Vancouver entrepreneur uses lived mental health experience to help creatives

Joëlle Perras, a French Canadian entrepreneur living with bipolar II disorder, runs a consultancy called Struggles 2 Strengths that helps people and organizations work through challenges and transform them into opportunities for growth. Their practice offers workshops on mental health for the creative process, often geared toward individuals in the performing arts.

Perras offers one-on-one consulting and mental health consultations for theatre shows or other creative work, drawing on 15 years of lived experience with their diagnosis.

"My lived experience with mental health informs my work and is part of what I offer," Perras said. "I do consulting based on lived-experience insight, and it fills the need for non-clinical, peer-based perspectives."

Mental health is often the subject of theatre shows and movies, but the wellbeing of the people creating the art often goes overlooked, according to Perras. "I love these two words: mental health. And you know why? Because a lot of people get uncomfortable when we say them. And rightly so, because it's heavy."

Perras credits Employ to Empower, an award-winning Vancouver charity, with a life-changing pivot. The non-profit provides free entrepreneurship training, mentorship and community support to people facing systemic barriers.

Before reaching out to Employ to Empower, Perras knew exactly what they wanted to do: run a consulting business. "I have this uncanny ability with a sensitivity to be able to bring people together and to help them open up and to facilitate an experience of them understanding themselves better."

Perras says everyone has a creative process that brings them into highs and lows, and most people wear masks in daily life, particularly professionally. Getting to where they are today involved removing masks in their own life. Growing up in Alberta, they developed an affinity for the outdoors, though they didn't realize many activities they gravitated toward during youth helped them cope with hypomania — unusually high energy and mood changes often accompanied by impulsivity. They didn't know they were living with bipolar disorder through adolescence and young adulthood.

Now, a short walk to the ocean offers Perras peace paralleled by few other things.