2019 One Brave Night for Mental Health: Shahin Khodaei - CAMH One Brave Night for Mental Health

Hello Friends and Allies! :)

My wonderful sister has started this fundraising effort, and I have decided to join her by playing live music in support of mental health. I will be thrilled if you would support us by donating to CAMH. CAMH is a psychiatric teaching hospital in Toronto and they do a lot of research with mental health as well as treatment of patients. I have not been involved with them personally yet, but have heard good stories about the work that they do. The dream is that through these fundraising efforts, we will help break down some of the stigma around mental illness, and provide more people with access to much-needed services.

I will be playing Santour (an Iranian instrument) as part of this fundraising. My sister and her friends will be doing Azerbaijani dance and Kurdish dance.

How to Help/Participate:

If you can, chip in for this cause online. All online donations go directly to CAMH. $5 is a good minimum. :)

If you are interested, join Our Team! Perform or Fundraise. More info: http://give.camh.ca/goto/showMeLife

We have also booked our party room on Friday, May 3rd! Come to have fun there or to showcase your talent (dance, sing, play a musical instrument, etc.). More Info: http://give.camh.ca/goto/showMeLife

My story:

I am raising awareness for mental health because I feel there are a lot of deeply ingrained problems with the way we deal with mental well-being. As my sister says, there are unspoken rules around how we should think and feel. The same rules that tell us it's weak to cry, that we should just "deal with it" if the world is bringing us down, that we should try as hard as we can to push away our pain when something painful happens to us. This sort of mentality and stigma stops us from talking about our difficulties, and because we don't talk about them, people often don't get the help they need. On top of that, getting professional help can be really expensive.

The world is a difficult place. New things inevitably come up that bring us down. Ideally we would just change our world so that it's less challenging, but I think difficult events are an inescapable part of being human. That's why it's important to know that there's nothing wrong with struggling, to know that it's okay to ask for help, and to have affordable and accessible professionals available that can provide this help. I am lucky to be in a university sphere where these issues are more openly discussed, but there's a lot of people around who don't have the same privilege as me. That's why I'm doing this, to help fight that stigma, and to make sure we can have access to the help we all need.

Thanks for making it this far along my page! If you care about this cause, please chip in whatever you can afford and help our fundraising campaign :)

Much love,

Shahin

Achievements

$300!

I've raised $300!

Personal Gift

Has made a donation to this event

Personal Progress:

of Goal

$310 Raised

$250.00

Fundraising Honor Roll

Amanda

Ankur Bodalia

Anonymous

Arsène Pinguelo

Ayse

Brooke C

Dianshi Wang

Gurpreet

Lilia

M.M.

Marc

Shahin Khodaei

Shahla

viv

Shahin is playing Santour for mental health!