Jennifer 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.