Chris Cull

Chris Cull is a frontline healthcare worker, documentary filmmaker, internationally recognized speaker, and strategy and policy consultant who represents Canada on the World Health Organization’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Mental Health, Neurological and Substance Use Conditions and has served on the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs. In 2025, he delivered the keynote address at the World Health Organization’s Forum on Alcohol, Drugs and Addictive Behaviours.

None of it was supposed to happen.

At twenty-two, Chris found his father — a paramedic of twenty-seven years who had lost his battle with Huntington’s disease — after he took his own life in a hotel room. The grief sent Chris into a nearly decade-long opioid addiction. He weighed 139 pounds. He stole food to eat. He had no heat or hot water for two years. Then, sitting alone in the dark, he asked himself one question: What would you do if you could do anything?

The answer led him to overcoming his opioid addiction and riding a bicycle across Canada — twice — filming a documentary about the impacts of the opioid crisis along the way, titled Inspire, followed by his docuseries, titled Surviving Addiction. It led him to working in the emergency department from which he once sought help, where he now serves on a Crisis Intervention Team, as well as consulting on public health and drug policy from the local level to the global stage and everything in between.

Chris lives with depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, and addiction. He has not left them behind. He has learned to make them work for him — and his signature keynote, “Mental Health: The Tools to Your Greatest Growth,” teaches audiences how to do the same.