S1E1: My New Life (Nov 6/23)

Matthew Dickson
6 min readNov 7, 2023

“My New Life” tells my story of a new start in life for me beginning soon after successfully recovering from schizophrenia, bicycling across Canada, and then continuing my mental health advocacy work in developing countries at www.MindAid.ca.

Hi! I’m Matthew Dickson. I am 51 and live in Eastern Canada. I bicycled across Canada at age 20.

At age 22 I got schizophrenia. It took me 3 decades to successfully recover, but recover I did, and at age 51, in the summer of 2023, I bicycled across Canada for the second time.

I am now the first person with schizophrenia to bicycle across Canada, as far as I know.

In 2018 I made the world’s first website, www.MindAid.ca, with all the groups helping people with mental illness in developing countries on one site (they are otherwise scattered across the web). This is my main focus. I am also a schizophrenia advocate.

I made YouTube videos documenting my bike ride in 2023. I also made Facebook posts with a few paragraphs or so about my day on the road each day. I enjoy being in front of the camera. I enjoy writing. There are many writers in my family, so I guess it’s hereditary.

After the bike trip ended in early September 2023, I kept making YouTube videos and will continue to do so for my Mind Aid platform as the years go on.

Now that a couple of months has passed, I have had time to think about the trip and put it in perspective a bit more, and am missing my daily…

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Matthew Dickson

Advocate for people with mental illness in developing countries at www.MindAid.ca. Bicycled across Canada twice, books, nature, fitness, learning, dancing!