health-education text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1970. Inspired in part by that text, a Canadian group called Women Healthsharing launched a quarterly magazine, which ran from 1979 to 1993 with a mandate to “take health out of the hands of the experts and return it to our own collective and individual hands.”

“The media landscape for women’s health information and feminist health perspectives in particular was dismal” at the time, says Connie Clement, founding managing editor of Healthsharing and longtime public health activist.

Healthsharing featured a mix of experts and lay writers reporting from across the country. “We always tried to write for lay women and women who had training in health. And I think it was a huge success for us that we had nurses and doctors contributing and reading, and we had women who had no special knowledge,” Clement says.

The subjects of Healthsharing ’s coverage were wide-ranging. In the inaugural issue, collective members Madeline Boscoe and Kathleen McDonnell penned a piece exploring birthing options in and out of the hospital, in response to feelings of “powerlessness, ignorance, and alienation from our bodies and our surroundings” in childbirth. Multiple issues reported on the use of Depo-Provera, a controversial contraceptive with potentially serious side effects. One column crowdsourced health information from readers (“We are trying to find out more about cervical caps in Canada,” read one callout). Other stories, like a piece on the labour conditions of garment workers, looked at the wider social and economic status of women in Canada.

This kind of education was key to both the women’s health movement and to second-wave feminism more broadly, grounded in the belief that knowledge was a precondition for enacting social change. “The whole feminist health movement was trying to change the social context of women’s health, [and] the structural conditions that influence health,” says Clement.

While it may seem like we are lightyears away from people not knowing what their own vulvas look like, as I peruse archival copies of the magazine over 30 years later, I am struck by how many articles overlap with current hot-button topics. The desire to balance “expert” medical opinion with the layperson’s experiences, the critical questioning of controversial pharmaceutical solutions, the attention to broader social, economic, and political conditions: it’s all in those pages, and it can be bittersweet to see how many issues are still relevant today, a testament to how slow progress can be in these contexts, and how easy it can be to roll it back, especially when we forget what has come before us.

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I came of age in the 2000s, long after the era of the Women Healthsharings and vagina colouring books of women’s lib. I instinctively shied away from the diet-centric, fatphobic content in teen girl magazines. Thankfully for me, there was an entire ecosystem of feminist writing I could turn to online which shared both individual women’s experiences and fact-based reporting on our health. From blogging platforms Tumblr and LiveJournal to linchpin publications Bitch and Jezebel to private and semi-private groups of people with the same issues, for a while it seemed like the Internet could deliver on the promise of creating networks of knowledge in ways that mattered, filling the gaps where traditional media failed.

But by the time I was doing a deep dive on LEEPs, the online landscape had transformed entirely—in no small part because of social media, especially TikTok. The short-video sharing platform has become a major source for health information, especially for young women. In 2024, a survey study in the journal JMIR Infodemiology found a majority of U.S. women between 18 and 29 used TikTok for health information. Users post about vaginismus, birth control, orgasms, squirting, perimenopause, endometriosis, fibroids: I could go on. Some of these videos are created by health professionals, but many AFAB people post in the spirit of helping others through sharing their own experiences.

When I type in “birth control” on TikTok, the results are as follows: a “wellness”-focused woman encouraging natural planning, i.e. tracking your menstrual cycle to understand when you might be ovulating; a self-described nutrition coach listing ways the pill supposedly “robs us of our health;” and a sex educator responding to a question about birth control that doesn’t involve hormones.

In some ways, this knowledge ecosystem seems like an outcrop of the activist efforts of yore, grounded in information-sharing between peers and often using the language of increased bodily autonomy. Topics like hormonal birth control’s effects on the body are sometimes grounded in
legitimate concerns. Although these contraceptives are both considered safe overall and highly effective at preventing pregnancy, rare life-threatening complications can occur. There is research investigating the link between birth control and chronic inflammation that can lead to cardiovascular problems, blood clots, and mood disorders. Meanwhile, for methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs), for example, some report extreme pain during insertion, feeding into concerns that women and AFAB people’s pain is being dismissed by health-care providers.

More problematically, however, discussion online about birth control can quickly veer into right-wing misinformation territory, inflaming fears in an effort to get people to abandon contraceptive use altogether.

And in countries like a post-Roe U.S., where some states are increasingly implementing restrictive abortion laws, the stakes of an unwanted pregnancy can be high, says Dr. Jenny Wu. Wu is a medical resident in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke’s School of Medicine; she studies women’s reproductive health information shared on TikTok.

“It’s a complex conversation to navigate with my patients, when they tell me they don’t want hormonal birth control and they want to do natural family planning in a state where we have limited abortion access,” shares Wu from her home in North Carolina, which in 2023 banned abortions after 12 weeks with limited exceptions. (Both surgical and medication abortion is legal in Canada and free to those with access to territorial or provincial health care.)

Wu says the level of misinformation propagated online about reproductive health is contributing to increased levels of distrust from her patients overall. This climate makes it more difficult for Wu and other doctors to have these conversations about proper gynecological care, but it also can mean people don’t go see her at all, don’t receive proper care, don’t get the contraceptives they need or access to screening tests to detect potentially life-threatening diseases. But mistrust of the health-care system, especially for at-risk populations, is nothing new.

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Underlying the relatively recent phenomenon of online misinformation is the much longer, checkered history of gynecological medicine. In Canada, abusive medical practices like the forced sterilization of Indigenous women are ongoing. Meanwhile, many AFAB people and racialized people feel their symptoms are routinely downplayed or dismissed by health-care providers. It’s not hard to understand why some people would want to avoid the medical system altogether.

Tracey Lindeman is a longtime Canadian journalist and author of BLEED: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care. Endometriosis, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, is notoriously under-researched, misunderstood, and underdiagnosed, which can lead to years of pain and suffering for those living with the condition.

“Endo is a super lonely disease, because you just feel like no one can really understand you and how much pain you’re in,” Lindeman, who lives with endometriosis, shares. For endo patients, frustrating repeated encounters with the medical system can feel more like gaslighting than care. In BLEED, Lindeman writes about asking her boyfriend to write a letter confirming that they didn’t want children in order for her request for a hysterectomy to be taken seriously. Another woman she speaks to experiences a pelvic exam so rough she files a sexual assault complaint; others still are denied referrals to a specialist or have their requests for pain relief dismissed.

Online groups can be a boon to these patients. There are thriving communities, like Nancy’s Nook Endometriosis Education on Facebook, with roughly 213,000 members, that offer a network of information and crucial support—and, just as importantly, the knowledge that those going through this are not alone.

But health influencers hawking cures of dubious provenance and efficaciousness feed off the need of those who turn to the Internet to self-manage their health. Much of the content paints itself as “natural,” implying it is better than “chemical” remedies. Looking up videos about LEEPs, I immediately stumble upon an account that is selling a course on how to “naturally” clear human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. Another “plant-based health” account shares a video about how “chemicals” cause endometriosis and that you can heal it without hormonal or surgical intervention. These accounts are selling supplements, creams, and cycle trackers, all ways to supposedly take control of your own health or body.

Many of these solutions are obviously farfetched; others have a “science-y” veneer of plausibility about them. But for those people who have been ignored, traumatized, or abandoned altogether by formalized health care, these options may feel like the only solution.

“[The wellness industrial complex] is capitalizing on desperation,” says Lindeman. “People are desperate for help, they’re desperate for answers, and they’re not getting that help, and they’re not getting those answers the conventional way, and so they become really vulnerable to online influencers and online [gynecologists] who are proposing information that lets them maybe try to manage it themselves.”

Enduring racism and sexism in the health-care sector; traumatic personal experiences when seeking treatment; the explosion of influencers promising to help reclaim power over your own body: these all feed into one another so that AFAB people delay the treatment they need, suffer needlessly, and even die younger. We need ways to circulate accessible, evidence-based information, both from other women and AFAB people and medical professionals, which build momentum to tackle these much larger problems together, instead of isolating us even further.

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A year after my diagnosis, I sat in a Montreal-area hospital, clad in a medical gown and socks, clutching a small piece of yellow paper. I didn’t feel like I had all the information I needed to make a decision about whether to have the LEEP, so I had scribbled down a list of questions for my doctor.

But I was called into the OR with no chance to speak to the doctor beforehand. Instead, I was ushered onto the operating table. As he applied local anesthetic to my cervix and inserted the wire into my vaginal canal, I asked him: “So… should I be worried about any sexual side effects?”

“No, no, I have never heard of this,” he replied.

With the loop still inside me, he rattled off what to expect post-surgery. In a daze, I heard the words “heavy bleeding.” “So a lot of bleeding afterwards is normal?” I asked. “No! Go to the ER if you start bleeding,” he repeated.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. I stumbled off, the yellow paper crumpled and unused.

For a long time after the procedure, I felt confused and irritated at myself for not being a better self-advocate. I could have refused to undergo the procedure if I wasn’t satisfied with the level of information I had been provided. Why hadn’t I been able to say what was on my mind?

Sharing my story helped, because I started to realize just how common LEEPs were. It helped assuage my fears that I was necessarily on the road to cervical cancer. Reading accounts like those from Lindeman, who experiences doctor anxiety after a lifetime of poor medical encounters, helped reassure me that I wasn’t alone.

Is sharing stories online enough to take control of our health? In some ways, yes. The Internet has become a lifeline for many Americans seeking medication abortions. Lindeman says journalists pay attention to what is being said online and amplify concerns to a wider audience.

Meanwhile, after finding that the majority of videos about IUDs on TikTok mentioned pain, Wu shifted the way she practices: “I [now] offer patients something for pain before any IUD placement and really before any gynecological procedure.” In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States’ public health agency, even updated its recommendations for IUD insertions to include discussions of pain management.

And in 2023, a year after my own LEEP, a study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine was published exploring healthcare providers’ limited knowledge of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction and the resources patients used to cope—potentially the first ever study to look at the difference in patient and health-care provider perspectives when it comes to LEEP treatment. It found that there was “misalignment” between the two and recommended not only further research into sexual dysfunction symptoms, but also better education and training for providers, and better support for patients who do have negative outcomes.

These are heartening indications that when you share your health experiences, people are listening. The question remains: how do we translate these types of discussions into improving health outcomes for all AFAB people—especially when research into health problems that affect us is still underfunded?

It starts with finding ways to pair networked knowledge with collective action, because the power of social media is ultimately limited. “It’s the personalization of systemic problems,” points out Lindeman. “[You’re] continuing to focus on what you can do as an individual, instead of attacking the systems that are responsible for such a deficit in care.”

Social media may give us the reassuring impression of solidarity. In reality, it is atomizing, incentivizing a competitive attention economy; a billion voices speaking over, but not always to, one another. The collectives of the women’s health movement knew that to build power, you must do it together, through communities of care.

Perhaps we have to start by relearning that lesson–even if it means tearing ourselves away from our phones.

Art by Valerie Thai

Aaron Campbell was 37 when he walked away from his world. For 27 years he had been told that leaving would jeopardize the chance of eternal salvation for him, his wife, and their four children. Yet salvation was just what he needed, and immediately. “Ultimately, I said, ‘If I don’t [leave], my mental health is going to continue to suffer to a degree where I don’t know what I’ll do,’” he recalls. “That was very scary for me.”

Campbell grew up in 1980s Wainwright, Alberta, a farming town of about 5,000 southeast of Edmonton. Until age 10 his community consisted of his mother, his brother and sister, and a handful of neighbours. Then, his single mom’s search for social support and spiritual direction led her to the Mormon Church (officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2018, after God urged a “correction” to the abbreviated LDS in a revelation received by church president Russell M. Nelson).

In many ways Campbell, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, was raised by the Wainwright branch of the LDS, amid tight community and tighter programming. Monday was Family Home Evening: a religious lesson and activity for family completion. A weekly schedule of age-specific meetups, seminary sessions, and miscellaneous social gatherings followed, culminating with a three-hour church service on the Sunday Sabbath.

The church provided friends and support, but prescriptions and proscriptions cast a shadow. “The messaging was subtle: that if you do these things it will enrich your family, it will bring you blessings,” says Campbell. “But the implication was: if you don’t do these things, bad stuff will happen to you.” Family reputation was paramount, and meant prioritizing the programme. “It required me to basically put my authentic self to the side,” Campbell recalls. “To be accepted into the community, in order to be accepted into my family, I felt I needed to perform and have a mask on.” There was, he says, “very consistent, daily reinforcement of: the person you are is not acceptable.”

Rural, pre-internet life meant that Campbell knew no different, and his mental health suffered. At 15 he was put on SSRIs, and enrolled in a national health system with scant appreciation for therapy or supplementary practices. Only after 20 years of futile treatment did he identify his relationship with the church, invisible in its ubiquity, as the root of his suffering. “When I left, it was like putting a tourniquet on a wound,” he says. “The wound had stopped bleeding, but I’ve still got a wound. Now I got to deal with this.”

Angry and confused, disillusionment with the medical system led him elsewhere in search of remedies. He went “all in” on exercise, cannabis, and keto dieting to little avail. Then, in 2017, he came across Johns Hopkins University research documenting the alleviating effect of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients—an early harbinger of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, which started to go mainstream with Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind. Inspired, Campbell contacted a fledgling psychedelic group in Calgary. Little did he know, he was initiating a journey into a community that would change, and possibly even save, his life.

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Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in New York State, amidst the fervent Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. On April 6, 1830, 11 days after the Book of Mormon was published, about 55 people gathered on Whitmer Farm near Fayette for the first Mormon congregation.

At first glance, tripping on psychedelics seems a sinful departure from Mormon tenets. The Word of Wisdom, a revelation Smith said he received from God in 1833, commands Mormons to refrain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Church prophets have since added substances that “impair judgement or are harmful or highly addictive.” But did the first prophet do as later prophets have preached? Convincing evidence suggests that psychedelics were in fact integral to Mormonism’s visionary beginnings.

In 1820 or 1821, a teenaged Smith experienced his First Vision after entering a grove of trees near Manchester, New York, seeking wisdom. “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he later reported. Heavenly “personages” then told him of the imminent Second Coming, and condemned all existing Christian churches for teaching incorrect doctrine. Smith experienced a string of such visions, from which several cardinal Mormon doctrines emerged.

A 2019 paper by Robert Beckstead, Bryce Blankenagel, Cody Noconi, and Michael Winkelman presents compelling evidence that these visions came from entheogens (chemical substances that produce altered states of consciousness when ingested). During his First Vision, Smith experienced mouth dryness, paranoia, and vivid hallucinations: symptoms consistent with entheogens—including two psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybe ovoideocystidiata and amanita muscaria—either scientifically documented to have grown in every area Smith lived, or almost certainly available through established trade networks.

It’s highly likely that Smith was familiar with these substances. His mentors, including his father, were enmeshed in folk magic, the occult, and esoteric Christian practices, some with entheogen links. His family possessed a panoply of magic-adjacent artifacts, from astrological charts to an alchemical amulet. His visions echoed those experienced by both of his parents and foreshadowed those of many early Mormon converts. Multiple eyewitness accounts describe the unusually intense visionary nature of early Mormon congregations, with symptoms seemingly manifesting on demand after drinking Smith’s wine sacrament. There was widespread suspicion that the wine was spiked.

Smith was shot dead by a mob in 1844 while awaiting trial in Carthage Jail, Illinois, after causing uproar by destroying a Mormon-critical press and, according to some reports, imposing martial law while mayor of the city of Nauvoo. Brigham Young became the new Mormon prophet. He shepherded the church to Utah and away from its probable, or at least possible, psychedelic genesis, which for nearly two centuries has been forgotten or denied.

But modern Mormons and ex-Mormons are returning to these visionary roots. The “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast is dedicated to “alternative methods for healing from trauma” and “exploring higher consciousness while healing from toxic religious shame.” Since launching in 2020 it has grown a monthly listenership of over 10,000. Divine Assembly, a Utah-based “magic mushroom church,” was founded in the same year by ex-Mormon and former Republican state Senator Steve Urquhart and his wife Sara. Though not all of its roughly 5,000 members are ex-Mormons, the church was founded in large part to help people leaving religious environments find healing through psychedelics. These congregations contain clues about the power of collective psychedelic practice to help people find new ways forward and process past pain.

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Campbell’s first psychedelic journey came courtesy of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Sitting in a circle of 15 fellow trippers and six sober space holders, he became the universe. He recalls creating stars and planets and music as scattered parts of himself. He felt giggly and joyous. “It was just a magical experience,” he says.

Campbell emerged from his trip feeling more connected to everything around him. He had felt a radically new sense of perception, free from hierarchy and suppression—a mode he still feels able to slip into to view situations differently, even though no experience since has recaptured that first sense of interconnection.

The decision to contact that Calgary psychedelic community started a chain of small events that, Campbell says, have “fundamentally changed the course of my life and, frankly, probably saved me from a trajectory that was going to end up in suicide.” Much of this stemmed from feeling like he was spending time with people who understood him, who saw him for who he was rather than how well he followed the rules. The Mormon church doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation and self-exploration.

On the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, two ex-Mormon friends, Mike and Doug, have languid conversations about psychedelics and related matters. It sounds like Seth Rogen and his best pals running a The Kardashians-style show. In a June, 2024 episode, they talk about basic milestones in their lives their religious loved ones may not necessarily condone, like the times when they each had their first drink.

Mike and his wife were travelling, and one day he just looked at her and asked if they should share a drink. “Then we were like, ‘fuck it! Let’s just each order one drink! Let’s order our own drink!’” Doug laughs uproariously. “What a decision-making process that was, though, right? Like so scary, so terrifying to wade into those waters, right.”

“Yeah…” and the conversation sobers.

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From 2001 to 2021, the number of people in Canada reporting no religious affiliation doubled. In the U.S., church membership dipped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020. Canadian census data contains 87,725 self-identifying Mormons in 2021, down from 105,365 in 2011. Even official LDS data, which includes inactive former members, shows Canadian membership growing slowly in absolute terms, but shrinking as a proportion of the population.

The ex-Mormon community, on the other hand, is growing—and connecting. The r/ExMormon subreddit, with 302,000 members, is the headline example, but Campbell says there are countless other ex-Mormon pockets of society. “There is something about the Mormon experience that teaches people to organize really well,” he says. The internet fundamentally changed things, and those who leave the church are now better able to connect again outside of it. Campbell says this means the church no longer controls their narrative.

Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance has bloomed. Psychedelic practice has a long history, from ayahuasca use across the Amazon Basin to iboga ceremonies among West African Bwiti communities and peyote usage among North American Indigenous peoples. But prohibition has reigned in the contemporary West, with promising medical research suppressed through the war on drugs. Until recently.

Research increasingly points to the potential of psychedelics in treating mental-health issues (despite serious methodological challenges, like ensuring double-blind trials with mind-altering substances and navigating the complex knot of possible mechanisms). Tectonic legal shifts are nudging countries, including Canada, toward clinical trials, medical use, and decriminalization debates. Stores selling psychedelics are semi-tolerated across Canada. Investment has boomed with the hype. And facilitated psychedelic experiences are accessible through an underground network of practitioners.

This renaissance holds growing appeal for religious communities, as evidenced by an emerging network of psychedelic chaplains integrating psychedelics into spiritual thought systems, as well as people processing the psychological challenges of leaving totalizing religions like Mormonism. Campbell is careful to stress that every experience of apostasy is unique, but there are patterns. Abandoning Mormonism generally means relinquishing a moral and spiritual worldview, which often creates a deep need for sensemaking. “You just need something to matter again,” an ex-Mormon Divine Assembly member and psychedelics user told Rolling Stone. Leaving can mean losing a tight-knit community of friends and family, plus the navigational framework of a familiar culture. This, in turn, can trigger the task of discovering your authentic self, which may contain characteristics long repressed through shame, like sexual desire or identity. For many, it can feel like being fully alive for the first time.

Powerful psychedelic experiences are inspiring some ex- Mormons to facilitate those experiences for others. Campbell now guides people through psychedelic journeys, from pre-trip preparation to in-trip support and post-trip integration. He isn’t formally trained or licensed, and doesn’t stick to a particular modality, but adapts his approach to individual clients. He works underground, mostly with ex-Mormons new to psychedelics and looking to make sense of life after leaving. They are typically middle-aged, well resourced, and curious.

Psychedelics are pattern disruptors, Campbell says. He believes the reason there’s so much research into how they can help people trying to break addictions is that they make people question their reasons for doing what they do. He helps people deconstruct these patterns as a precursor to long-term change. He typically works with somebody once, either recommending practical next steps or referring them to a medical professional with relevant expertise.

Campbell’s understanding of his work highlights what seems obvious, but is often effaced by psychedelic discourse focused on individual treatments and miracle trips: that our psychology is shaped by the systems we live within. “Any system that is well established basically tricks people into thinking that it’s not alive,” Campbell says. “It hides, and the more it can hide, the longer it will last.” This can lead ex-Mormons and others to mistake mental-health challenges for personal failings, or scapegoat leaders without recognizing how systems also enclose those scapegoats.

Community is a powerful vehicle for identifying and understanding systemic patterns. Psychedelics are often most effective as deconstructive tools when used with others who understand and can help process that deconstruction.

Later in the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, Doug talks about a recent trip he took that felt different. He was contemplating what makes him feel fear and anxiety, and thinking about how, once the thing he thought was causing those feelings dissipates, something else comes and takes its spot. He and Mike agree that being afraid of death is the same as being afraid to live. They talk about overcoming shame in the way we can only do with someone who really gets us. Doug talks about this moment he always has when he’s high and feels super dirty, but says it’s the grounding part of the trip for him. It reminds him, “Ya popped up from the earth, big dog! And yer going back down.” Mike murmurs understanding.

Campbell experiences similar seamless conversations now, too. “I don’t have to explain the acronyms, I don’t have to explain the backstory of any of this stuff,” he says of his experiences in ex-Mormon psychedelic circles. “People are like, ‘Yep, I get it,’ right away. That feeling of being understood, being heard, being validated, is huge —huge.” Psychedelics alone didn’t save Campbell; psychedelics plus finding community did.

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This insistence on collective psychedelic practice resonates beyond the ex-Mormon community, and represents a broader call for a different psychedelic renaissance. Writing in Jacobin, Benjamin Fong identifies two possible renaissances. The “psychiatric paradigm” sees government institutions and psychedelic companies administering psychedelics in tightly regulated medical settings to alleviate specific mental-health symptoms. Critical psychedelics podcast “Psymposia” dubs this corporadelia: psychedelics as commercial service and psychological adaptation.

The collective paradigm envisions an alternative renaissance, rooted in a systemic understanding of psychedelic possibilities and what conditions our mental health. This paradigm proposes supplementing psychiatric services with decentralized, community-centred psychedelic practices, and connects individual healing with the need to acknowledge and even reimagine the social, economic, and political systems that shape mental health. Whereas the psychiatric paradigm reduces psychedelics to “just another little pill for skull-bound ailments,” in the words of Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, co-founders of psychedelic-assisted therapy organization Cardea, the collective paradigm is more radical. “When used correctly, these substances are not quick-fix cures for illness but consciousness raisers,” they write. “And raised consciousnesses tend to find the public causes for personal pain.”

The collective paradigm heeds what we know about how psychedelics work. One of the few concrete research findings is that the context around a psychedelic experience— set and setting—affects its outcomes. The systems that shape us are the bedrock of that context. Proponents also cite the array of Indigenous psychedelic practices—encompassing religious, social, medicinal, creative, and warfaring rituals—as evidence of collective psychedelic possibility. Another touchstone is Mark Fisher’s “acid communism,” which holds that the psychedelia of postwar New Left counterculture helped people transgress boundaries, generate new artistic forms, and bolster new social relations capable of undermining “capitalist realism:” the seeming impossibility of imagining beyond capitalism.

What the collective paradigm should look like in practice is a complex, contested question. But experimental answers are sprouting in Canada and beyond, like mushrooms after rain. Motivated by the exclusion of racialized communities and issues from existing research, professor and clinical psychologist Monnica Williams is pioneering research exploring psychedelics as a tool for processing intergenerational racial trauma. “When people are traumatized, usually it’s of an interpersonal nature,” she recently told The Conversation Canada. “But also we find that people heal through connecting with other people.”

Williams has been involved in research documenting the impact of naturalistic (non-experimental) psychedelic use on racial-discrimination symptoms among Indigenous, Asian, and non-white people in North America. Her ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work has alleviated PTSD associated with racial trauma. Through both individual therapy and group sessions for specific communities, like Black women, she applies psychedelics to historic, cultural forces impacting mental health at systemic scales. Her work gestures toward the possibility of improving mental-health outcomes and raising consciousness around collective issues in therapeutic settings.

There is growing experimentation around collective psychedelic care. Daan Keiman is a psychedelic practitioner and Buddhist psychedelic chaplain. Formerly through The Synthesis Institute, and now through The Communitas Collective, he is at the forefront of work to develop holistic models of psychedelic care, including training for potential psychedelic practitioners, that integrate systemic, spiritual, somatic, and relational dimensions. Keiman sees systemic issues and collective experiences as integral to healthy, transformative psychedelic practices. “Psychedelics can offer us these experiences in which we feel part of something bigger again,” he says, because they help dissolve boundaries. “It becomes so incredibly important to make sure that the model of offering psychedelic care to someone can address both these experiences: of communitas, and underlying problems of alienation and belonging.” Research shows that systems shape mental-health outcomes like alienation and loneliness, he continues. Who and how we are changes with social setting, and a sense of belonging guards our mental health. Collective psychedelic practices can not only demonstrate these findings and cultivate empathy, but can also prove more accessible and cost-effective than individual services.

Another example of collective psychedelic activity is the patchwork of Canadian associations offering psychedelic advocacy, education, and experiences, from the Psychedelic Association of Canada down to local communities like Vancouver’s The Flying Sage. Empowered by creeping psychedelic permissibility, Michael Oliver started The Flying Sage after working for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies Canada, which has been instrumental in enabling psychedelic medical research. While he recognizes the health benefits and trojan-horse strategic value of medical trials, Oliver imagines broader cultural possibilities. So The Flying Sage aims to destigmatize psychedelics by pairing them with activities like cold plunges, breath work, and dance.

“Psychedelics are really great at tapping into this collective unconscious,” Oliver says. “It’s a very powerful aspect of psychedelics which at the moment isn’t really being talked about at all in the mainstream narrative.” As a meeting space for underground and overground practitioners to connect, The Flying Sage is one example of how hidden collective-paradigm psychedelic communities are underpinning the ostensibly individualistic psychiatric paradigm.

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Campbell has learned that people are finding value not only in psychedelic trials or miraculous doses, but by combining psychedelic experiences and time spent with others. His ultimate goal is for psychedelic practice to be integrated into communities. The point isn’t that all communities must use psychedelics, but that normalizing safe, connected psychedelic experiences can help more people.

Campbell says he is struck by “just how not unique the work is that I do,” meaning it isn’t so different from the many forms of care that sustain healthy people and communities. He cites American spiritual leader Ram Dass’s culturally integrated conception of care, and his notion that “we’re all just walking each other home.” Thanks to finding both psychedelics and deep connections, Campbell has made it back to a home in which he knows himself better than ever before. He’s more present; a better parent. Regardless of faith, he hopes and thinks more people will soon be served by collective psychedelic guidance.

Photo courtesy of the Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society and Community Outreach Transit Team

They’re slumped over on the seat, head almost touching the floor of the train car. The other passengers try to politely look away, avoiding sitting in their vicinity. Is the person asleep, unconscious? Possibly unhoused, with random personal items spilling out of a ripped backpack, they might need assistance. Yet no one moves to get involved.

Concerned, someone finally calls an Edmonton Transit Service peace officer. Someone else also shows up alongside them: a Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society (BATHS) outreach worker. Together, they gather the groggy person up and help them off the train.

This new social program, the Community Outreach Transit Team (COTT), was put into action along Edmonton’s train lines as a pilot project in 2021 to help give meaningful and humane support to unhoused people and people in distress who use the trains and bus system as shelter. The wider purpose of BATHS, “is to make sure that all Indigenous children are connected to their culture and families, especially to make sure that we’re also building on the strengths of Indigenous children and families, to enable them to grow spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally so that they can walk both in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities,” says BATHS senior manager Lloyd Yellowbird. Working off a similar program model as the Human-centred Engagement and Liaison Partnership in Calgary, the City of Edmonton, partnering with BATHS, felt that a related strategy could benefit the city’s unhoused people.

Together, this team is working to help end homelessness in Edmonton. Outreach workers, also staff members of BATHS trained in trauma-informed responses, connect people with inner-city programs that offer long-term solutions to those who choose to engage with the team members. They help unhoused people get ID and transportation to access medication and other services. Specialized training is important because, “a lot of times [houseless people] face living in a traumatic lifestyle to begin with. [They] don’t want to go to shelters because they don’t feel safe,” Yellowbird says.

After the successful end of the first pilot phase of the partnership in 2021- 22, 2,700 general interactions were logged, and there were 510 instances where referrals were made to assistive services. In March 2023, the city agreed to continue the COTT project, allocating funding of $2.1 million until Aug. 31, 2026. These funds are used by the outreach teams to connect their clients with housing programs and financial assistance services, and to reconnect families and communities. With seven active teams working along the transit system, from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days per week, Yellowbird says that there will hopefully be funding for four more teams soon. COTT also continues to assist those who have received support from them in the past. “It’s not just a one-off kind of system. Support is always there,” Yellowbird says.

The work that BATHS does to connect displaced people to their communities is something that could, and should, be replicated in other cities. BATHS’s success is one way to help those who have been marginalized to find the community connection that leads to personal fulfillment.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper

Kevin Sidlar’s garden has been a refuge for the past two decades, if not quite a major source of sustenance. For much of his adult life, he’s grown annual flowers, peas, and tomatoes in his backyard.

In the early days of 2020, something shifted within Sidlar. He felt nervous about disease and the security of our food systems. Surveying his abilities to meet his own basic needs in a suddenly uncertain future, the Thunder Bay resident decided to get serious about growing his own food.

Sidlar was sure that increasing his self-sufficiency would settle his nerves about what he felt could be an impending societal collapse, and spending more time with the earth would improve his mental health in the short term. He grew up on a farm that had been in his family for 100 years, and he’d absorbed the rhythms and methods surrounding him. “Gardening teaches me responsibility. Also, I’ve got more fresh food in the house, that leaves me less reliant on the grocery store and frozen foods,” he says. An application developer for the region’s major phone and internet company by day, Sidlar delves deep into one or two hobbies at a time. In his 40s, his major avocations have included foraging for wild mushrooms, sailing, and drumming with a local band. Translating that energy to food production made sense.

For one thing, grocery stores didn’t carry some of Sidlar’s childhood favourites, like kohlrabi, perhaps because it’s impossible to machine harvest large quantities. Also, shade from nearby apartment buildings and trees limits the kinds of crops viable in population-dense urban areas, and Sidlar wanted to diversify the crops he was able to grow. He found a Facebook post advertising affordable rental garden plots located a few minutes’ drive from his home, just within city limits.

Adventure 38 was Jay Tarabocchia’s response to the growing needs of his urban neighbours. He and his father were only able to use a small portion of the 38 acres they lived on, and Tarabocchia had seen how much joy and contentment gardening had brought his father in his senior years. Having moved back to Thunder Bay from Ottawa to care for his dad in the family home of 50 years, Tarabocchia extended use of the land to would-be gardeners who lacked the space. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do some kind of project to keep expanding on the gardening theme, keep him excited for life?’ So I started making more gardens.” It wasn’t long before he thought to share the space with others.

Nutrient-rich soil and unimpeded sunlight offered exciting opportunities at Sidlar’s rental plot—he could finally grow corn after innumerable failed backyard attempts. His first growing season was a learning experience, though, and he took note of how different the conditions were between his lakeside backyard and the farm plot, which is farther inland.

Lake Superior affects the weather in Thunder Bay, which means more moderate temperatures in town. Adventure 38 experiences a shorter, more intense season. The hotter summer days offer greater outputs, provided gardeners are able to time sowings appropriately. Crops requiring higher evening temperatures, like okra, corn, and peppers, do well there. Seed packages offer guidelines, but it’s only through trial and error that farmers learn when to plant which crops, and which plant relationships are mutually beneficial when interplanted. This long-term thinking with considerations for the rhythms of the seasons gives Sidlar a sense of profound satisfaction, and an afternoon spent in the dirt offers a quiet ease that can be hard to attain in late-stage capitalism’s dizzying circus.

The deep disconnect many of us have from food sources has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Joining a community garden like Tarabocchia’s is one way to stitch our relationships with food, ourselves, and the earth back together.

*

When food prices shot up enough that many fully employed people weren’t able to feed themselves or their families, it was time to go back to basics. Whether the unending, oppressive food scarcity is partially or entirely artificial, the only recourse many Canadians have is to seize the means of production.

Almost everyone has felt the mounting pressure from climbing food prices in the last two years. The Bank of Canada has, since 1991, tried to keep inflation to two percent yearly, yet grocery store prices have risen steadily since December 2021. The metric for prices is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which uses a “basket” of foods most families consider staples to calculate the changing costs of a trip to the grocery store. As of August 2023 it contained hundreds of items spanning different cultural and dietary considerations: avocados, baby food, chicken, dried lentils. In 2022, the CPI for food had its largest year-over-year increase in 41 years at 11.4 percent. The metric for all items went up 6.8 percent, and that year saw an increase in average wages of only five percent. Following a 2022 poll, Statistics Canada estimated that 20 percent of Canadians would need to use a food bank in the next six months.

Primary causes for the jump in food prices include supply chain interruptions with COVID-19 outbreaks and facility closures, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and changing weather. With concurrent increases in housing and energy costs, most people have difficult choices to make. While harnessing solar or geothermal energy may be outside the budget for many, the average Canadian can take steps toward improving their food security.

Once thought of as a quaint hobby primarily enjoyed by retired folks, gardening has taken off and captured the hearts of people across demographics. Due to a surge in first-time home gardeners, stores in Canada’s cities were sold out of many gardening supplies in spring 2020, and similar purchasing frenzies occurred in 2021. As the vast majority of Canadians live in cities and lack the space, soil, and light sufficient to grow much food, community gardening solutions have proliferated to meet our changing needs.

A meta-analysis of community gardens in Canada and five other countries showed a 19 percent increase in use from 2018 through 2019. Following decreased interest at the onset of the pandemic, numbers surged again in 2021 and levelled off in 2022. The city of Edmonton created 350 ad-hoc community garden allotments in 2020, while Victoria reallocated resources at Beacon Hill Park to grow food for distribution, prioritizing socially vulnerable populations. Brampton responded to pandemic gardening needs by distributing gardening materials to home growers, who either consumed the food they grew or donated it to the community.

In Winnipeg, Wolseley Community Gardens (WCG) sprung up in 2021 as a response to some of this increased demand. They offer garden space mostly to those living in multi-family dwellings and apartment buildings. WCG co-chair Jade Raizenne says that they received 47 applications for 20 plots in 2021; 39 in 2022; and 37 in 2023. The group expanded the garden each year, so it now hosts 24 raised beds, a native pollinator garden, and an orchard of fruit trees. “Since we started, everyone I’ve talked to has mentioned how much they love coming here, and how good it is for their mental health. One man who doesn’t rent a plot, but walks through the orchards every day, said it’s often the high point of his day,” Raizenne says. At times of social unrest and anxiety, community gardens are resilient, offering respite and a relatively safe third space in cities.

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As globalization and capitalism accelerate, operators of large farms have found it increasingly challenging to make a living growing food. Rates of suicide among farmers have soared in the past decade, and many young adults coming of age in the aughts were unable to envision a financially feasible future farming. Large farms became more technologically advanced over the past 20 years, with the proliferation of drones, robotics, and sensing technologies. While these advances can drastically increase quantities of food being produced, the ecological costs may not be fully understood.

The opposite is true for less tech-dependent, older methods. Permaculture has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and merits consideration by anyone looking to optimize their land use. It’s a framework that works with the land, rather than imposing changes in an effort to yield species that may not do well in a given region. Colonizers famously brought invasive species with them wherever they went, and despite how charming some of these species can be, like bellflower, they can choke out native plants that offer more to ecosystems. Most invasive plants, though, can be replaced by a native species with a little research.

And in a growing number of gardens, ancient, Indigenous cultivation methods are in use despite settlers’ efforts to supplant them. Three Sisters is commonly practiced among gardeners and the symbiosis of beans, squash, and corn gives each crop advantages they lack when grown individually. Intertwining stalks and varying growth habits makes that triumvirate impossible to machine harvest, so we see how cultivation with respect for innate qualities of plants and the earth they grow in is inextricably linked with slow food practices.

Regardless of what type of food plants are grown where, it is clear that monoculture is the enemy of sustainability. When agents of industry realized that one species of orange and one variety of banana performed best, those varieties were grown on huge farms to the exclusion of all others. Today, the only banana commercially available is the Cavendish seedless, which is a clone. Because every tree on a plantation has the same DNA, if a novel fungus attacks, the entire crop can be wiped out. This already happened with the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s. Without genetic diversity allowing for adaptations to changing pathogens, farmers have had to continually increase pesticide use on bananas. In the past decade, some years saw seasons of near-total losses of navel oranges and russet potatoes. Late-stage capitalism and an unconscious preference for uniformity have brought food production systems to a point where staple crops are needlessly vulnerable in ways that biodiverse farms aren’t.

At community gardens the world over, including Adventure 38, gardeners are constantly learning through trial and error, and by exchanging ideas. There are innumerable choices that farmers make, consciously and not. Whether to use pesticides, fertilizers, and whether to use cost-effective synthetic products versus old-school organics like bone meal and composted manure are just a few of the variables to consider. People are experimenting with and reviving traditions that had almost been forgotten, like hugelkultur. This German practice creates large mounds of decaying logs, offering lower-effort raised beds than the more commonly seen flat rectangles, fabricated with lumber. The sloping sides increase available growing space, and soil quality improves as the wood decomposes. One person whose plot neighbours Sidlar’s uses two-litre plastic bottles, standing upright in small hills. They fill with rainwater, overflow runs downslope, and these reservoirs keep plants happy without having to get out a hose. Not having to irrigate cuts down on labour, allowing the grower to make fewer trips to tend to their farm.

As small farmers return to pre-tractor methods that may decrease yield, they find that some kinds of input become unnecessary. Fertilizer prices skyrocketed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions, as Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s top exporters. But bringing kitchen scraps to a composter, learning more about how to revitalize soil, and narrowing the scope of a farm have allowed hobby farmers and intentional communities to approach self-sufficiency. Sourcing hyperlocal materials such as a neighbour’s livestock manure can decrease dependence on global supply chains while building connections with others.

The idea of gardening was deeply implanted in Sidlar’s family history, but those new to gardening can consult books, radio programs, and community members. For those who are able, gardeners and small farmers are always looking for labour, and trading effort for produce is one way to broaden the reach of community gardens. For folks whose time is consumed by work, community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes of produce can connect them with local food systems. This gives farmers more money for input at the beginning of the season, and customers get high-quality, local food at an accessible location without having to brave the markets.

It’s more of a challenge, but self-grown food is popular in the city, too. At the Thunder Bay Conservatory, a grassroots organization has put on workshops teaching alternative gardening methods, like straw-bale planting. Not everyone can rent and transport themselves to a garden, or perform the manual labour required. Time, fuel, and physical ability considerations make community gardens inaccessible to many. Planting into the surface of straw bales brings the garden a few feet off the ground, making them accessible to some wheelchair users or folks with physical limitations. Methods like these show that almost everyone can learn how to grow their own food.

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While Canadians may be waiting a long while for agricultural trends to change, on a microscopic level, small farmers and gardeners can steer things in a more sustainable direction. Though quantities will always be smaller than what factory farms provide, the benefits to small-crop growth are immeasurable. Paying close attention to the relationships between plants and weather facilitates an attunement with natural rhythms. And being emotionally invested in food production prevents waste. “If I put my sweat into a tomato, I’m eating it before it goes bad,” Sidlar says.

CSA kohlrabi in Thunder Bay may cost more than the cheapest alternatives at big box stores. But it has more intact enzymes, a lower carbon cost, and promotes a future of resilient, biodiverse small-scale agriculture that won’t accelerate climate catastrophe or exploit disadvantaged farm labourers elsewhere. It’s probably a lot tastier, too.

Photo by Mooneydriver

In the middle of the 2023 fire season, A Critical Incident Stress Management counsellor came to our fire base. The season had been unprecedentedly busy, even with wildfires ramping up in recent years, and my crew in southern British Columbia had racked up more than 70 days on the fireline with no sign of it slowing down.

The counsellor’s visit was proactive. During a previous record-breaking year, I had witnessed the accumulating fatigue that led us to turn on one another. Pushed to our limits through months on end with little sleep, the social structure of the crew fractured, and infighting became common. But this year, my crew supervisor wanted to get ahead of the turmoil.

All 20 of us sit in a circle, and one by one we begin to air our grievances. One crew member speaks up. “I go home, and I just can’t listen to anyone. They tell me stories or things about their life and I just don’t care. I can’t help but trivialize everything they’re going through.” The rest of us nod our heads in agreement.

“I was at MEC and I just kept having power fantasies about beating the cashier to a pulp,” another crew member says. I feel a twinge of guilt. I’ve had similar intrusive thoughts, but I would have a hard time admitting it to a group.

“I don’t feel close to anyone in my life anymore,” I say when it’s my turn to speak. “I feel that all my friends, my family, are drifting away and I can’t stop it.” More nodding heads.

A second-year crew member raises his hand. “I just… I… miss my son.” He can’t say anything else. Tears come instead.

The counsellor speaks. “Listen, you guys are all living up here.” He raises his arm way above his head, and his wrist makes a shaky gesture. He’s referring to weeks with little sleep, the constant high-pressure thinking: contain the fire, avoid death. He’s referring to being away from our loved ones, to several months of moving from one objective to the next without any thought for ourselves or others. He’s referring to 19-year-old Devyn Gale, who died on the fireline near Revelstoke, B.C. just a few weeks before his visit. Again, we nod. I guess the counsellor is right—our normal is somewhere in the region around three feet above our heads.

“Now, when you leave the fireline and spend time at home, everyone else is down here.” His arm lowers to waist height. “Of course, being home is going to feel bad, it’s now an abnormal place for all of you.” The conclusion: being on the fireline is easy now. We have been in it long enough to adapt. It’s leaving it that’s hard.

The group counselling session helped us to recognize each other as members of a common struggle, reminding us to get through it together. However, as seasonal workers, we are laid off in October. Away from the support of our crewmates, in an environment that lives at waist height.

After a few weeks, some recover. They sleep long hours, rekindle relationships with their partners. Bodies worn out, the winter is spent recuperating. They travel, ski, and read. Some return from a chaotic summer and continue working or studying just as they had before. They do arborist work, massage therapy diplomas, forestry degrees. Life goes on.

Others do not fare so well. For many, off-season is a cruel time. It is lonely; the close ties with crewmates are severed. It is inexplicable; family and friends have a hard time understanding what we’ve been through. It is exhausting; previous months of herding fires and digging guards take a toll on the body. In an effort to reclaim, some spend their entire savings on gambling and compulsive drinking. However, usually the suffering is secret, silent. It lives under layers of despair, rotting in the decrepitude of hopelessness and isolation.

This was my fourth year on the job, and despite the struggle, I love it. I have worked in grease-stained industrial kitchens and on the icy ski slopes of New England; but to me, nothing compares to being a wildfire fighter. Nowhere else have I felt the camaraderie of carrying a fire hose with my squadmates until our legs give out, the meditative bliss of chainsaw bucking, or the satisfaction of successfully establishing a fire guard around a community. The job is challenging, thrilling, and communal, all in the astounding desolation of the Canadian wilderness.

After this season ended, I came to expect detachment and lingering fatigue. But this time something was different. Food tasteless, television and books uninteresting. I stumbled to my family doctor. The diagnosis: major depression.

It is one thing to be in such a sorry state for the five-month off-season. It is another to think that some of these burnt-out, emotionally comatose workers will return year after year without question. We are leaving. Across Canada, there are high rates of turnover and a chronic lack of retention.

One solution would be to improve mental health support during the off-season. For example, year-round access to insured therapy would be helpful. However, this would be a band-aid solution to an issue that stems from being overworked in the summer months, an issue that ultimately comes from working under an old model that is in need of revision.

The demands of the job have grown. Wildfire seasons have become more strenuous and crews are spending more days on deployment. As the nature of the job changes, the job itself must adapt to the growing destruction. Treating recovery during the season as a part of the job could be a good step. Earning paid time off after successive deployments would incentivize recovery instead of it being a financial cost to workers. And, at least in my home province of B.C., the ministry is adapting. Deployment length and rest periods have become more flexible. Pay has increased a bit. Washing ash and soot off our bodies is now considered on-the-clock work time. Gradually, things seem to be improving, one motion, one addendum at a time.

There is still more to be done. Depression should not be common among the workforce and burnout should not be an inevitable reality of the job. It may take more union clamouring and scheduling adjustments to make the job more sustainable.

It is unfortunate that my co-workers and I became wildfire fighters at a time when summers became more vicious, when the regulations of the job lagged behind the demands. That we are the ones caught in the gears of an intensity shift. I hope that those of us who are burnt-out, depressed, and isolated are catalysts for a change ahead, and not a sign of what’s to come.

Sometime around 2005, in the halcyon days of the internet when it was still treading its path to ubiquity, I peaked. Hunkered down late at night in a small room exclusively dedicated to housing a family desktop computer, I used the free peer-to-peer file-sharing client LimeWire to pirate the less-free peer-to- peer file-sharing client LimeWire Pro. The genius of such a move is one I will never again equal. From there, I sifted through mislabelled songs, copious malware, and recordings of Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” until I found something called digital drugs. The pirated folder contained audio files supposedly engineered to simulate, using specialized sound waves, the sensations of different substances.

Back then, on the precipice of puberty, I knew about drugs the way I know about the concept of enlightenment now. That is, I knew vaguely what sensation I was expecting without any firm idea of when I’d know I was experiencing it. With a smorgasbord of different drugs’ effects at my fingertips, I ran the gauntlet. Beyond the whole medley that appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there were audio sequences said to recreate the feeling of certain experiences: swimming in a frigid lake, déjà vu, having sex with a co-worker on an out- of-town work trip, confessing your love to a best friend, the anticipation floating around a marathon’s starting gun. I was surprised to find that these promises felt accurate: the sounds did take my mind to another place. To some degree, each felt like dreaming for the first time, like being dropped in the middle of an already running narrative and left to gradually fumble around for my place in the proceedings before being suddenly yanked into another thread of another unfolding story only to start all over again.

Of course, I had no idea whether any of it actually was accurate, or if anything was happening at all. As it turns out, that was a more difficult question than it would initially appear. What was being advertised as “digital drugs” were combinations of sound frequencies known as binaural beats, and their legitimacy, efficacy, and potential medical and recreational impacts remain up for debate.

*

Binaural beats were first discovered by Prussian physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839 by striking tuning forks on each side of a student’s head and learning they heard the difference in frequency as a slow, third beat. Dove didn’t pursue the discovery further. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the work of Dr. Gérald Oster, that binaural beats were taken as anything more than a mild curiosity by the scientific community. In 1973, Scientific American published Oster’s article “Auditory Beats in the Brain,” which outlined the differences between monaural beats and binaural beats. Oster described monaural beats as only requiring one ear to perceive. Binaural beats, on the other hand, he described as “perceived when tones of different frequency are presented separately to each ear,” which requires the use of both ears to localize and selectively filter out certain sounds, such as when eavesdropping on a conversation at a large, noisy party. His observations and insight opened the question of whether binaural beats could be a new, rich vein for cognitive and neurological research.

Later work further clarified the binaural beat effect as something akin to an auditory illusion. In the simplest terms, binaural beats aren’t a sound, per se. More accurately, they’re a perception of sound when two pure tones, played at a different frequency into each ear, create the recognition of an additional modulation of tone within the brain. This third tone is the binaural beat. Despite the technical lack of another tone, the brain registers the difference in frequency between the two tones as a third, distinct tone. For example, when a pure tone is played at an 80 Hz frequency in the left ear and a 90 Hz pure tone is played in the right ear, the brain would perceive a third tone at a frequency of 10 Hz. Most interestingly, the origin of this third tone is perceived by the listener to be from within their own head.

In the 1980s and later, neurological and auditory research began to focus jointly on the reasons our brains create this effect and on whether there are any potential usages, specifically whether it can entrain mood or perception or— perhaps—even act analogously to a drug. The optimistic belief in the ability of binaural beats to synthesize a selected result is based on two strong reasonings. One is that, for most of human history, music and sound have been used to tune into a particular headspace. All of us have a song or two that changes our mood, positively or negatively, simply by hearing it. The second reason for belief in the potential of binaural beats is due to our greater scientific understanding of brain waves with the invention and wider use of magnetic imaging.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that reads electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp which looks familiar to anyone who watches horror movies, we can see how brain cells communicate by measuring electric impulses. Our brain cells are always in communication, and the frequency with which they are in communication shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording. In 2016, researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in India used an EEG test to observe and group brain waves. Their research concluded there to be five main frequency bands of brain waves that are believed to correspond to our emotional states.

When we’re asleep, our brain waves are in Delta, low frequency, because there isn’t much to communicate beyond the messages required to keep us alive. During a deeply relaxing scenario, when our minds tend to wander into daydreams, such as being pampered at a spa, our brains are likely in Theta, which operates at a frequency between 4 to 8 Hz and relates to our subconscious mind. A slightly higher frequency, up to around 12 Hz, will likely be registered when someone is passively focused and generally relaxed. Thus, it’s likely this range—Alpha—will correspond to someone who is rewatching The Office for the dozenth time. Basically, it’s being in a general good mood free of the need to meaningfully engage with an external source. The Beta wavelength is typically our normal frequency. It operates between 12-35 Hz and can range from relaxation to anxiety depending on the world around us. The frequency band with the highest Hz, anything above 35, is Gamma, which signals a heightened degree of concentration. This is the wavelength of our brains when we’re focused on a task or situation.

All this is to say that it’s believed by some scientists, and binaural beat connoisseurs, that we can use the brain’s perception of binaural beats to simply recalibrate our current wavelength into whichever frequency band we desire to experience. But the question remains: does it work?

*

Back in 2005, I was an audio addict, digitally dosing myself on LSD, heroin, mescaline, and strange designer drugs only known by some combination of letters and numbers. As far as I knew, the sensations were similar to their physical counterpoints. Digital cannabis made me giggle. I’d have vivid daydreams on audio psychedelics. Binaural beats mimicking cocaine had me impatient and talkative, jittery with a vague sense of violence. Of course, that was the past. And time has a way of softening people, so now I use binaural beats to achieve a flow state of concentration or induce drowsiness for a power nap.

A pilot study conducted by the Oregon Health & Science University and the National College of Natural Medicine on the neuropsychologic, physiologic, and electroencephalographic effects of binaural beat technology on humans found no significant differences between the experimental and control condition in any of the EEG measures. But in that same study, the self-reported measurements of the participants saw an increase in mood and a decrease in overall anxiety. Better put: there was no scientific reason that participants felt an improvement in mood, yet they did.

There must be a motive behind why people are using binaural beats. Anecdotally speaking, I certainly feel calmer when I listen to one of the myriad binaural beats soundscapes that are easily findable online, so isn’t that the same thing as being calmer, even if my brainwaves disagree? After all: I think, therefore I am. That may be the entire point, suggests Dr. Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. “There are a lot of activities that affect our nervous system and can produce psychoactive effects, including meditation, chanting, exercising, even doing art,” says Barratt. “Yes, we can consider binaural beats through [this] lens.”

And I’m not alone in using them for this reason. In 2021, Barratt was a researcher with the Global Drug Survey (GDS), an independent research study that aimed to collect data on drug use patterns and trends worldwide. When questioned on the survey, five percent of the over 30,000 respondents said they used binaural beats to experience altered states at least once within the last year.

Dr. Cristina Gil López, a cognitive neuroscience researcher and educator, writes on her website that the beats have become trendy due to our increasing difficulty to focus and be productive in our daily activities. We live in a state of permanent distraction, so we seek new ways to mentally focus and decrease off-putting distractions, like anxiety. Other studies echo the sentiment that exposure to binaural beats can boost cognition by reducing anxiety and the perception of pain, albeit modestly.

So where do we go from here? While large-scale investigations comparing the effects of binaural beats specifically and auditory beats as a whole are still rare, there are some promising case studies for their potential application. One such avenue is the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP is a therapeutic tool that uses specially filtered music designed to stimulate the vagus nerve, which carries signals between the brain and heart. The SSP is intended to induce the body and mind into feeling a sense of safety. There have been successful case studies that show SSP exposure can improve social awareness in children and adults with autism and help to reduce chronic pain in older patients.

Barratt herself underwent the protocol as part of her research. For 30 days, she listened to audio files as part of the SSP and may have discovered the everyday benefits binaural beats could have on many of us. “I felt some positive effects and there [weren’t] any downsides. It could all be placebo in the sense that taking time every day to listen to some special music may be an intervention in itself.”

While writing this piece, I thought about what initially drew me to these files. The truth is I have no idea. There was no larger reason behind accessing them beyond the fact that I could.

It took roughly 135 years from a Prussian physicist striking tuning forks on opposite sides of the room and noticing the effect for another researcher to even give that effect a name. Since then, we’ve seen vast leaps in technology that have allowed scientists to measure, with as much certainty as currently exists, that nothing is happening within the brain that can explain why binaural beats can improve our mood and decrease our anxiety levels. But people who listen to them claim that they do, time and time again. In defiance of the science, they feel that listening to binaural beats can impact their mood.

Maybe in another 135 years we’ll discover that they’re right. Maybe we’ll still only know that the effects are something many people enjoy. Maybe that’s all the reasoning I needed to enjoy binaural beats as much as I did when I was 12.

I know it’s all the reason I need to enjoy them now.

In the summer of 2023, 200 African asylum seekers were left homeless in Toronto. With nowhere to go, they had no choice but to sleep on the streets after escaping poverty, political violence and climate disaster back home.

While municipal, provincial and federal governments twiddled their thumbs, Black and African organizations in the city rallied together to provide shelter, food and assistance to the group of Black migrants. One of the leading organizations behind the effort was the Rwandan Canadian Healing Centre (RCHC), a Toronto-based group that provides support to Rwandans and others facing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by violence and war. Forwarding a mission of hope, the RCHC gathered collaborators and accomplished what the three levels of government could not: they found local shelter spaces for the migrants.

Canada has a 156-year history of welcoming migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Today, the country is more diverse than it has been in over a century. In 2021, according to Statistics Canada, more than 8.3 million people, or 23 percent of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in the country. This marked the largest proportion since Confederation, beating the previous 1921 record of 22.3 percent and making it the highest number among the G7. People from all over the world have left violent situations to build a new home in the Great White North. This is the story of the Rwandan community as well.

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi is one of the worst atrocities in modern human history. In the span of 100 days of chaos, close to one million Rwandans were slaughtered by their fellow citizens largely due to their ethnicity. Millions of Rwandans, mainly from the Tutsi heritage, fled the landlocked nation to escape the carnage.

By 2016, Toronto was home to over 1,000 Rwandans. Today, most of the city’s Rwandan population is made up of older Rwandans who came as refugees post-genocide, and a younger generation too young to remember the horrors, but who still live with the scars of that time and long for the promise of a prosperous future. Part of that prosperous future means bringing the Rwandan community together to collectively heal from the trauma of war.

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Kizito Musabimana escaped the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a child and came to Canada as an immigrant after spending years in Kenya. When he got to Toronto, he didn’t expect to spend time unhoused, but that’s part of his story. Now, he’s the founder and executive director of the RCHC. Since adopting Canada as his home, Musabimana has been a leader in the city, heralding the effort to find suitable shelter space for the African migrants over the summer. Facing his own history of PTSD, Musabimana knows how powerful community is, and how important physical spaces like homes, community centres, and third spaces are to mental health.

With the help of other East African organizations, the RCHC wants to create a purpose-built neighbourhood for Toronto residents in the Rwandan community and other groups dealing with trauma. The organization is also working with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada’s national housing agency, inside their National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs, a project aimed at finding community-driven solutions to the affordable housing crisis. The labs offer local and national organizations funding and expertise to help them solve complex housing problems. One successful project that started within the labs is the Gender Transformative Housing Supporting Women Leaving Violent Relationships: Co-creating Safe-at-Home Hamilton. Another, in association with the Canada Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Research Network (CanFASD) and the Alberta Clinical and Community-Based Evaluation Research Team (ACCERT), aims to create a framework to house youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Through the Solutions Lab, the CMHC provides groups like CanFASD or the RCHC with up to $250,000 through a competitive application process to develop a community-centred plan to solve housing issues as they relate to specific populations. “As a newcomer in Canada who has experienced homelessness,” Musabimana says, “I would have greatly benefitted from an affordable housing project like this, which focuses on community and connection that offers resources to navigate a new country.”

Together with the CMHC, the collective of African communities created the African Canadian Affordable Housing Solution/Model. The model is a framework that details all of the important elements necessary for their vision of a purpose-built neighbourhood. To determine what’s needed, Rwandan and East African communities participated in several interviews, surveys, and workshops to flesh out what an urban village should provide. The design of the AfriCanadian model hinges on three interwoven perspectives: intergenerationality, cooperativism and holisticism.

More than most, African families live together in one place. Grandparents, parents and adult children often cohabitate together as a way to keep familial bonds strong. Building housing with room for multiple generations of residents under one roof is a key element of the plan. The model also hopes to set up cooperative networks of self-governance, so community members have direct decision-making power in how their neighbourhood runs. Most importantly, it offers a holistic approach to mental health. With proper access to public space, recreation and onsite counselling, Musabimana wants the project to centre healing. “We want to recreate the support and community of a traditional African village for African Canadians living in Canada who haven’t been able to experience it. To bring a taste of home to the community,” Musabimana said at the onset of the project.

As of November 2023, the group has already created the framework thanks to community engagement. So what’s next? “Once we are able to identify land, then we will have everything we need to begin the development phase,” Musabimana says. But that is not so easy. The path to housing development, and to carving out space in Toronto, is filled with trouble.

*

Back home in Rwanda, the government, led by Paul Kagame, has been attempting to restore a country that almost destroyed itself. In 2005, the Rwandan government began creating the legal framework necessary to allow agricultural cooperatives that included housing to flourish within the nation’s market economy. Not only smart economic planning, cooperatives were also meant to build reconciliation among a population scarred by trauma. According to International Labour Organization documents, cooperatives in the post-genocide period flourished as many felt the need for protection and safety within the social grouping that they provided.

Here in Canada, the Rwandan diaspora does not have the resources to build the sort of communal neighbourhoods that provide safety, healing and community. A small but growing population in Canada, Rwandese families face the same housing issues other Toronto residents do, but without a historic legacy of property ownership. Although statistics on the rate of homeownership for Rwandan Canadians are scarce, the Black homeownership rate is only 45 percent, while it is 66.5 percent for the general Canadian populace. The reasons stretch from anti-Black racism to housing policy, but it also has lots to do with the generational effect. Generational Canadians have had the time to create communities when housing prices were lower, and because of that many have managed to hold onto legacy housing. The Rwandan community, and many other Black communities (though not all) have relatively recent histories in Canada and have become victims of the jump in housing prices over the last two decades.

In contrast, communities with a longer history in places like Toronto have managed to carve out areas of the city to protect their land rights. One great example is Toronto’s main Chinatown, which has avoided the worst of gentrification through collective organizations like the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust (TCLT).

The TCLT is a community-controlled effort to build an inclusive, culturally competent, and ever-evolving Chinatown in Toronto. Launched in 2023, the land trust is designed to protect the historic Chinatown community from condo developments. They acquire, develop and steward land, in perpetuity, for community needs and benefit. The organization was established by managing director Chiyi Tam, but is governed democratically by its members. An urban planning expert, Tam leveraged her experience with land trusts in both Parkdale and Kensington Market and decided to work with her community to save it from the host of developers buying properties along the Spadina Avenue neighbourhood.

Comparatively late to the game, the Rwandan and East African communities are now trying to get onto that property ladder. They’re searching for a sense of home, support, and for some, a sense of safety for the first time.

*

A filmmaker by training, Musabimana is a bit out of his depth when talking about housing and development, but the African housing project is filled with experts who believe in his vision. A partner with the RCHC, Jonathan Okubay is the executive director of New Nakfa, a nonprofit organization that caters to Eritrean Canadian youth. He has a background in housing development and has become an instrumental part of moving from the CMHC’s solutions lab, which led to the model, into the development phase.

One of the major hurdles now, Okubay says, is getting the city on board to help drive down the price of construction. He says the project will cost anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 up front. “We’re moving into actual implementation and looking at sites for potential development, and at how we get the CMHC and the feds and the city involved in making the project feasible,” Okubay says. Part of that feasibility has to do with finding a place to build in an already crowded market. “Ideally, we would like to have it in a central location with access to transit nodes, schools and grocery stores,” he says. “Despite the difficulty…due to high land prices, in an ideal world, we would like it to be in Toronto.”

Canadian real estate is some of the most expensive in the world, and the costs are only growing. They’re wildly inaccessible in Toronto, where the price of materials and labour has grown to be one of the highest in Canada. The average low estimate for constructing the hard costs (labour, materials and equipment) of multifamily homes was $250 per square foot. In Calgary, the average low estimate was $190. Currently, Toronto’s hard cost estimates are roughly keeping pace with smaller cities like Phoenix and Denver, which sit at around $180 (U.S.)—or about $244.

Where Toronto exceeds most other cities in cost is at the government level. Fees and levies to build are astronomical in the city. A 2018 real estate study by Altus Group found that fees levied by the government added around $165,000 per unit for high-rise condos and $206,000 for single-family housing. Once the price of land, developer profits and government fees are taken into account, Toronto becomes almost inhospitable to any sort of affordable housing. This means finding a good developer is part of the myriad of hurdles for the community in general.

Musabimana, Okubay and their team have been stuck dealing with government bodies and talking to stakeholders, all the while holding the community close. It has been a process, but one guided by purpose. “I would say we are mainly searching for a land and development feasibility study, then the next phase is fundraising,” said Musabimana.

With all of these challenges, it would be easy for many to get discouraged. Still, a few years ago, no one would have thought this tiny little segment of the city would be part of such a radical vision. Musabimana is positive that the RCHC’s model, co-created with the community, will become a reality. Based on Okubay’s development experience, he believes they could start building the project by spring 2025.

If everything goes to plan, Toronto could soon have an African village in the middle of its urban jungle.

Photo by IMAGINIMA

“It was just something to do…like getting your hair braided,” says Kayowe Mune, describing the mindset held by many communities about female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C).

Mune, now 42, is a content creator based in Toronto and was cut when she was six years old, as part of what’s known as vacation cutting, which often happens during the summer when school is out. Mune was born in Somalia and was living in Saudi Arabia with her parents at the time. While spending the summer at her grandmother’s house back in Somalia, Mune was taken to a hospital to be cut. Since her cousins were already going, her grandmother added Mune to the group, accompanied by her aunt.

“It wasn’t like the village lady…shrouded in scars came with a…razor,” says Mune. She explains that she was taken to a “really nice” hospital, where a lineup of other girls also sat waiting for their turn. While the hospital may have been welcoming, the procedure was done without anesthesia.

“I remember sitting outside waiting for [my] turn, and that part was pretty scary because you can hear them screaming,” Mune says. In the days that followed, all that Mune recalls is feeling dissociated from her body.

A tradition in many African cultures, FGM/C is viewed as a way to protect a girl’s chastity and ensure that she gets a good husband, explains Mune. Older generations often don’t see anything wrong with the practice and it’s frequently equated to male circumcision, which isn’t comparable at all, according to Giselle Portenier, co-chair of the End FGM Canada Network. Portenier, who is also a journalist, learned about the abuse of women’s human rights through her documentary work. She co-founded the End FGM Canada Network after realizing how big and under-reported an issue this is in Canada. Portenier explains that the equivalent of this kind of genital mutilation/cutting performed on males would consist of cutting off the head of their penis.

“There is no comparison,” she says.

*

Female genital mutilation/cutting is classified into four types, per the World Health Organization. Type I, also known as a clitoredectomy, involves the partial or total removal of the visible part of the clitoris and/or the prepuce/ clitoral hood, which is a fold of skin surrounding the clitoris. Type II, also known as an excision, is the partial or total removal of the visible part of the clitoris and the labia minora, the inner folds of the vulva, with or without the removal of the labia majora, the outer folds of the skin of the vulva. Type III, also known as infibulation, involves the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora, sometimes through stitching, with or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans. Type IV includes all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, such as pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.

FGM/C is not something that affects only those in African countries. While there’s no official study detailing the prevalence of FGM/C in Canada, vacation cutting affects survivors living in Western countries, too. It is practiced and/or affects those living in 92 countries across every continent but Antarctica, and this number is only growing as more survivors are discovered.

Often, girls who are born in Canada are taken to their parents’ home country, usually in African nations such as Somalia or Egypt, to be cut and then brought back home to Canada. In other cases, such as Mune’s, girls immigrate to Canada with their families having already experienced FGM/C. This happens despite the fact that female genital mutilation has been identified as a form of aggravated assault in Canada’s Criminal Code since 1997, a move the Department of Justice says was made in keeping with Canada’s commitment to support the 1993 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the 1995 Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women. These recognized that violence against women, including FGM/C, violates their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Still, according to Portenier, there are over 100,000 survivors of FGM/C in Canada and thousands of girls at risk. This figure is based on End FGM Canada’s analysis of immigration from 29 FGM/C practicing countries in the Middle East and Africa as reported in the 2011 Canadian Census. Yet, “there [is little support] for them in Canada, largely because there is a culture of silence and silencing about this issue here,” says Portenier.

The silence is often due to a fear of causing offence around other people’s traditions. In May 2023, a daycare worker alleged that a two-year-old child’s genitals had been mutilated and alerted Quebec’s youth protection services, which reportedly replied that the case was too delicate for the agency to handle. (The child was later examined by a doctor, and the case has since been declared unfounded.) In response to This Magazine, Quebec’s Human Rights Commission refused to comment as this case involved a minor.

Canada is also the only Western country, besides New Zealand, lacking in official statistics on FGM/C, according to a 2020 report by Equality Now, a human rights association dedicated to the welfare of women and girls. “Efforts to get statistics and be [funded] by the Canadian government on statistical analyses have failed on several occasions,” says Portenier. While the government has attempted to calculate estimates, their most recent September 2023 report still states that “the results should not be interpreted as official estimates of FGM/C in Canada.”

Despite the failure of the federal government, last year Alberta was the first and only province to date to pass a bill strengthening existing laws that ban female genital mutilation in the province. The bill states that health professionals who practice or facilitate FGM/C in the province will be removed from practice if convicted. Additionally, those convicted in other jurisdictions will not be permitted to practice in Alberta.

When asked how things can be improved for survivors in Canada and those who are sent for vacation cutting, Women and Gender Equality Canada stated that they strongly condemn FGM/C and under the federal Gender- Based Violence Strategy they “provide funding to various community-based initiatives that address FGM/C nationally” and will “continue to work together with [their] provincial and territorial counterparts as well as with academics and service providers to ensure a multidisciplinary approach so that impacted women and girls have access to culturally safe services.”

While there are federal as well as provincial plans in place to address FGM/C, not a single prosecution has occurred since the 1997 criminalization of FGM/C in Canada. According to Global News, a leaked border services report in 2017 also showed that FGM/C practitioners were entering Canada to carry out the procedure. The lack of prosecutions in Canada come as a shock when in comparison, the U.S., the U.K., France, and Australia have all prosecuted cases of FGM/C.

*

Since FGM/C is generally performed without anesthesia, the first immediate side effect is the intense pain. Bleeding occurs and scar tissue forms over time in most cases of cutting. Depending on the type, menstruating and urinating can be difficult and cause pain, as can childbirth and intercourse. Female sexual pleasure is hardly taken into consideration, but this is also compromised.

Depression, PTSD, and anxiety are just a few of the psychological effects of FGM/C. Others include not being able to do things a child normally does, recalls Mune. “When you’re cut, they don’t want you to learn how to ride a bike because you can open up your stitches.” Sports were out of the question for girls, but Mune was able to rebel when she moved to Toronto and signed up for her school’s athletics program.

While immigrating to Canada helped Mune escape some of the cultural restrictions imposed on girls, she and many other survivors faced, and continue to face, a whole other set of challenges here.

“I would say white Canadian doctors are not educated, and a lot of them don’t care, especially the males,” says Mune, speaking about her experience with the Canadian health-care system. Mune has found compassionate care with doctors who are primarily women of colour, but other challenges persist. With staff shortages, difficulty in getting appointments, and medical professionals’ generally busy schedules, awareness and empathy have been hard to come by for Mune.

Over time Mune has gotten better at advocating for herself, but she wishes there was a way for doctors and gynecologists to know that they are seeing a survivor of FGM before they enter the examination room. “I think… it should be highlighted, like every [appointment] that this person is a survivor of genital mutilation…before [the healthcare provider] sees [the patient],” says Mune.

Organizations like End FGM Canada are working to create more awareness around the practice in Canada. Initiatives include educational modules designed for health-care professionals and child-protection workers. A special module for teachers is set to release in November 2023. They also created “Miss Klitty,” a campaign that promotes education about the clitoris. In the vast majority of cases of FGM/C, the clitoris is harmed. This is often due to the belief held by many practicing cultures that the clitoris is evil, explains Portenier. Thus, “Miss Klitty” was created as a way to demystify the clitoris and get people talking.

One option for those who have experienced FGM/C is reconstructive surgery. Dr. Angela Deane, an obstetrician/gynecologist at North York General Hospital and the University of Toronto, focuses on clitoral reconstruction. Deane sees up to five patients per month for consultations regarding potential treatments. She explains that in some types of cutting the clitoral glans is removed, which is the very visible tip on the vulva.

“What we can do is release more clitoral tissue from beneath all that and bring that forward to the outside. And having that new clitoral tissue on the outside is like a creation of a new gland,” says Deane. This new gland can then offer more sensation. Surgery can also include removal of a cyst or scar tissue, as well as defibulation. Depending on the impacts of FGM/C, an individualized care plan is recommended which can be non-surgical and include medications or therapy to address pain or scar tissue. Often, recommendations also include seeking mental health support, sex therapy, and physiotherapy.

Mune says one step forward is to make therapy or counselling free of cost for survivors. “It used to be hard for me… when I was younger to afford [therapy]… and I knew I needed it,” she says.

Mune also emphasizes the importance of education and a present father in a young girl’s life. Her parents were unaware of her being cut and they never would have supported it had they known. Even today, she knows Somalian families where daughters with present fathers have never heard of FGM/C, while other families send their daughters to be cut without the father’s knowledge. That’s not to say the women and other men of the families are deliberately trying to hurt their daughters, Mune underlines. “They’re not monsters…they’re doing this out of love…It’s just an old, very ancient procedure that needs to go away, and it just won’t go away.”

Anecdotal statements from Mune, other survivors and wider diaspora communities suggest that FGM/C is still a problem and while global efforts from the United Nations have been helpful, change has been slow due to its secretive nature. What sets Canada apart from other Western countries is the lack of statistics on FGM/C and its implications here.

In order to prevent vacation cutting in Canada, a first step would be to fund a project on obtaining proper statistics. Efforts at all levels of government also need to be placed on genuinely communicating with members of communities and working together to eradicate this practice from Canada rather than being afraid of offending people.

Providing coverage for reconstructive surgery under provincial health policies would also help. In Ontario, for example, coverage varies depending on a person’s needs, and clitoral reconstruction is not fully funded. Finally, law enforcement and the legal system also need to work on prosecuting cases of FGM/C, as done by most other Western countries. Canada’s culture of silence can no longer afford to continue to perpetuate this abuse.

Illustration by Tobias Diuk

When my girlfriend of six years broke up with me by text, followed by a short call, I couldn’t comprehend it. It wasn’t grief, shock, or denial. My brain, damaged from 16 months of Long COVID, couldn’t read or write, splice voices from background noise, or parse words said fast enough to react. When our friends asked what happened, I couldn’t explain the literally, not just emotionally, incomprehensible.

Early media coverage of the virus’s neurocognitive impacts focused on smell and taste, driven by viral videos of patients unable to tell pickle juice from lemonade. But SARS-CoV-2 can affect every sense and most aspects of cognition. My experience was severe but not rare: impaired word recall and object recognition; executive functioning, such as following steps to do laundry; and spatial memory, even in my own apartment. Conversations were dream-like, disorienting, and difficult; technology use triggered sudden naps. The pandemic’s collective TV-watching, live-streaming era passed me by. My life became as quiet as I could make it, and all the more isolating.

Louise Cummings, a professor in the Department of English and Communication at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, says that “language is breaking down” in adults with Long COVID. “Even a short, slow-paced conversation can induce a severe flare-up of symptoms,” she says, “necessitating many days of rest in some cases.” In her 2023 study, participants reported difficulty finding words (93 percent), losing concentration when talking (89.6 percent), recalling what was said (65.4 percent), or understanding speech (38 percent). Conservative estimates of Long COVID incidence are at least 10 percent of infections, and neurocognitive symptoms are among the most common and longest lasting. But while other types of brain injury (e.g., from a stroke) may show on a static scan, Cummings says “the disruption to brain physiology in Long COVID is likely…more subtle.”

Studies that do show this disruption use specialized testing not available to most patients. A University of Waterloo study found reduced oxygen saturation in the prefrontal cortex during cognitive tasks. Oxygen is fundamental to brain functioning, implicated in fuel metabolism and neuron communication. Numerous studies, including two from the University of California, San Francisco and CAMH in Toronto, found inflammatory markers in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, known to impact memory and mood.

When my hospital network opened a Long COVID clinic and I was seen virtually, 20 months post-infection, the cognitive rehab specialist recommended a maximum of 20 minutes per day of cognitive or screen activity. She said I’d likely never work again: my brain was irreparably damaged. Like most clinics, there were no neurologists, cardiologists, or infectious disease specialists, no diagnostics or prescriptions; only virtual patient education on adjusting to illness, social workers and dieticians, and a PDF handout on attention and memory I couldn’t read. To get treatment, I had to find my own specialists, including in private practice.

Desperate for distraction while bedridden, I could only handle instrumental music: nigunim (Jewish songs in lilting rounds of nonsense syllables) or small classical ensembles. Slowly, I added podcasts, listening for short stints without multitasking. My favourite hosts were always two intimates whose conversations felt like lounging after a dinner party. I’d let the social ambiance wash over me, an experience that violated public health policy. Even when I couldn’t handle watching closed-captioned TV, I listened to backlogs of “Witch, Please” (“a fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world”); official cast and crew pods for The Good Place and Hacks; recap shows like “Out on the Lanai;” and “Race Chaser” (“dedicated to the discussion, dissection and dissemination of every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race”). It helped to hear familiar voices describing familiar things without pressure to contribute, to practice comprehension and memory in a low-stakes environment.

Some formats felt more accessible, even rehabilitating. Hannah McGregor, program director of Simon Fraser University’s publishing program and co-host of “Witch, Please” with Marcelle Kosman, suggests this could be due to pedagogical principles built into good podcasting. “Core to teaching is repetition,” McGregor says. “You need to articulate things multiple times for them to resonate with people, and ideally, you will articulate them in multiple different ways.” Podcasts, like all serialized media, are “a balance of repetition and change,” she says, a structurally predictable format with cues like segment intros or musical transitions. “Witch, Please” revisits every book and movie through different theoretical frameworks, glancing deftly sideways from critical theory back into fiction like the best undergrad class you never took. It uses the explainer format, in which one host presents research to the other, which McGregor says models “the actual process of listening” through active listening noises and follow-up questions, making it easier to stay engaged, especially for my overloaded brain.

Big Dipper, executive producer at the Moguls of Media (MOM) Network, says that “Race Chaser’s” comforting balance of structure and improv is intentional, supported by guiding outlines and a timed four-segment format. “All the character, uniqueness, and what stands out…comes organically from [hosts, drag queens Willam and Alaska Thunderfuck] in conversation, but I give them a strong structure to hold onto so that they can really have freedom…to improv and talk shit.” The hosts riff on a vast pastiche repertoire of Drag Race, queer canon, and cult classics, both reverential and sardonic, vividly describing the action on screen and outfits from hair to heel.

Big Dipper says the format made queens “far more accessible to their fanbase….long-form, true personalities, no facade.” The podcast is a love letter to other media and mediums, not just in content but in style. The leisurely intros and outros come from Big Dipper’s theatrical background. “I structure the majority of our shows [like this]: the cold open, theme song, intro, and an outro to let the audience down gently.” Cummings says frameworks like these can be helpful. “If an interview has a set structure, you are able to use a mental template of how it will proceed, to facilitate comprehension,” she says, compensating for the lack of visual cues. The format is comforting, says Big Dipper, because “nothing is expected of the listener” and you can “let it wash over you.” Listening helped me rebuild memory retrieval pathways for sound and images.

For me, podcasts were patient companions who didn’t mind repeating themselves, and a descriptive medium when I couldn’t comprehend multimedia. They kept me company when I was too sick to leave the house, when in-person events were banned, and my community fell apart post-breakup.

Even now, three years into this, large Zoom meetings and dinner parties are still challenging and nightclubs are inconceivably inaccessible. But I can listen in on other people’s friendships while they “improv and talk shit,” and doing so has helped immensely as I relearn how to comprehend, remember, and connect with the world.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.