Brent Froese is taking on the role of board chair for the Canadian Mental Health Association's Central Region.

It's a two-year term, and he's glad to be joining their amazing staff.

"I'm really excited to see some new people on board that we've hired. A new Executive Director who's young and ambitious, and comes with a background of service in the RHA Jordan Friesen. He's on the provincial board of PSR (Psycho Social Recovery) efforts, so he's really up on the latest trends and I find that really exciting. If we can even make a small impression in the image we have locally to shift from where mental health issues have often been seen as last ditch efforts to deal with what often end up being social economic issues, rather than mental health issues. If we can shift that to where there's a broader acceptance of a need for everyone to develop better resources for maintaining mental health. Jordan has really identified workplace mental health as a strong initiative."

The Central Region is currently reassessing their role in the community to quite an extent. "We've grown a lot in the last while, maybe too fast for our own good sometimes. We've taken on housing projects -- we never really meant to become a landlord but now we are -- and as we provide services and a fee for service base to the RHA we've taken on more and more of those roles," says Froese. "Sometimes we're scrambling so much to keep up with what we're doing it's hard to see where we're going. Certainly we expect to be right on the cutting edge of what's a shift in the focus of mental health services nationwide, and that is a shift toward the psycho social recovery model. Instead of talking about mental illness, we're going to be talking about mental health."

He adds talking about mental health is the first step of many, and explains why he wanted to get involved.

"I see this as an organization that has a really critical role in the community. It fills the gaps in service that exist between what the Regional Health Authority can do and what people can do on their own. There's folks with mental health concerns, or issues, or personal experience in virtually every family I would think, and a lot of mental health issues go un-addressed because people are either afraid to talk about it, or the services they need doesn't exist. Sometimes they feel there's a stigma associated to it that's hard to overcome, so instead of addressing the needs they go unmet and that has an even worse outcome down the road. I've personally had some experience with some of these issues and they're pretty close to my heart, and when I see people being left or falling through the cracks simply because the services aren't consistent enough or organized enough and I see a non-profit organization trying to fill that need. Yes there's quite a bit of passion for me."

Froese says they expect to be at the front of a shift toward the Psycho-Social Recovery model. "Everyone has mental health in one shape or the other, and our best bet long term is to build resources for mental health, as opposed to waiting until the problems become unmanageable."