Matthew Soldier is the lead hand at the FXR Warehouse in his native Winnipeg. He has repeatedly demonstrated his strong work ethic and reliability during his time there, and has quickly become an important part of the FXR Warehouse team.

He has also become a strong advocate for the understanding of mental health and mood disorders in Canada, and has been a member of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada since November of 2013. "Learning about cognitive distortions and how to cope with certain mental illness has been a very big thing in my life recently," he says, "and is going to continue to be."

As Matthew Soldier knows, mental health generally refers to the balance of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health, and is an ideal that most people strive for on a daily basis. Mental illness, meanwhile, is a disturbance of health psychological patterns that, in severe cases, can affect the day to day functioning of its sufferers.

Matthew Soldier has become an advocate for mental health, and wants people to have a better understanding of what it really is all about. For most people mental illness is a disturbing prospect, and those who have some form of it are stigmatized. But he believes that this is largely due to a fear of the unknown, and that education is something that everyone would benefit from.

The facts, he says, are that one in five Canadians will have some form of mental illness during their lifetimes, and about ten percent of the Canadian population will have some kind of mental illness at any given time.

Breaking those numbers down, Matthew Soldier says that about one percent of Canadians will experience bipolar disorder during their lifetimes, while eight percent will experience a major depression. About twelve percent will experience an anxiety disorder. The age bracket with the highest rate of depression symptoms are those under twenty, and the age bracket with the highest rate of anxiety symptoms is in the twenty to twenty-nine age group.

Matthew Soldier says that no one has a perfect life, so a big part of good mental health is about developing the coping skills we all need to deal with the ups and downs of life in the twenty-first century.