For more than half my life, someone has been trying to kill me.

That someone is me.

The first time I considered ending my life, I was eight or nine years old, living in a rented house with my father and brother in Owen Sound, Ont. My mother had moved out years earlier, after my father tried to stab her; he had started directing his misogyny at me instead. We had just watched The Towering Inferno, an early-1970s drama about a fire in a skyscraper. My brother described how he would climb balconies and elevator shafts to safety, and I thought: I’d just jump.

I knew I shouldn’t say it out loud, that the thought was somehow shameful, but it seemed clear to me that there are better and worse ways to die. I couldn’t see a good answer to the question, “Why not?”

Karen Letofsky, board president at the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP), was not surprised to hear this. “There is a lot of social ambiguity around suicide,” she says. Much of what we think we know about suicide is based on social mythology, which creates barriers to the honest conversations Letofsky says people who attempt suicide need to have.

Yvonne Bergmans also emphasizes the importance of talking about suicidal thoughts. Bergmans is a CASP board member and suicide intervention consultant at the University of Toronto’s Arthur Sommer Rotenberg Chair in Suicide and Depression Studies Program at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. She says suicide attempts and suicidal ideations speak to a “great, deep pain: that hurt where there’s a story being written about ‘I can’t survive this’ or ‘I need to end this.’”

In our discussions about suicide, both women say our country’s mental health system is under-resourced and prioritizes crisis over long-term support. Its uneven structure leaves it poorly equipped to help survivors do what we most need to: articulate and understand the stories behind our suicide attempts. And those stories matter—hearing them helps demythologize suicide, so we can understand and address it as a social problem.

I grew up in poverty, in an abusive home. I learned early in life that my physical safety and bodily autonomy were not guaranteed, that I had little control over what happened to me, and that being killed was a real possibility. My earliest suicidal thoughts aren’t about giving up. They’re about regaining control: If I can’t choose not to die, I’ll settle for choosing how to die.

***

Suicidal ideation was a secret I kept throughout my childhood. Even if there had been someone for me to share my feelings with, I didn’t have language to do so. Bergmans says this is a common problem. About 80 percent of her clients experience alexithymia, or an inability to identify and describe their emotions.

“A lot of folks can only talk about how they need ‘it’ to go away, without any language to understand what ‘it’ might be,” she explains: “The emotional literacy to be able to say, ‘I’m so angry,’ or ‘I’m so frustrated,’ or ‘I’m so lonely,’ or ‘I’m so hurt’ just doesn’t exist.”

Unable to communicate our feelings with words, people who attempt suicide learn to communicate with behaviour instead. I was 16 the first time I acted on suicidal thoughts. While I didn’t attempt suicide that day, I made a detailed plan: I was going to slit my wrists and then hang myself from the railing above the stairs in my foster home. My hanging body would block my foster parents’ path to the garage—they would have no choice but to acknowledge my pain. The idea scared me; that it seemed inevitable scared me more.

I confessed my plan in an online chatroom for people with depression, and someone called the cops. That was the first of many arrests under Ontario’s Mental Health Act—often referred to as “being formed” because there is a form the arresting officer or doctor fills out to require you to submit to psychiatric assessment.

The hospital discharged me back to my foster home the following morning.

The next year, I began struggling to determine what was real. My mind battered me with thoughts about scooping out my eyes, splitting open my abdomen and removing my uterus, cutting off my hands because they were being operated by someone else. I now have a word for what was happening to me—dissociation—but I didn’t then. I overdosed and wound up in the hospital again. Once again, I was discharged with limited follow-up. In these and other suicide attempts throughout my teens and 20s, I was telling a story, whether anyone wanted to hear it or not: I’ve got good reasons to feel this angry, and I demand to be heard.

Bergmans says it’s common to feel isolated after a suicide attempt: “Even when people are in crisis, their experience with the mental health system is often, ‘let’s find a diagnosis, try to medicate, and send them on their way.’ And what gets missed is the trauma of the experience that somebody has in attempting suicide.” The problem is both interpersonal and systemic. In a crisis, a person with suicidal thoughts can present themselves at the emergency room or call a suicide hotline and get immediate care. But, argues Letofsky, “once the crisis has passed, there really aren’t many resources. That compounds the problem.”

One area where we see the mental health system’s “crisis-driven service orientation” is in the programming that attempts to respond to youth suicides and attempts, such as the suicide crisis in Canada’s Northern Indigenous communities. “Most of the resources are front-ended and applied at the time of crisis,” Letofsky says, “and then you never hear again about that story or its longer-term impact.”

Indigenous people in Canada live with the trauma of ongoing genocide, a history that includes over-representation in the foster care system, in prisons, in poverty, and among suicide deaths. While Indigenous people are over-burdened with trauma that demands to be heard, the mental health system serving them is even more under-resourced than in the rest of Canada.

Makwa is an Indigenous social worker and mother of two from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. Intergenerational trauma has shaped the experience of suicide for her and her daughter, Nimkii. (Both names and their location have been changed to protect their identities.)

Makwa’s mother, an Indian day school survivor, struggled throughout her life with self-harm, suicide attempts, and a substance use disorder, and Makwa and her siblings were apprehended by Children’s Aid when she was a baby. The first time Makwa attempted suicide, she was nine years old. She overdosed on acetaminophen in her foster home, thinking that if she died, she could leave the home.

By the time she was 11, Makwa was regularly self-harming. Each episode led to another crisis call: police, paramedics, hospitals, new foster homes, group homes when the foster homes would no longer take her. Sometimes, the hospital or jail Makwa was held in couldn’t discharge her because she had nowhere to go. Her sense that the system was tired of dealing with her crises left her “feeling even more worthless.” Eventually, a guard from one of Makwa’s detention facilities agreed to foster her.

Makwa developed a substance use disorder in her late teens, and when she aged out of foster care at 17, she was pregnant with Nimkii. Nimkii’s father, also a child welfare system survivor, used substances and abused Makwa. They lost custody of Nimkii and their infant son after Makwa, reeling from an episode of domestic violence, slit her wrists.

To be able to parent Nimkii and her brother, Makwa needed to change. She left her abusive partner, overcame her substance use disorder, went back to school, sought mental health treatment, and regained custody of her children. But as Nimkii entered her teenage years, Makwa saw familiar behaviour in her daughter: Nimkii began to self-harm, attempted suicide, and assaulted others.

For years, Nimkii’s only consistent support was Makwa. Makwa believed Nimkii needed residential treatment, and she knew being a child in the foster care system would open doors to treatment that she couldn’t afford. Makwa reluctantly agreed to a temporary care order with Children’s Aid, in hopes of getting Nimkii into the Roberts/Smart Youth Mental Health Centre in Ottawa. Nimkii eventually got into treatment, but at an enormous cost. She was placed into foster care. Like Makwa, she bounced between group homes, hospitals, and jails. She began using substances. Her behaviours worsened, and her criminal charges began to pile up. She ran away and was sexually assaulted. In the end, it took a year and a half to get Nimkii into treatment, and Makwa had to sign her parental rights away to do it.

Jane, a Barrie, Ont., high school teacher whose name and location have been changed to protect her job, also feels stuck in a repetitive cycle of crisis care. “When I was in crisis,” she explains, “I was able to talk one-on-one with a nurse, and they gave me phone numbers and set up initial appointments, but after that, I was on my own,” she says. Jane feels that, once the crisis is over, nobody cares whether she seeks treatment.

Both Makwa and Jane have had their parenting abilities questioned because of their mental illnesses. When Nimkii was released from residential treatment and returned to Makwa’s home, Children’s Aid remained involved. Their file was finally closed in November 2017, but it was reopened in January when Nimkii had an episode that required Makwa to call police. Most recently, Children’s Aid cited Nimkii’s mental illness as a reason to deny Makwa kinship care of another family member.

For Jane, the call from Children’s Aid came after her husband discussed suicide with a psychiatrist. In Barrie, the mental health system is so under-resourced that most patients can receive only a one-time assessment from a psychiatrist. Unfamiliar with Jane’s family, the psychiatrist concluded that two parents with the potential to self-harm constituted a risk to their children and reported them to Children’s Aid. She never considered that Jane and her family could find a way to cope with the risk of suicide.

Bergmans’s research found that even when follow-up support is offered to survivors, the conversation focuses on changing behaviour, not understanding emotions. One of Bergmans’s clients described behavioural therapies as “putting a doily on top of a pile of shit; there’s a pretty doily there now, but it still stinks.” Jane agrees: “As long as you’re making a valiant effort to fix your behaviour, people are more comfortable with that than with ‘this is who I am, this is how I am, this is how I think.’”

***

Sarah at an Athabasca University award ceremony in Toronto in 2013. Photo courtesy of photographer Janyce Mann.

Today, there are efforts to change that mode of thinking. Bergmans started trying to change the system in 1999, when her first therapy group for suicide attempt survivors in Toronto began, using an established intervention model that remains popular for treating suicidal individuals. But Bergmans’s eight group participants weren’t finding the therapy useful. So Bergmans adapted the group, working with survivors to build on academic research and on Bergmans’s experience working with children and youth. Together, they developed a program that “targeted the key areas for suicidality—safety, emotions, problem-solving, and interpersonal relationships.”

Bergmans’s intervention model lays out the core concepts participants use to understand the stories behind their attempts. The program includes 20 weeks of group therapy, during which participants also receive one-on-one support to process their learning and emotions. The challenge for participants is not to simply change their behaviour, as suggested in typical therapy models, but to understand it. Bergmans’s technique is in use at hospitals and community mental health centres in southern Ontario, including St. Michael’s Hospital, where 433 people have participated in the therapy. In fact, 121 of them have returned to complete it a second time.

Despite the success of Bergmans’s model, the Canadian mental health system is ill-prepared for widespread adoption of such resource-heavy methods. At St. Mike’s, Bergmans’s group participants all have one-on-one support. Other groups employ paid part-time staff, or they add the group to the workload of existing staff. It’s also a program in which service providers must become comfortable with risk—participants must feel safe discussing their suicidal thoughts and mental health challenges. In the risk-averse bureaucracy of the system, that’s not something health care workers are trained to do.

***

By 2013, I had scraped my way through a three-year Bachelor of Arts program at Toronto’s York University and made it into a graduate program in St. Catharines, Ont., but I had stopped coping. I still lived in poverty. I was raped two years prior, exacerbating my depression, anxiety, and gory, vivid nightmares—symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was using opioids to cope with constant anger, sadness, and existential terror. There was nowhere, nothing that felt safe. A doctor at the walk-in clinic gave me a couple months’ supply of Cymbalta and sent me home. I took them all and texted goodbye to a friend.

This time, the hospital kept me. I spent 10 days in the Niagara Health system’s new mental health unit. They offered me group therapy, but the idea of explaining why I was so fucked up to strangers, doctors, and social workers sounded like torture. I played Uno with my friend when he came to visit, staring blankly across the room, dazed by the drugs I had poisoned myself with, while he dealt and nudged me to take my turns. I was discharged abruptly when a male patient grabbed me and tried to kiss me. Sometimes the story is just this: This story sucks.

But when I was discharged, I had a plan for follow-up. I would see a case manager at the Niagara branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), and I had an intake appointment at Quest, a community health centre in St. Catharines that specializes in providing health care to poor people, people with mental illnesses, and drug users.

My substance use disorder, which had been developing over years of increased use of OxyContin, heroin, and cocaine, worsened and eventually imploded. I often found the mental health system hostile, invasive, or outright harmful. Over the next three years, I was hospitalized nine more times, sometimes because I voluntarily presented at the ER in crisis, and others because I was apprehended under the Mental Health Act. But there were safe havens: a short-term crisis shelter at the CMHA, daily visits to a pharmacy for addiction medication, weekly visits from my case manager, monthly visits to the doctor. When I had suicidal thoughts, I brought them to people I trusted, who were knowledgeable about my mental illnesses, honest about what they thought would help, and consistent in these behaviours. I was learning to write another story: Slamming my head against this wall is exhausting. You slam it for me for a while.

None of my health care providers was consulted about that metaphor. And it’s hard, I imagine, for anyone who has never considered suicide to conceptualize such violence as therapeutic. It is absurd to crawl through a maze of bureaucracy and stigma, looking for someone to help me bash my drug-addled, self-destructive brains out. Why not just stop slamming my head into the wall? Finally, I was learning how to answer, “Why not?”

***

One way or another stories demand to be told to completion. At worst, these stories end in death. The key to reducing the number of suicide deaths is listening to the stories with alternate endings.

Although I still think about suicide most days, my last suicide attempt was in 2014. It took three years to find a combination of medications and therapy to keep me sane. By the fall of 2016, my mental health was stable enough that I was able to stop using drugs. Last year, when I returned to writing, art, activism, and community organizing, I realized I felt more like myself. Next year, I’m considering returning to graduate school.

Working with the Mental Health Commission of Canada, CASP has developed toolkits to support suicide attempt survivors. What’s important, Letofsky says, is being honest about the situation. Often, family and friends of suicide attempt survivors are afraid of saying the wrong thing. Letofsky advises support persons to begin by asking the survivor to tell their story: “What do I need to know? What do you need from me to help you stay safe?”

Jane’s Children’s Aid worker agreed that she and her husband pose no harm to their children and closed their file. The experience was stressful for Jane and for her eight-year-old daughter, who was recently diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The ordeal had a chilling effect on Jane’s willingness to seek treatment. “All this experience has done for me,” she says, “is create and solidify more distrust in the system.”

Makwa works to help other Indigenous people navigate the mental health system and practises her Anishinaabe culture at home. Nimkii is stable and has returned to her mother’s home. She receives treatment at a community health centre for Indigenous women and sees a psychiatrist. They spend hours making jewelry together. While Makwa is afraid of what will happen when her daughter has to face the hospitals, community, and police on her own, she is also aware, from her own recovery, that her culture and traditions provide comfort and guidance. Decolonization is a healing practice.

In Bergmans’s therapy groups, suicide attempt survivors do the hard work of understanding their own stories. They make safety plans not for “what if” their suicidal ideations return, but “even if” they do. How will they manage their turmoil as safely as possible? How will they cope with suicidal thoughts that might never go away?

Suicide is scary, and a magic formula for answering those questions would be very reassuring. But there isn’t one. The best I can offer is this: This story has barely begun.

IF YOU NEED HELP, HERE ARE SOME RESOURCES ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO CONSIDER:

CANADA SUICIDE PREVENTION SERVICE:
By phone: 1.833.456.4566
By text: 45645
Online: crisisservicescanada.ca

KIDS HELP PHONE: 1.800.668.6868

FOR RESOURCES IN YOUR PROVINCE OR TERRITORY: yourlifecounts.org
READ MORE ABOUT SUICIDE PREVENTION: suicideprevention.ca

The new issue of People magazine has both celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade on its cover. Sadly, the magazine is the only weekly tabloid to give both stars the cover treatment, with other magazines featuring only Bourdain.

When Spade and Bourdain died by suicide, just days apart, tributes and tweets celebrated the lives of both, but there was a distinct gender bias in the media coverage of the two deaths. While articles on Bourdain celebrated his life and accomplishments, writers speculated that Spade’s professional success and the pressure associated with it had, perhaps, finally taken its toll on her. Bourdain was heroic; Spade was tragic. If you don’t think gender has anything to do with it, please consider these two headlines:

From Rolling Stone: “Anthony Bourdain’s Meal With Obama Was a Proud American Moment” 

From Business Insider: “Kate Spade reportedly addressed a suicide note to her daughter”

The media largely focused on Spade’s career as a successful designer, on the business she built, and on the effect the things she created, most notably handbags, had on those who purchased them (often with some serious classist overtones). At times it was as if Spade was invisible, existing only in relation to how she made others feel, how owning a Kate Spade purse had made a writer feel like they had finally crossed over the threshold to adulthood. Spade was not a woman, but a symbol of first careers, of first moves to big cities like New York, of first steps towards the Carrie Bradshawing of one’s life. 

Bourdain’s tributes were much more emotional, much rawer, and more focused on keeping Bourdain front and centre. He was repeatedly described as a great listener, a great conversationalist, a great checker of white privilege. It was not just about his resumé, what he produced, or how we consumed it, as it had been with Spade. People talked about the effect Bourdain had on their lives, but never in a way that rendered him absent from the narrative.

Significantly more column inches were devoted to the sensationalist, tabloid-like aspects of Spade’s death. How did she do it? Was there a note? If so, what did the note say? Who was it addressed to? There was US Weekly-style speculation that perhaps Spade’s separation from her husband and business partner Andy Spade had led to her death.

In the hours after Spade’s death, the media was like TMZ on steroids. Spade was not a human, but a headline. A CNN online story notes the cause of Spade’s death in the first paragraph. It takes CNN eight paragraphs to get to the cause of death in their reporting on Bourdain.

Coverage of Bourdain avoided the celebrity gossip angle and was less concerned with details of motive or method. No one speculated about the state of his relationship with actress and director Asia Argento and no one questioned how or if it could have been a factor in his death.

Writers were respectful of Bourdain, repeatedly acknowledging that they may not have known what the TV host was going through. The same can definitely be said of Spade, but that didn’t stop the media from speculating widely about it. As a woman, they felt it was okay to project, to speculate, to speak for Spade—even in death.

Bourdain’s coverage largely questioned why he would take his own life when he had everything. His was a glass half full. Spade’s coverage referenced what she had lost, her business troubles, her marriage troubles, and how it might have all been too much. The underlying narrative was that women are weak, that this world is too much for them. That they cannot survive. She was a glass half empty.

Coverage of Spade’s death mentioned that she may have been drinking too much, may have been self-medicating with alcohol and pills to deal with business challenges and her crumbling relationship. Writers discussed how Spade may have been afraid her depression and drinking would jeopardize her brand so she kept it hidden. Remember, Spade was a brand. Bourdain was a human. It makes me incredibly sad that in her professional and personal life, Spade could have felt like she had to hide addiction, darkness, and depression to preserve an empire built on positivity and polka dots. This says so much more about the pressures that society places on women, and especially successful women, then it does about Spade.

Articles hinted at Spade’s drinking, but largely treated it like a shameful secret she kept. If only Spade had been a man, then her drinking would have been good for business. Bourdain’s coverage described him as a “drug-loving chef,” and while his battles with heroin have been well documented, most notably in his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential, tributes largely treated his addiction as a thing of the past.

While coverage didn’t speculate on whether Bourdain was using drugs again, it certainly would have if he was a woman. It celebrated his bad boy image, his status as a “renegade chef,” and talked of his second act which, of course, doesn’t include his past drug use. Celebrating, rewarding, and excusing the bad boy is something media and pop culture do again and again (see also: Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp and so many more). Both in life and in death, male celebrities always get a redemption story.

Both might have been drinking too much, but only one merits mention. In death Bourdain was a saint, and Spade a sinner. If you want to see this tired narrative in action some more, just compare the tabloid-like documentaries of the lives of Whitney Houston or Amy Winehouse, which chronicle every drug use detail and bad relationship decision, with the 2017 documentary devoted to George Michael’s life and career, with doesn’t mention drugs, public restrooms or undercover cops at all. Of course, Michael’s film was authorized by the artist; with Houston and Winehouse’s docs, male filmmakers thought it was okay to just take a woman’s story, pick it apart, and package it for moviegoers.

It’s not surprising that Spade’s role as a wife and mother was front and centre in all the tributes. Spade’s coverage often referenced her 13-year-old daughter and painted Spade as a selfish mother who had abandoned her child. Bourdain’s daughter was not mentioned as often, if at all, nor was he accused of abandonment or neglect. I actually had no clue he had a daughter until one article mentioned it days after his death.

Eventually, coverage of Spade’s death was replaced by Bourdain’s as he took centre stage. The tributes to Bourdain continue, while Spade’s death has largely faded from the media spotlight. Female celebrities are always upstaged by their male counterparts—and even in death, it is no different.

“Advocacy is really not about me in my mind—it’s about everybody else,” he says.

For the past four years, Nyuurnibe has been speaking at schools, summits, TEDx, and even the World Health Organization. He’s made it his mission to speak up against mental health struggles and break the stigma so no one ever has to feel the way he did five years ago when he tried to take his own life.

Before he was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety, Nyuurnibe felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. In 2012, Nyuurnibe was in his third year at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., studying aquatic resources and political science. Though he was active on campus and gave tours to incoming students, he was struggling. Some days, he couldn’t get out of bed. “I basically wasn’t able to go to classes, get assignments in on time, wasn’t able to talk about what I was feeling,” he says. “No one was talking about mental health at the time.” Feeling helpless, he tried to take his life, and was hospitalized. After being released from the hospital, Nyuurnibe started to wonder why no one was talking about mental health and decided to take matters into his own hands. It’s what he says was the first sign of hope.

But this revelation didn’t make things any easier. For one, he couldn’t return back to school. “There were a lot of issues, especially with my father. He was in charge of taking care of my tuition and wasn’t able to fulfill that. He had no idea about my mental state until things got as bad as they did,” says Nyuurnibe. The school, he says, also just didn’t know how to respond to his situation: “It wasn’t handled in the best way.” Everything about it—in particular, the initial visit by a campus counsellor and her hurtful attitude—was horribly managed, says Nyuurnibe.

People started to notice he wasn’t at school anymore. That’s when an editor at the school newspaper, The Xavieran Weekly, asked Nyuurnibe to write an article and share his story—his first step to becoming an advocate. “Writing that article meant coming to terms with something I’d been dealing with for a while. Something I had quite frankly been ashamed of,” he says. After the article was published, people he had known during his time at St. Francis Xavier came up to admit to him that they, too, were struggling with their mental health. In some cases, Nyuurnibe was the first person they told.

“My worry was that somebody else besides me would go through this,” Nyuurnibe says. “I guess that’s what up to this day keeps pushing me.”

Since then, he’s been pushing for mental health advocacy and change. Nyuurnibe believes that the new generation of young people will be the ones to push for and see policy changes within the country.

That’s why he champions the work he does with Toronto-based youth mental health advocacy group, Jack.org. The organization’s mandate is to transform the way we look at mental health by opening up the conversation with young leaders from high schools and universities across Canada. Each year Jack.org hosts a summit that gathers 200 young leaders, and in 2016, Nyuurnibe was the host—a shining moment for him since he had shared his story at the first summit back in 2013.

For Nyuurnibe, being an advocate means constantly thinking of a new way to get his message across. His latest project in the works is called Dance for Depression, aninitiative he hopes will bring the mental health conversation into an arena that’s comfortable for everyone through music. As a lover of electronic music and dance, he’s aiming to get musicians involved and people moving.

Though Nyuurnibe thinks the conversation around mental health in Canada has come a long way since he attempted suicide in 2012, he says there’s still work to be done. “There’s been a lot of talk, which is great,” he says. “But it has to start building up the the point where action leads to services and to people getting the right care. I think we’re on the right track.”

While some universities have improved their student mental health services, Nyuurnibe says one of the biggest challenges still facing many institutions is funding. But he’s taking action. In October, he met with Health Minister Jane Philpott on Parliament Hill to discuss funding around mental health.

When asked what his plans were for the next five years, Nyuurnibe can count them on and on. Among the top: graduate from a journalism program at Nova Scotia Community College, cut down the wait time for access to mental health services on campuses, increase funding, ultimately normalize the conversation by continuing to get his message out there. “It’s not just built on one story, it’s built on the story of many people,” says Nyuurnibe. “One life lost is one life too many.”

For Leah Parsons, healing through activism is about finding a balance between doing enough and not wearing herself down.

“With everything I do, I ask myself, ‘Does it feel light, or does it feel heavy, emotionally?’” she says.

Nearly four years after her daughter, Rehtaeh, took her own life, Parsons steadies herself by being a voice for silenced women and girls—a type of healing she says is bittersweet.

Rehtaeh Parsons is now a household name in Canada, but five years ago, she was a typical high-school student in Halifax. In November 2011, Rehtaeh was sexually assaulted by a group of high school students at a party. One of the perpetrators took a photo of the act and circulated it around Rehtaeh’s high school. Rehtaeh was characterized as “the slut” and “the party girl,” says Parsons, and faced intense and relentless cyber-harassment for months as the photo circulated the internet.

The police didn’t know what to do, and because her physical safety wasn’t threatened, neither Rehtaeh nor Parsons could stop the photo from being circulated or the barrage of hateful and harmful harassment. After an investigation, the RCMP noted that there was “insufficient evidence to lay charges.” “There’s that perception in the police force if they’re not trained in trauma and rape that because she said it was okay after the fact, and she had been drinking, then it’s not rape,” says Parsons.

“I was traumatized. She was traumatized. And then I had to fight—I had to fight and be strong to get her the help she needed,” says Parsons. After the rape, Rehtaeh spiralled, experiencing anxiety, anger, and panic attacks when she saw anybody from her school. “Suddenly I was dealing with an at-risk youth,” says Parsons. “I felt like I was flailing in water, and all we were faced  with were obstacles.”

In April 2013, after months of battling depression, Rehtaeh attempted suicide. Three days later, her parents made the choice to take her off life support. After her death, Parsons went public with Rehtaeh’s story, and it drew international attention. Parsons says she knew Rehtaeh didn’t want to be silenced. “So I just became her voice. I knew how hard she fought back against the attacks,” she says.

Now, Parsons travels across Canada to speak at conferences and gatherings of police officers, youth probation officers, nurses, and high school students. She spends her days giving talks, telling Rehtaeh’s story—and the the story of how the criminal justice system failed her family. “It isn’t a story to me, it’s my daughter’s life,” says Parsons. “I begin by speaking about who Rehtaeh was before any of this happened to her. She was a teenage girl just like anybody else.”

In 2013, Bill C-13, known as Rehtaeh’s Law, was introduced in Parliament. The bill made it illegal to distribute an image of someone without their consent.

In 2015, it became law, though it was criticized in a court ruling later that year for being too broad and too vague. Parsons says it’s now being rewritten.

An independent report into Rehtaeh’s case also makes recommendations for police, government, and public prosecutors to improve how these institutions respond to cases like Rehtaeh’s. The recommendations include the revision of the RCMP and Halifax Regional Police’s child abuse policies, implementing sensitization trainings for police and prosecutors, and ensuring that if cyber-bullying is criminal, police act quickly.

Parsons calls this a much-needed step in the right direction. “So much has come because of what happened to Rehtaeh,” says Parsons. “She’s not just another statistic.”

On a personal level, Parsons also fosters a support network for parents who have lost their children to suicide. She says her grieving for her daughter is dynamic and takes on many shapes and forms. “I started painting stones the one-year anniversary of Rehtaeh’s death, writing her name, and the next morning, I placed all the stones in the community in places that she loved to go,” says Parsons. “When I shared the photos, they took on a life of their own, and everyone wanted a stone—now they’re traveling around the world,” she adds. “I always say she just keeps planting her seeds everywhere.”

Photo courtesy of Leah Parsons.

Illustration by Dushan Milic

The hockey world was shocked this summer when three tough guys (one just retired) died unexpectedly, one from an overdose of alcohol and pills and two others by suicide. When Wade Belak, a popular, seemingly happy former Toronto Maple Leaf hanged himself while in Toronto for the taping of CBC’s The Battle of the Blades, it affected many in the hockey world very deeply. This talked to sports psychologist Paul Dennis, who worked for the Leafs for 20 years as what he calls “a mental skills coach,” and who once coached the Toronto Marlies of the OHL, about depression and hockey.

THIS: In general terms, how do hockey players deal with depression or mental illness?

DENNIS: It’s a taboo. The evidence seems to be that for athletes in general, between nine and 15 percent will report symptoms of depression. It’s almost double that for the general population.

THIS: Is it also a taboo topic with management?

DENNIS: No. That’s the irony of the whole thing. Because the people I’ve worked with, whether it’s Brian Burke or Pat Quinn or Ken Dryden, those three in particular, they would want people to come forward. They would be there for them and make sure they would get the social support to deal effectively with this. But the athletes themselves wouldn’t take advantage of it.

THIS:: What’s their fear?

DENNIS: For the most part, they fear it’s a sign of weakness. Professional athletes are all supposed to be tough-minded and not be vulnerable. Not have any demonstration of mental weaknesses even though we know that depression, for example, is not a sign of being mentally weak. They’re not well-educated in that regard.

THIS: Does the league educate them?

DENNIS: They do. There’s a program they have. At the beginning of each year the player’s association sends around a team of experts. One psychologist and one or two people in the substance abuse area. They talk about anxiety disorders. They talk about depression. And here’s the confidential number they can call if they need help. What was disappointing during the summer when these three tragedies occurred, the NHL and the PA were criticized quite heavily for not having a program. But they do have one. It’s just not publicized.

THIS: What can you say specifically about Wade Belak?

DENNIS: I knew him very well for seven years when he was with the Leafs. I’m not sure anyone in our organization was aware [of his mental issues].

THIS: I think his suicide is particularly hard for people in the sports world to accept because no one saw it coming. And they’re saying, if Belak can do this, anyone can do this.

DENNIS: That comment has been expressed to me by players, almost word for word.

THIS: Are they rattled by his death?

DENNIS: Incredibly rattled by it, for that reason: happy guy, great family, financially secure, a lot to look forward to.

THIS: What does his suicide tell us about depression?

DENNIS: It’s similar to the concussion in that it’s the invisible injury, an invisible disorder. There are signs and symptoms we can look for, but if they aren’t there we automatically assume everything is okay. We don’t even make that assumption. It means people can mask it very well.

THIS: Will his death have any positive impact on how the NHL in particular, and maybe sports in general, deals with depression?

DENNIS: I hope it does. We used to think that because an athlete is depressed after he retires and he withdraws socially it’s because he misses the game so much and therefore he becomes depressed. Now it seems research is telling us that the blows to the head…there’s something organic going on in the brain that’s causing this depression.

THIS: I’ve interviewed several enforcers and they all said they hated fighting.

DENNIS: I recall having conversations with Wade about how difficult his role was. Who likes to get hit? Who likes to fight and take blows to the head? They do it because they have to. It’s their livelihood. I think players today fight because it’s a strategy, a tactic. It energizes their teammates. It energizes the crowd. It’s for all the wrong reasons.

THIS: Hockey might be the only place that bare-knuckle fighting is allowed. You can’t do it in a boxing ring or in mixed martial arts.

DENNIS: Remember Don Sanderson [the 21-year-old who played for the Whitby Dunlops in a senior league and who died after hitting his head on the ice during a fight a couple of years ago]? I thought fighting would be banned after that.

THIS: But it wasn’t.

DENNIS: Just last night I said to my wife that if Sidney Crosby plays in a game [on a Thursday] and he gets punched in the head and falls to the ice and dies, by Saturday fighting would be banned in hockey. But that’s the total disregard for human life they have. What difference does it make whether it’s a Sidney Crosby or a name we’ve never heard of before? It’s a human life.

THIS: What’s a bigger taboo in the NHL? Admitting you’re gay or admitting you’re severely depressed?

DENNIS: Geez, that’s a great question. I think they’re on the same plane.

Credit: PearlyV

1. Mental health, depression, and suicide are rampant

We all know that prisons are too often warehouses for those amongst us suffering addictions or mental health problems. The actual numbers, however, are harrowing.  In federal penitentiaries 11% of prisoners have some sort of mental health diagnosis and 21.3% take prescription anti-psychotics on admission.  Almost 15% of male prisoners, at some point prior to their incarceration, had a psychiatric hospitalization; the number almost doubles for women.  The suicide rate in prisons is seven times the rate outside of prisons; as is the rate of people hurting themselves in prisons. All this and more can be found in a report issued by the Office of the Correctional Investigator last week. The punch line: “The mental health needs of offenders exceed the capacity, services and supports of the federal correctional authority to meet the growing demand.”

2. Women are the fastest growing prisoner population in the world

That’s true in Canada, too. Canadian Elizabeth Fry society executive director Kim Pate argues that the massive cuts made to the welfare state in the 1990s and 1980s particularly affected women. It’s no coincidence, she says, that mentally ill, poor and racialized women were imprisoned just as support services were scaled back.

3. It’s worse than ever to be Indigenous, poor, or illiterate in prison

It used to be (as of February of this year) that those convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison would receive a 2-for-1 credit for the time they spent in jail awaiting trial. Jails, unlike prisons, are notoriously overcrowded, dirty and dangerous. The 2-for-1 credit was an explicit acknowledgement from judges that prisoners remanded to jail suffered inordinately.  The Conservative government, however, disagreed and last year passed the Truth in Sentencing Act. An internal Corrections Canada report, obtained by the Canadian Press, finds that, as a result of the new law, Indigenous individuals, low-income people, and people with low literacy are spending much more time in prison.

4. There are over 2 million people in prison in the United States.

For comparison’s sake, on the eve of the Second World War there were 1.3 million people in Stalin’s gulags. 3.2% of America’s adult population, or 1 in every 31 adults, is in jail, on probation or on parole.  The rate of incarceration for black men is four times that of white men.  If prisoners, who are generally idle, were counted in unemployment figures along with discouraged workers the United State’s unemployment rate would jump two percent.  The number of people in prisons in the United States has increased roughly ten times over since the 1960s. Canada’s incarceration rates are lower but have jumped in similar proportions over the past four decades.

The opening spread from our special "Legalize Everything" issue. Click to enlarge.

The November-December issue of This is showing up in subscribers’ mailboxes and on better newsstands coast to coast this week, and today we’re kicking off “Legalization Week” to showcase the five stories and writers who contributed to this special issue.

Today it’s Tim Falconer’s call to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Canada:

Given that the boomers, a generation accustomed to getting their own way, who are watching their parents die—and not liking what they see—are starting to face up to their own mortality, we should be enjoying some momentum on this issue. We aren’t. But the Bloc Québécois’s Francine Lalonde did introduce a private member’s bill to give Canadians the right to assisted suicide. This is not the first such bill she’s sponsored and she did it knowing she has cancer. While that may mean her fellow parliamentarians have some sympathy for her personally, it won’t change the fact that private members’ bills rarely become law—and it’s not going to help her cause that the media has pretty much ignored the issue.

Well, we aren’t ignoring the issue. All this week we’ll also be posting polls like this one at the right, asking your opinion on these legalization ideas. Please do leave your comments here on the website or email your thoughts to editor at this magazine dot ca. This is all leading up to the “Legalize Everything!” party we’re throwing in Toronto on November 19. If you’re in the area, please come and meet the magazine’s staff and volunteers and bicker about these controversial notions in person.

Tomorrow: Jordan Heath Rawlings on legalizing music piracy…