People First Radio – July 25, 2024People First Radio – July 25, 2024
People First Radio
Sarah Kenny and Mireille / Mairead explain how the game She Could Fly shares real OCD experiences and challenges stereotypes, while Georgina Franke and Dingamin / Dingemin Van Boshoef describe grassroots tent platforms and advocacy for people experiencing homelessness in Yellowknife. The conversations focus on education, dignity and the need for better housing, treatment and support.
0:00•26 Jul 2024
Games, Loops and Tent Platforms: OCD and Homelessness Put People First
Episode Overview
- She Could Fly uses a looping escape‑room style game, documentary clips and a graphic novel to help people understand OCD beyond cleanliness stereotypes.
- Mireille explains that OCD involves distressing intrusive thoughts followed by compulsions, and that the condition is widely misunderstood and often trivialised.
- The creative team set four goals: end trivialisation, properly count people with OCD, secure timely access to ERP‑based treatment, and fund research on social factors.
- In Yellowknife, volunteers have built tent platforms so people without housing, including couples, can have safer, more stable spaces than overcrowded shelters.
- Georgina and Dingamin argue that real progress needs government‑backed housing, counselling and jobs, treating homeless residents as community members with potential, not problems to move on.
“Intrusive thoughts… just mean you’re a human with a brain. Anxiety in response to it, and where that anxiety is, is where the compulsion is too.”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction, anxiety and life on the margins? This edition of People First Radio brings together two very different, but deeply connected, conversations about mental health and human dignity. First up, you'll hear how a point-and-click “documentary escape game” is being used to share the reality of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
Creative lead Sarah Kenny and co‑producer Mireille / Mairead, who has lived experience of OCD, explain how *She Could Fly* places players in a looping apartment as a way to echo looping intrusive thoughts and compulsions.
The game blends a graphic novel, short documentary clips, and interactive puzzles so that, as Sarah puts it, “the documentaries aren’t just add‑ons… they’re very much integral to the game.” Mireille breaks down the OCD cycle in plain language, stressing that intrusive thoughts alone are human, but the anxiety‑driven compulsions that follow are what define the condition.
She challenges the casual “I’m so OCD” stereotype and notes how this “trivial kind of personality quirk” image hides the reality of harm‑related intrusive thoughts and long delays in diagnosis. The team’s four goals include ending trivialisation, counting people with OCD in health systems, improving access to evidence‑based ERP therapy, and funding research into social factors.
The second half shifts north to Yellowknife, where advocate and instructor Georgina Franke and roofer Dingamin / Dingemin Van Boshoef describe grassroots efforts to support people experiencing homelessness. They’ve been building simple wooden platforms and tent spaces so couples and individuals can have safer, more stable places to sleep. Georgina talks about homeless residents as “my family” and links housing, sleep, food, work and healing as a single chain.
Both guests call for governments to treat Yellowknife as an “arrival city” and invest in housing, counselling and real jobs, not just emergency mats on a gym floor. If you care about how creativity, community and recovery intersect, this conversation might leave you asking what role you could play too.
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