Speaking Nuwan Fonseka you can feel like the world is a little less broken.
Fonseka, a clinical psychologist and founder of the Integrative Mindfulness Center, speaks in the gentle cadences of a man who has seen things, wars, wildfires, and a level of human suffering most of us pretend never happens. Sri Lanka born, Toronto trained, and now 15 years into a one-year commitment to serve Northern Manitoba, he offers something the region rarely gets: permanence.
He also offers a kind of psychological first aid kit.
It’s called Acute Trauma Responder Training, or ATRT, and if you’re picturing PowerPoint slides and bureaucratic jargon, you are in the wrong universe. This is not a class; it’s a triage strategy for the soul.
“It’s emotional CPR,” Fonseka tells me. “You wouldn’t wait for a doctor if someone was choking. So why do we wait days for mental health support when someone’s mind is collapsing?”
Here’s what that looks like in the North: wildfire evacuations in South Indian Lake and Cross Lake. Entire communities reduced to smoke and soot. Families watching flames lick the edges of their backyards. Fear, flashbacks, grief reawakened. And no therapist, no responder, no plan for days.
“We are, unofficially, number one or number two in Canada for crisis incidents,” he says.
So, he built his own cavalry.
Back in 2021, Nuwan and two colleagues, Kathy Jenson and Jeff McIntyre, worked with U.S. therapist Roy Kiessling (an EMDR pioneer) to design two protocols: CIDP (Critical Incident Desensitization Protocol) and ATIP (Acute Traumatic Incident Procedure). One works within the first 48 hours of trauma. The other kicks in after that.
They teach grounding. Bilateral stimulation. Tapping. Eye movements. “We’re targeting emotional vividness,” Nuwan says. “That’s the thing, if you can reduce the vividness of the experience early, the trauma doesn’t sink in as deep.”
It’s neuroscience, not mysticism. They’re working with the amygdala, the hippocampus, the sympathetic nervous system. But you don’t need a psychology degree to feel it. Nuwan likens it to the Heimlich: “Something stuck inside. We help get it out.”
And the kicker? The whole thing is unfunded.
No grants. No government support. The team livestreams daily trauma support sessions on Facebook for free. “Even during the wildfires, we were doing it every day,” he says. “Nobody from the media ever called. Until you.”
This should be a national scandal. But it’s not. It’s just… normal. In Canada’s north, distance, silence, and institutional inertia are standard-issue. In some communities, it takes days for a crisis team from Winnipeg to arrive and by then, vividness has hardened into scars.
So, they train the community members themselves. “We say it’s not mental health training,” Nuwan clarifies. “It’s life training. Because trauma is a part of life.”
That may sound fatalistic, but it’s the opposite. The idea is radical empowerment. Anyone, an elder, a teacher, a nurse, even you, can become a first responder of the psyche. “Every community needs ten of these people,” Nuwan insists. “We don’t need to wait anymore.”
And it’s working.
In the past three years, they’ve trained hundreds: paramedics, firefighters, addiction counselors, chiefs, caregivers. When a crisis hits be it fire, flood, or suicide these “emotional EMTs” are ready with protocols, not platitudes.
They give out booklets. They follow up. They check if people have food, shelter, love. It’s trauma care that remembers to ask, “Have you eaten today?”
What Fonseka has built is the equivalent of a rural fire department run out of someone’s garage. Only the fires are internal. And invisible. And often, nobody even sees the smoke.
Fonseka says, softly, “It’s very sad sometimes. Northern Manitoba… sometimes you can’t believe it’s still Canada.”
And yet, there’s hope.
They’re continuing to hold training sessions, the latest already taking place August 7–8, in Thompson. Anyone can come. No background required. Just the willingness to show up within 24 hours of disaster and say, “I am here. I see you.”
That’s it. That’s the magic.
There’s no cape, no government badge, no compensation. Just a chair, a hand, and the knowledge that emotional first aid is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Because we don’t just bleed on the outside.
