AUDIO: Lydia Bardak explains why ‘Brain Age’ is a real thing

The annual Voices for Peace Conference organized by Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada on the weekend brought together four local voices offering differing perspectives on this year’s topic: Healing the Home: Strengthening Cultural Ties.

Held at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife on Sunday afternoon, one of the speakers was Lydia Bardak, a past city councillor, former executive director of the John Howard Society and well-known advocate for Yellowknife’s homeless community.

She began her remarks explaining why some extra tolerance is called for with some of the downtown street-involved population is warranted:

“When we’re downtown in Yellowknife, we can all see and hear the loud, rude, crude, drunk, obnoxious behavior. It’s around us every day. What I see is the disability. We’re talking about people who have multiply layered traumatic brain injury, and I believe if they could do better, they would. So we’re talking about people who had brain damage before they were born, and their earliest memories are of trauma. And we hear all the time in the news about professional and elite athletes and concussion. Well, each time we see somebody with a black eye, a missing tooth, a swollen cheek, a bruise a scar on their head, those are head injuries that likely cause concussion. So they’re multiply concussed, they begin substance abusing in their early teen years and arrest the development of their brain. So if you see people who are acting in a very juvenile manner, it’s because that’s their that’s their Brain Age. That’s where they got to. And so it’s trying to understand that and learn to be tolerant of it…”

Here are edited portions of her full comments: