Jen Durrant

Our job isn’t to create resilience. It’s to reveal it and help to strengthen it.

I grew up in Scarborough. I went to school here, my husband grew up here, and now we’re raising our daughter here. Coming back to work here felt like coming home. I was a Scarborough kid, and now I’m helping Scarborough kids.

At the Shoniker Clinic at Centenary Hospital, I work with young people experiencing some of the most complex mental health challenges, including suicidal thoughts and self-harm. Many of the young people we see are at very high risk and are also from marginalized communities.  

We provide Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, or DBT, a proven treatment that combines one-on-one counselling with group skills training. We often describe it as skills for emotions, skills for relationships, and skills for life. Our program runs for six months, with young people attending twice a week.

And because of donor support, it costs families nothing.

Privately, that same care could cost at least $300 a week. I believe everyone should be able to access the mental health care they need, regardless of their financial situation. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back to Scarborough.

The Slaight DBT Program, funded by the Slaight Family Foundation, brought specialized DBT care to Scarborough and made it accessible to young people and families at no cost.

For me, that matters personally.

Growing up, I saw how difficult it could be for someone experiencing mental health challenges to find the right support. The services people needed weren’t always available in Scarborough, and accessing specialized care could mean travelling downtown — something that isn’t possible for everyone.

I’ve always been drawn to helping people, and eventually I knew that mental health and social work were where I belonged. I started my career working with young people in Scarborough before spending almost 10 years at Ontario Shores, where I developed my expertise in DBT.

When the opportunity came to bring that experience back to Scarborough, I knew I wanted to take it. I wanted to work with young people in my own community, and I also wanted to provide care that wasn’t dependent on someone’s ability to pay.

Now, I get to see what happens when young people actually have access to that care.
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The thing that motivates me most is seeing my clients make progress. Sometimes it’s a step toward change in an individual session. Other times, you get to see how far someone has come over six months.

Recently, we had a group graduation, and I left feeling so inspired by the young people I get to work with and by their resilience.

After six months in our program, a young woman who had been through so much told me, “I never expected to feel this way.”

Those are the moments that stay with me. She has a whole lifetime ahead of her, and now she has skills she can carry with her as she continues her recovery.

But those moments also make the hardest part of my job harder: knowing how many more young people need this care.

Since we began taking referrals in March 2024, we’ve received 418 referrals. We’re a team of four, and we can’t keep up with the need.

When you see something working, you want to be able to offer it to everyone who needs it.

Mental health touches everybody. If it doesn’t touch you personally, you know someone it does.

That’s why this work matters to me. I came back to Scarborough because I wanted to work with young people in my community and help make specialized mental health care more accessible. Now I’ve seen the difference that access can make.

I’ve seen young people make progress they didn’t think was possible. I’ve watched them graduate from our program with skills they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Everyone who walks through our doors is already resilient.

Our job isn’t to create that resilience. It’s to help them see what’s already there and help them to learn the skills to build their life worth living.

And I want more young people in Scarborough to have that chance.