About
How this works.
The Academy is the teaching arm of Pathway to Hope, a non-profit in Kitchener, Ontario working with young people on mental health and addiction.
Who it is for
The courses are written for people aged 13 to 25. That shapes the language, the examples, and the assumptions: about school and first jobs, about living at home or having just left, about the particular weight of being the age you are. Caregivers, teachers, and support workers read them too, and are welcome.
Where the material comes from
Lessons cite the research they draw on, and every lesson is graded on an emotional sensitivity rubric before publication, from General through Severe. That grading is what drives the advisories on this site.
A lesson graded Medium or higher carries a note before the text and a link to crisis support. Lessons below that do not, because a warning on everything is a warning on nothing.
Fact-checking, and where it stands
Every course is being checked against the published literature before it goes live: whether each claim holds up, whether each cited work exists and actually supports the claim attached to it, and whether the clinical terminology is current.
That check is under way and it has already found real problems, including citations that could not be verified. Until a course clears it, treat what you read here as a draft rather than as settled fact, and take anything that matters to you to a professional. We would rather tell you this than let you assume a review has happened that has not.
What is here today
The curriculum runs to 271 courses across 20 topics.0 of them are readable on this site right now. Another 90 are written and being moved over, and 181 more are outlined and waiting to be written.
Every course is labelled with which of those three it is. We would rather show the honest shape of the work than a short list that implies the curriculum is smaller than it is, or a long one that implies more is readable than actually is.
No account, no tracking
There is nothing to sign up for and no analytics following you between lessons. Someone reading about addiction or self-harm should not have to wonder what is being recorded. The cost is that the site cannot remember your place in a course, which we think is the right trade on this subject.
What this is not
These courses are education, not treatment. They are not a diagnosis, not therapy, and not a crisis service. They can help you understand what is going on and what usually helps, and that is genuinely worth something, but they cannot assess your situation or respond when something is urgent. Here is where to find help that can.
Open by licence
Course content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so anyone can share and adapt it for non-commercial use with credit. If you run a classroom, a clinic, or a youth group and want to use this material, you already may.