When she was 17, Samra Zafar was forced to marry an older man she’d never met and move to Canada with him. Eventually, she gained the courage to walk away, and build a new life for herself and her daughters. Now, Zafar is an international speaker, a bestselling author and a med school student at McMaster University. Here, she shares her riveting story with Dr. Jack Muskat, and provides encouragement on how to survive, and even thrive, after difficult situations.

Eat Move Think experts nutritionist Leslie Beck (eat), our host Shaun Francis (move), psychologist Dr. Jack Muskat (think) and Dr. Peter Nord (medicine) discuss the year that was, make their picks for the wellness trend that dominated the last 12 months, and speculate about what’s to come in 2022.

Does your local Starbucks barista make a mean frappuccino? Perhaps that’s because their company provides them with one of the most comprehensive wellness benefits packages around. Each Starbucks “partner” who works 20 hours a week gets $5,000 for mental health support every year, among other perks. Here, Medcan Chief Growth Officer Bronwen Evans chats with Starbucks Canada VP of Partner Resources Cara Beck.

Marc Lewis, neuroscientist, former opiate addict and author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, believes that addiction rates increased recently because lockdowns deprived people of the physical proximity to loved ones that the brain finds so nourishing. Here, he explores his thesis with Medcan’s clinical director of mental health, Dr. Jack Muskat.

The growing field of art therapy argues that paintings and sculpture can improve your wellness. In collaboration with Art Toronto, host Shaun Francis examines the evidence with such experts as the contemporary artist Marcel Dzama, RxArt founder Diane Brown, Sinai Health psychiatrist-in-chief Dr. Lesley Wiesenfeld and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts art therapist Stephen Legari. Plus: Medcan’s art strategist, Stacy Francis, discusses her innovative approach to art.

There are a lot of self-help books out there, but none of them are written by a hockey legend with four Olympic gold medals and a medical degree. Hayley Wickenheiser’s extraordinary success as a woman in a male-dominated sport happened because of her remarkable grit and resilience. In this episode, she chats with Medcan’s Chief People & Growth Officer Bronwen Evans about her new book, Over the Boards: Lessons from the Ice, and tells stories of the moments and mentors that made her who she is.

“Psychedelics saved my life,” says Payton Nyquvest. “Now [I’m] on a mission to pay that forward.” Nyquvest is the CEO of Numinus Wellness, a publicly traded Vancouver start-up that manufactures MDMA and psilocybin for clinical drug trials. The intent is to determine how effective they are as a therapy for mental illness. In this episode, the second of two parts, host Shaun Francis walks Nyquvest through his fascinating life story, and his predictions for the future of psychedelic therapies.

They’re portrayed as a mechanism to achieve self-knowledge in the Amazon Prime show, Nine Perfect Strangers. They were the subject of promising clinical trials in the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine. So is the buzz about psychedelics justified? What’s the deal with microdosing? And exactly which mental illnesses might benefit from psychedelic therapies? Psychopharmacologist Dr. Roger McIntyre and Dr. Ishrat Husain discuss the latest scientific developments for psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine and more.

Our wellness as individuals depends on the extent we feel like we belong in community settings at work, when socializing, and at home. But how can today’s leaders encourage strong ties among coworkers when so many are working virtually? Host Shaun Francis explores the challenge of creating strong social bonds with climbing expedition leader Scott Kress of Summit Team Building.

How do you come to terms with a life-changing health diagnosis? That’s exactly what Taylor Efford—a Toronto-based content creator, comedian and actor with a large social media following—had to confront last year when she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. This week, she sits down with Dr. Jack Muskat, clinical director of mental health at Medcan, to talk about how she stayed resilient through it all.

Getting adequate mental health care is too difficult. Where do you go? Who do you turn to? We need to change this—fast, says Dr. David Goldbloom, celebrated psychiatrist and the senior medical advisor for Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Dr. Goldbloom has actual solutions to some of our problems, and he shares them in his new book, We Can Do Better. This week, he joins Medcan CEO Shaun Francis to discuss how we can reinvent our mental health care system and his hopes for the future.

Can you imagine the pressure that Olympians are feeling in Tokyo right now? Dane Jensen, author of The Power of Pressure, is the guy elite athletes and coaches call when they need help handling that pressure. Jensen believes that we can not only learn to manage pressure, but use it to our advantage—and his invaluable Olympic-level advice can be applied to our own pressure-filled lives, too. This week, Jensen joins Medcan CEO Shaun Francis to discuss his book and share some of his best coping strategies.

We’re back again this week with Do Nothing author Celeste Headlee, whose conversation with Dr. Jack Muskat, Medcan’s clinical director of mental health, was so captivating, we had to dedicate two episodes to it. This week, Dr. Muskat and Headlee dive into the lifestyle changes we should all be making in order to break out of this vicious work cycle we’re trapped in and embrace leisure.

It’s an age-old story: work hard and you’ll find success and happiness. Then why do so many of us end up burned out—even after scoring that dream promotion? For one, that story we tell ourselves is actually a relatively new one that has altered the way we work for the worse, author Celeste Headlee argues in her book Do Nothing. In part one of a two-parter, Headlee joins Dr. Jack Muskat, Medcan clinical director of mental health, to discuss how we became obsessed with productivity and why we need to relax.

To increase our chances of living long, healthy lives, we need to be doing more than exercising and eating well—we need strong, supportive social networks too. On this week’s episode, journalist Marta Zaraska joins us to discuss her latest book, Growing Young, and the science-based case for how friendship and kindness can help us live to 100.

In October 2019, Dr. Steven Taylor published his eerily timed book, The Psychology of Pandemics, just weeks before the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Wuhan. This week, he joins guest host Dr. Jack Muskat, Medcan’s clinical director of mental health, to discuss the lessons we can learn from pandemics and predict what the future of mental health may look like post-COVID. He also explores the potential for an oncoming Roaring ‘20s.

Dr. Jonathan Danson is a clinical psychologist who believes the pandemic’s grand reboot of routines can trigger a paradox of choice for high achievers. Shaun talks with Dr. Danson about what to do next.

We’re all dealing with anxiety lately. What do we do if things start to spiral? How do we manage our thoughts when the future is so unpredictable? What if it all starts to seem a little too much? An authentic and grounded discussion with Medcan’s director of mental health, Dr. Gina Di Giulio, a clinical psychologist.

We’re all familiar with the way people can feel irritable and tired if they go too long without food. Dr. Felice Jacka’s research indicates the relationship with what we eat is deeper than that. In our interview, she discusses how our food choices may be able to lift the symptoms of depression, as well as other mental illnesses.