Jocelyne Monty

Jocelyne Monty decided to become actively involved in the community. In 2000, she agreed to chair the fundraising campaign for Partners for Life – a provincial tour to make teens between the ages of 14 and 18 aware that depression is a risk factor for suicide. She knows it is essential to demystify mental illnesses because there are still too many taboos surrounding them. For this engaged woman, recognition of the link between mental illnesses and suicide is important. She is also concerned with the relevance of knowing the precursors of depression in order to effectively treat young depressives by diagnostic and appropriate pharmaceutical intervention.

Jocelyne Monty’s charisma enabled her to convince several generous people from her network to join the program. During the first stage of the Partners for Life’s fundraising campaign from 1999 to 2001, she gathered more than $3 million, exceeding the objective. A woman who seeks authenticity and balance, she can be very persuasive; she succeeds in making a convincing argument that she skilfully ties to the needs and expectations of the donors and sponsors.

Coming from an environment where education was seen to be of great importance, she later organized an information session on adolescence for a group of women who had expressed an interest. This initiative, with its many testimonies, is proof that depression among adolescents could have been ignored and simply thought of as a teenage crisis. Since then, she has strived to make people aware of depression as a risk factor for suicide and the need to identify it and explore new avenues to counter it.

When she took on the chair of the Mental Illness Foundation in 2002, Jocelyne Monty put her energy into breaking the silence surrounding mental illness. Her greatest desire: “That one day we live in a society that shows tolerance and understanding toward people with mental illness.”

In 2005, Jocelyne Monty was honoured with the Champion of Mental Health Awards (Community) of the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH) for her exceptional contribution to the cause of mental illness.

Jocelyne Monty was inducted into the Academy of Great Montrealers in the Social category in 2006 and was named a Commander of the Ordre de Montréal in 2016.

The picture and biographical information appearing on this page were current at the time this person was admitted to the Academy of Great Montrealers.