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Board members*:

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President: Kathleen Mochnacki is a Richmond Hill Ontario mother with a son with psychosis. A trained social worker, she was instrumental in developing Home on the Hill Supportive Housing and is a Member of the Implementation Committee of the Affordable Housing Strategy of Richmond Hill where she vigorously advocates for the development of supportive housing.  Her interests are supportive housing and mental illness literacy.

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Vice President: Susan  Inman is the mother of a daughter who has been living with schizophrenia for 24 years. She has written about mental illness policies for a variety of publications including the Vancouver Province, the Sun, the Tyee, Huffington Post Canada, Psychiatric Times, Psychiatric Services and BC CMHA’s Visions.

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Secretary: Mike Theilmann is a retired federal public servant living in Ottawa.  During 30 years with the Government of Canada, he worked in both public communications and policy development and for the last seven years of his career was posted to Washington, DC, and the Canadian High Commission in London, UK.  For over a decade, he has supported a family member suffering from severe mental illness and has lived experience of the challenges involved.

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Director: Marvin Ross is a medical journalist/publisher and has a son with schizophrenia. He lives in Ontario and co-authors a blog on mental illness with a psychiatrist. He has written himself  and published for other authors, a number of books on schizophrenia.
 

Director: Dr. John Gray lives in Victoria BC and has worked in the mental illness systems of Saskatchewan and British Columbia for over 30 years. He is the lead author of Canadian Mental Health Law and Policy.

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Director Denis Riordan lives in Halifax and is a retired professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. He has been an inspired advocate for mental health and education programs in Ottawa and Halifax since 2017. He won an Inspiration Award from The Royal Hospital in Ottawa in 2019. He is currently a member of NSMoms, an advocacy group for caregivers of loved ones with serious mental illness.

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​Director: Susanna lives in Ontario and is a mother of two adult children with serious mental illnesses. She has become involved in mental illness advocacy over the past decade. She is especially interested in how privacy laws inhibit family members from being involved in their loved ones’ treatment, thus acting as a barricade to those with mental illnesses becoming as well as possible. She has made it her mission to try to correct this.

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Director: Richard Charney is a Toronto-based labour and employment lawyer, an area in which he has practiced for several decades. In recent years he has handled the many issues arising from the mental illness of a family member, both medical and legal. As a lawyer he is sensitive to the need for family members to be able to advance the needs of an ill relative, which is to the benefit of everybody  including the broader community, while constructively reconciling this with individual liberties in a balanced and practical way.

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Director Eva Sultan is a Montreal real estate broker and former social worker. She  cares for a loved one with a co-occurring mental health/substance abuse disorder. She sits on various committees at the Douglas Hospital, the Institut de Santé Mentale de Montreal, and CAMH to share her lived experience to advance mental health research. 

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*Some of our board members are omitting their last name to preserve privacy for their loved one.