For 50 years, IDEAS has been delivering the best in contemporary thought for an hour, five times a week to the homes, cars and computers of listeners across the country and beyond. To help us celebrate this milestone anniversary, we invited those listeners to tell us about programs that have inspired them to make major life changes, altered their world-views or simply piqued their intellectual curiosity. **This episode originally aired October 16, 2015.



IDEAS, or The Best ideas You'll Hear Tonight, as it was first called, emerged from a tradition of educational programming on CBC Radio. Subjects were at times presented in great depth and at serious length. Sometimes a whole month would be devoted to a single topic -- that's the equivalent of 20 hours in a university lecture hall.

But as the demands of our listeners changed, so did IDEAS, challenging ourselves to be as engaging as we possibly could be. The result that we've often heard from you is that the program has changed the way you look at the world.

In this episode, listeners tell us how hearing the right idea at the right time can have a lasting impact.



Participants in this episode:

Catherine Shelley lives in the Gatineau hills outside Ottawa. She had been on anti-depressants for many years and had been trying to get off them when she heard Rethinking Depression. It gave her the help she needed to start an anti-depressant-free life. Mary O'Connell brings us the stories of the depressed on the path to wellness and the methods that can be used to get them there. 53:59



Iain McLeod is a writer and innovator from Nova Scotia. Many years ago, while living in Toronto, he had a landlady who showed signs of severe mental illness and Iain was very uncomfortable in her presence. Hearing a program featuring the psychologist R.D. Laing opened his mind to positive ways of relating to her and other elderly mentally ill people that have continued to last to the present.

R.D. Laing 55:42

lives in the Gatineau hills outside Ottawa. She had been on anti-depressants for many years and had been trying to get off them when she heard Rethinking Depression. It gave her the help she needed to start an anti-depressant-free life.is a writer and innovator from Nova Scotia. Many years ago, while living in Toronto, he had a landlady who showed signs of severe mental illness and Iain was very uncomfortable in her presence. Hearing a program featuring the psychologistopened his mind to positive ways of relating to her and other elderly mentally ill people that have continued to last to the present.

Martha Perkins is a writer and editor now living in Vancouver. Growing up as one of seven children, the kitchen had been the centre of family activities and her mother had been the heartbeat of the home. The night her mother died, Martha was in her kitchen when she heard an IDEAS program that turned her grief to courage.





David Lapointe lives In Courtney on Vancouver Island. He was driving home from Nanaimo when a program about the writer and teacher René Girard and his ideas about the roots of conflict turned his own ideas upside down.





Hazel Regan lives in Toronto. She is a former marathon runner who took for granted her freedom to run in those races. Listening to Paul Kennedy's series on marathons she discovered the powerful story of Katherine Switzer and her battle to defeat the officially sanctioned view that women couldn't run the distance. Her experience running up heartbreak hill in the Boston Marathon suddenly took on new meaning.

