This episode contains adult subject matter and some listeners may be triggered by this content. Listener discretion is advised.
This episode is part of a special series for CMHA Mental Health Week in Canada.
In this episode, we delve into the critical issue of workplace mental health and the quest for fairness in professional settings. We discuss the challenges individuals face when mental health struggles intersect with career demands, particularly how support or the lack thereof can profoundly impact our wellbeing and job security. This conversation opens up about the systemic changes needed to foster healthier work environments that prioritize employee mental health.
Jan Wong
Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian who grew up in Montreal speaking English, some French and zero Chinese. In the summer of 1972, while majoring in Asian studies at McGill University, she traveled alone to the People's Republic of China. At 19, she talked her way into a spot at Peking University, becoming the first of two Westerners to study in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Jan soon became fluent in Mandarin as a result of being the one and only student of a humorless Communist Party official (whom she nicknamed Fu the Enforcer.) On Saturday afternoons, as part of Chairman Mao's Revolution-in-Education Movement, Jan also dug ditches, hauled pig manure and harvested wheat. Later, as a foreign correspondent based in Beijing for six years, Jan was an eyewitness to the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.
Jan began her journalism career in 1979 as the first-ever news assistant for The New York Times bureau in Beijing. In 1981, after graduating with a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she became a staff reporter at The Gazette in Montreal and, later, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail.
She is a recipient of the George Polk Award in the US for business reporting, a National Newspaper Award in Canada for foreign reporting, the New England Press Association Newswoman of the Year Award, the Globe and Mail’s Stanley MacDowell Prize for Writing, the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Silver Medal, a National Magazine Silver Award in Canada for column writing and the Daily Bread Food Bank Public Education Award in Toronto, among other honors.
Jan's Resources
Out of the Blue
The Jōrni Resources
https://thejornipodcast.com for show notes
https://thejorniblog.com for more holistic healing and mental health resources
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