National Network for Equitable Library Service

2016 Governor General's Literary Award Finalist. 2017 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winner. 2017 Joe Shuster Award Nominee. Teva Harrison was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at the age of 37. In this brilliant and inspiring graphic memoir, she documents through comic illustration and short personal essays what it means to live with the disease. She confronts with heartbreaking honesty the crises of identity that cancer brings: a lifelong vegetarian, Teva agrees to use experimental drugs that have been tested on animals.

Income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports; far more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers, it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Ryan Meili uses scholarship and patient stories to explore health determinants and democratic reforms that could create a truly healthy society.

Health activist, scholar, award-winning journalist, and cancer survivor Sharon Batt investigates the relationship between patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry as well as the contentious role of pharma funding. Over the past several decades, a gradual reduction in state funding has pressured patient groups into forming private-sector partnerships. This analysis of Canada’s breast cancer movement from 1990 to 2010 shows that the resulting power imbalance undermined the groups’ ability to put patients’ interests ahead of those of the funders.

When patients visit a clinic or hospital, they bring stories of the everyday life conditions that made them sick in the first place – stories about where they work, live, and play; stories about income, food security, and housing. Doctors today are listening. Personal stories and patient encounters illuminate the social determinants of health, that is, the upstream source of what too often become complex, painful, and expensive downstream problems.

The Industrial Diet chronicles the long-term transformation of food from a natural resource into an edible commodity that far too often fails to nourish us. Anthony Winson reveals how a combination of technological changes, population growth, and political and economic factors helped constitute and transform mass dietary regimes from the nineteenth century to the present day, and he offers new evidence linking broad-based dietary changes with negative health effects.

Community Mental Health in Canada offers a timely, critical overview of the provision of public mental health services in Canada, past, present, and future. This new edition has been substantially revised and expanded and includes a deeper discussion of stigma, the recovery vision, the pharmaceutical industry, and mental health law, in addition to an array of new topics. Recent developments such as the creation of the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2007 and the release of its national mental health strategy document in 2012 are also discussed.

When Henry Morgentaler, Canada’s best-known abortion rights advocate, died in 2013, activists and scholars began to reassess the state of abortion in the country. In this volume, some of Canada’s foremost researchers challenge current thinking about abortion by revealing the discrepancy between what Canadians believe the law to be after the 1988 Morgentaler decision and what people are experiencing on the ground.

Aboriginal peoples in Canada have diverse cultures but share common social and political challenges that have contributed to their experiences of health and illness. This collection addresses the origins of mental health and social problems and the emergence of culturally responsive approaches to services and health promotion. Healing Traditions is not a handbook of practice but a resource for thinking critically about current issues in the mental health of indigenous peoples.

Health Care and the Charter explores the systematic use of Charter litigation in the area of health care and the policy impact of the resulting judicial decisions. Christopher P. Manfredi and Antonia Maioni examine three of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in recent years. Eldridge (1997) and Auton (2004) invited the Court to extend the scope of publicly funded services, while Chaouilli (2005) asked the Court to allow private health services.

John Yudkin was the first to sound the alarm about the excess of sugar in the diet of modern Americans. Pure, White, and Deadly clearly and engagingly describes how sugar is damaging our bodies, why we eat so much of it, and what we can do to stop. He explores the ins and out of sugar, from the different types-is brown sugar really better than white?-to how it is hidden inside our everyday foods, and how it is damaging our health. In 1972, Yudkin was mostly ignored by the health industry and media, but the events of the last forty years have proven him spectacularly right.