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In honour of Bell Lets Talk day I have decided to share my mental health journey in the hopes of inspiring some reader some where some time to get the help they need before it is too late.


The whole thing begins in the year 1992.  My parents have struggled on the edge of poverty with three kids for more than a decade.  A friend offered an opportunity for my dad to get a job in Calgary Alberta.  After much debate it was decided that he would go alone and establish a place for the family to move to later.


At eleven  going on thirty I was the oldest of three.  Always a mama's boy at heart and ever eager to help I was given the responsibility of helping my mother with running the house.  Obviously to a limited extent, but I cooked and cleaned and helped with watching my siblings. 


When the day finally came to fly to Alberta I was so excited about the big city.  I had grown up in the country, much of my young life spent fishing and camping.  I still remember driving down a long highway similar to a pikeway in design with yellow lights and my dad explaining how the streets with exits were all multiples of eight.


Math was one of the few things my dad and I had in common.  He helped me memorize the multiplication table and always seemed to have another way to approach a math problem.  In eight years of school my father taught me more about math than any teacher.  It was the lesson he taught me next that changed my life.


So to warn you fairly this is where the story gets graphic.  


Over the years I have lost much of my memory from this time, but it was this period where my whole family was shaken to the core.  What I remember is a lot of anger and feeling betrayed and hated and eventually despair and uselessness.  My father repeatedly assaulted me during arguments where I was made to be the villain while he got away with strangling me, bashing my head through walls, and otherwise beaten before being isolated from my family while I had to listen to him twist the rest of the family against me.


Eventually I came to believe that it was my fault and that I was an angry child that was in desperate need of correction.  That I was the disappointment on the family and that society held no place for angry little boys like me.


Of course this affected my school life where I was bullied and rejected in my new school.  I was to injured at this point, after a summer of abuse, to feel I deserved otherwise.  Because I never complained nothing was done.  All the while the seeds of depression and the biggest battle of my life were sewed and began to reap fruit.


My dad got what he wanted, submission.  I submitted to his will for fear of reprisal.  My mother could only watch in horror, at least I later figured out.  This is how my father single handedly dismantled our family for whatever pain he had in his heart.


During the next two years my brother started drugs which eventually would lead him to where he is now, serving time in London Ontario for breach of probation.  My sister became the angry one, but my dad, whom probably deserved it, was always safe from.


My mother's story was the most tragic during this time.  After witnessing the collapse of her family while living in fear of her now controlling and manipulative husband she was understandably upset.  An accident at a mountain that shattered her self image led her to start drinking to cope.  Soon after, her father returned to her life and stirred long buried emotions and found her a drinking friend.  This led to almost a decade of alcoholism that took away my relationship with her.  I will come back to this.


After two years I was sent to live with my grandmother.  I started yet another new school but it was supposed to be the fresh start I needed.  Here, a girl I met early in the year decided to break up with me, on my birthday of course, which was world ending because as a teenager everything is.  This earth shaking moment in time would have been easily forgotten, because trust me, she was not that special, except this is when rumours began to spread about me.  Now, I can never prove it was her and her friends, nor do I actually care where it started, what matters is the bullying that followed.


Here I was getting the usual treatment, except catholic school kids are harsher than my previous school.  I did have friends, a select few people who cared nothing for rumors and preferred to know someone before passing judgement.  Such a foreign concept in today's world.  So despite their support and a caring grandmother those seeds of depression began to bare fruit again.  I began to cut. 


No one ever realized and I did not do it long but this is a major sign of shit going wrong.  Of course in 1998 noone cared to do anything about bullying.  Things changed the following year.  So for those of you that don’t know 1999 was the year that the shooting at a columbine highschool by the so called trench coat mafia stirred the pot and brought bullying to the forefront where it has stayed ever since.  I will cover the summer and get back to this impact after.


That summer I re-joined my family in Alberta.  Things there had deteriorated.  By the end of the summer my brother was addicted to drugs beyond repair, my mother was drinking to the point of almost always being drunk.  My siblings openly mocked her, further degrading her fall from the graceful and powerful woman I remembered.  To top it all off my father was eager to knock me down a peg or two again.  The summer was spent emotionally battering me until finally a few weeks before school would begin.  After we could not find a place we could afford and were living out of our vehicle my father pushed me too far and I hit him.  This resulted in a fight, which he obviously won as I was a scrawny 110 pounds and he was a contractor accustomed to physical labour weighing in at over 170.


I was arrested and charged, obviously.  In the end I received 12 months probation and my family moved us back to Ontario.  Most profoundly I remember 2 things about the ordeal.  In the youth prison there was another teen there who used a pen to colour his arms and legs to the point he got poisoned and was put on suicide watch.  It was the most innovative suicide attempt I had ever heard of.  The second was the idea and resolution that I was alone.  It was at first an idea, or maybe a fear or even an acknowledgment that my family would never take me back.  This evolved into a resolution that somehow some way I would make it on my own no matter what it took and I would be better than they were.  Heavy stuff for 16 right?


Back to Highschool.  When Columbine happened I was going through a goth phase, so those who had not already started bullying me began to pick on me, this time out of fear.  Hallways fell silent when I entered them, people whispered when they thought I couldn’t hear.  This led to the first bullying intervention I had ever heard of.  Obviously everyone wanted to get ahead of this but no one had any clue what to do.  The vice principal saw me daily, practically begged me to give him names of people picking on me.  When I finally gave up a name he dragged the poor kid into the office and tried to resolve the conflict.  In the end it made things worse and I hope that by now they are better at it then they were.


When I graduated, my father was late.  He missed the ceremony, then acted like nothing happened.  I should have realized by then that we were all but forgotten by him anyways.  He had resorted to housing us because he had to, but in the cheapest holes in the wall he could.  Of course he was sleeping with whatever girl he was dating and we were barely fed, let alone anything worthwhile and my mother was living in a room on social assistance.  She had serious mental health problems and was left to suffer because she would not accept the help.  Fear? Stigma?  No one knows but it does not matter now.


After highschool I moved out, attended college, and moved on with my life.  I lived with a low mood disorder or mild depression but I was free from abuse.  Well outside abuse.  Over the years of struggle I had learned to criticize myself worse than anyone out there ever could.  I am outwardly a compassionate and understanding person, but to myself I am the harshest of critics.


In the years that followed and the various struggles I endured I made several attempts on my life.  I tried to hang myself, but thankfully It failed, though I got very close.  Another time I tried to throw myself into traffic, in the end I decided that that was too traumatic for the driver.  I stood at the edge of a cliff for hours trying to convince myself to throw myself onto the rocks below.  That moment when you have planned and executed most of the plan.  When you stand on the edge of the abyss by yourself and it is just you and life battling for control and pain is your weapon and life is trying desperately to counter with joys.  That moment is traumatic, and you are at your absolute worst to yourself.  You sit or stand there and challenge everything with anger and fear and pain in your heart.  If at any of those times hope had failed to overcome I would not be writing this story


In 2008 I met my would be wife.  My mother and I had just started to recover our relationship after a decade.  A year later I was engaged and enlisted in the forces and making everyone proud.  Though I still had lows I was at my best I had ever been.  My mother was proud of me and things were recovering on all levels and in 2010 I married the most wonderful woman in the world.  My worst was yet to come.


My mother was to be diagnosed with cancer.  At first it was one they felt they could beat, but it turns out her cancer would travel and the stage 5 mass they thought they could win against would be unbeatable.  Before she died she met my daughter Hope, and spent remembrance day in Grand Parade Halifax with 4 generations of our family.  Her final request for me was to continue to serve my country and take care of my family.


At her funeral I stood on parade for the whole time.  I ignored the tears, the cold, the pain, nothing hurt more than her not being there anymore.  To me, my mother was my closest friend and confidant.  I was not ready for someone else to fill that role, and when the dust settled she left a massive vacancy in my heart.


As a result of failing to seek help and take it seriously my depression became worse than it had ever been.  It resulted in terrifying images of extreme violence from my perspective in the day as I went about my daily life.  It was traumatic and scary, worse was the voice that said I needed to just end it before I hurt someone was louder than it ever had been. 


Eventually, through a lot of work, and almost a year of recovery I made it.  If not for my wife, my military family and psychosocial services I would never have made it through.  In the end they closed my case, took me off my medical category and I returned to work.  That was supposed to be the end of it.  I was supposed to live happily ever after.


At the end of 2016 my depression returned.  This time it was different.  No violence, no anger, just apathy.  So much apathy in fact that it affected every aspect of my life.  I knew I needed help, but going back to psychosocial services meant that I had failed.  That I was not strong enough to stay well and that I was never going to get better.


When I finally got help, I discovered a great deal about myself and my past that I never knew.  Earlier I talked about the abuse my dad put me through.  It turns out that I was not an angry kid, I was the kid that stuck up for my mother and drew my father’s ire instead of her.  I was the defender and protector, so in the end it was my fault, but I don’t mind wearing that mantle now because now I know I was doing what I felt was right and that changes everything.


I now use Mindfulness as my primary strategy to cope with anxiety and the occasional low.  I am learning self compassion but it is very hard.  I have accepted my wife into the depths of my heart and her love warms me all the time.  I have now two beautiful children who brighten my days with their eternal joyousness.  They remind me to smile even when I don't want to.


I hope that this story will change how people feel about mental health and seek it out when they need it.  A safe place to start is with a friend, or if you just want to ask a few questions or reach out for help through me I will do what I can but there is a caveat.  I don't have all the answers, no one does.  I can’t fix you but I can help you find help.  It will get worse before it gets better, but it does get better.