Clem Martini – CASP Conference 2019 Keynote Speaker
We’re co-hosting the 30th Annual Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP) Conference alongside the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Edmonton.
Register for the conference now!
Presenters from across Canada and around the world will be coming to speak about suicide prevention and this year’s theme, Reconciliation: Honouring the Other. This theme forefronts the need to heal relationships to drive connectedness, a key underpinning of suicide prevention. Whether we are focused on individual relationships, engaging with priority populations or fueling the suicide prevention network across Canada, reconciliation and honouring is needed.
As the conference dates approach, we are pleased to begin announcing our keynote speakers. We have been working hard to bring keynote speakers who are passionate about suicide prevention to share their unique ideas, innovative programs and impactful stories to the conference.
Professor Clem Martini, a celebrated playwright, novelist, and screenwriter will be joining us as keynote for the CASP Conference.
Martini is a passionate advocate on behalf of issues associated with suicide, mental-illness-related-stigma, and family caregiving. He is a recipient of the ATB Financial Healing through the Arts Award. He currently teaches in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.
Martini’s younger brother Ben was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1977, and died by suicide ten years later. Martini’s older brother Olivier was also diagnosed with schizophrenia three years after Ben’s death. Olivier has struggled with this psychiatric condition, as well as repeated suicidal behaviours for the past thirty years.
Martini has written about his experience as a person impacted by suicide and mental illness in Upside Down: A Family’s Journey Through Mental Illness, Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness, winner of the W.O. Mitchell award, and The Unravelling, Alberta Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year.