People First Radio – September 17, 2026People First Radio – September 17, 2026
People First Radio
Corey Bialik talks about living with double depression and how a park labyrinth and nature-focused urban design ideas helped create therapeutic moments. Historians Stephanie Hunt Kennedy and Jen Barkley then discuss disability archives, power, and why so many disabled people’s stories remain hidden or constrained.
0:00•17 Sept 2026
Labyrinths, City Streets and Hidden Disability Stories
Episode Overview
- Nature-rich public spaces can create moments of refuge that feel genuinely therapeutic, even if they are not a cure.
- Simple features like labyrinths and naturalised park areas may help people with depression carve out mental space beyond hopelessness.
- Design choices in cities are often constrained by profit, which can push aside health-focused, biophilic ideas unless someone fights for them early in a project.
- Openly naming depression and therapy in workplaces and personal circles can reduce shame and make daily life feel less isolating.
- Disability-focused archives need to recognise power imbalances and actively include diverse disabled voices, rather than limiting records through stigma or institutional self-protection.
“It was like the first moment where I experienced sort of like a crack in my head where I found some small space to start thinking about a potential other than hopelessness, if you will.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety and mental health? This edition of People First Radio centres on how the spaces we move through – and the histories we inherit – shape our inner lives. First up, you'll hear urban planner-turned-sustainability professional Corey Bialik reflect on living with double depression: persistent depressive disorder and major depressive disorder.
Corey describes how leaving the house in Toronto can feel "like being attacked by the city" when everything is concrete and engineered, with no refuge in nature. His turning point came in Winnipeg’s Kings Park, at the Carroll Shields Memorial Labyrinth.
Skeptical but desperate for relief, he started walking the one-way path and says, "It was like the first moment where I experienced sort of like a crack in my head where I found some small space to start thinking about a potential other than hopelessness, if you will." From there, the chat widens into biophilic design, wellness buzzwords, and the ways profit-driven development can erase simple, therapeutic features in public space.
Corey candidly shares what it’s like to "out" himself at work as someone in therapy and how speaking openly about depression can loosen shame’s grip. The second segment shifts to disability history with historians Stephanie Hunt Kennedy and Jen Barkley, co-editors of *Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power*. They unpack how disabled people’s stories are often missing or distorted in institutional records, particularly psychiatric archives, and why access is sometimes blocked in the name of "privacy" or institutional self-protection.
You’ll hear about family archives, deaf community archives, and the emotional toll of working with documents that flatten disabled lives into diagnoses. Together, these conversations ask how cities, parks, archives and even backyard ants might support, or undermine, our mental health. Could paying closer attention to both our surroundings and our stories be one more tool in your recovery toolkit?
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