By Corey Hirsch, Former NHL Player and Mental Health Advocate, and Chris Gardner, ICBA President
This piece first ran in The Vancouver Sun on Oct. 12, 2022.
This year, about 4,000 Canadians will die by suicide. That’s 4,000 families, friendship circles, workplaces, and schools – all left behind to pick up the pieces, to struggle with the why’s and the how’s and to grieve their immeasurable loss.
We know that grief all too well.
For Corey, it was the 2018 suicide of his girlfriend, a woman who once told him that she prayed every night “to make it through one more day.” Sadly, the night came when she could no longer deal with the lies her mind was telling her. She was in pain, not weak, but there was no help when she needed it.
For Chris, it was the suicide of his father which shaped Chris’ childhood and set his life on a completely different trajectory. A half century ago was not a time when mental health was openly discussed or treatments readily available. There was no hope or help for people in crisis.
This shared experience of losing a loved one led us both to dedicate considerable time and energy to ending the stigma around mental health and suicide. Our backgrounds could not be more different – a professional hockey player who played in the gold medal hockey game for Team Canada at the Winter Olympics, and a law school graduate who spent a decade working in finance in Asia who now advocates for the men and women who make their living in construction.
Corey shared his personal story battling with obsessive compulsive disorder and his own struggles with suicide in a ground-breaking article published in 2017 in The Players’ Tribune, aptly titled Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark. Corey’s new book, The Save of My Life, goes deeper and was released this week.
Chris, as president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA), told his father’s story publicly for the first time last year when launching ICBA’s new mental health and wellness program for construction workers.
Corey and Chris came together a year ago and embarked on a province-wide speaking tour that is now going to cities across Canada. They have spoken to more than 30 gatherings of business leaders, contractors, construction professionals and members of the public.
A male-dominated stoic culture defines both the NHL and the construction industry. And the numbers are sobering – 75 percent of all suicide deaths are men, and in Canada, one male takes their life every three hours.
To make a dent in these statistics, we need both the federal and provincial governments to step up and make real, meaningful investments in mental health services. No level of government has all the answers. But they can do so much more to ensure that there is help before, during, and after the moment of crisis. Too often, the warning signs are missed by a health care system that is already strained to the breaking point.
A major step forward was recently accomplished when the CRTC announced it would implement Prince George-Cariboo MP Todd Doherty’s plan to designate 9-8-8 as an emergency phone number for those contemplating suicide. As a teenager, Doherty lost his best friend to death by suicide, and has dedicated himself to improving services for those struggling with mental health.
But more is needed. Coming out of the mentally gruelling COVID-19 global pandemic, our health care system is overwhelmed and parts of it are collapsing.
It all comes down to government priorities. The BC Government currently spends $25 million annually on its Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions – an amount that is budgeted to stay flat through 2025. To say that this is just a drop in the proverbial bucket would be understating the obvious.
The harsh reality is that we find ourselves in the middle of a profound mental health crisis – we see it every day in our schools, our places of work, and on our streets. The consequences of grossly underfunded treatment resources are the loss of far too many lives and the destruction of families and communities.
Government must dedicate more resources to finding and equipping psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, therapists, nurses, and other mental health professionals.
However, all too often these caregivers are overwhelmed struggling to deal with a crisis that is unfolding before their eyes. There’s a tsunami of mental health needs and it’s upon us right now.
A system of support, intervention and help must be there whenever and wherever someone reaches out, asking for help to make it just one more day. For far too long, government have failed to properly build that network. It’s time to stop turning our collective backs on people in crisis and make the investments required to save people, families and communities.
