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Encouraging the corporate world to embrace the reality of mental illness

By Beverly Topping

 

I was born on a farm in rural Manitoba. When I was four, my dad went back into the military and we moved around the world—a way of life that was about as far away from discussing mental illness as you could get. Believe me, no one talked about ”feeling bad” back there and back then.

 

It took my kid sister, Colleen, to make me see the truth about mental illness, not just in my family, but in the boardrooms where I work now.

 

One Christmas day, in the late 1980s, I travelled to Winnipeg with my own family to be with my sister, her family and our mother. But Colleen wasn’t behaving the way I wanted her to. She seemed sad—she wasn’t pulling her weight in the be-happy department during the seasonal celebrations. So we had a fight—not just an argument, but a physical fight, outside in the snow, with the family watching from the warm indoors. She didn’t speak to me for three months, but when she did, she sent me a little pair of yellow boxing gloves.

 

In 1991, Colleen took a leave of absence from her job as a federal civil servant. It was only then that I learned she’d been suffering from depression for years. Frankly, that was when she learned it too. I was pretty quick to blame her husband for this sudden revelation. Why? Not because of anything he’d done, but I now know it was because with depression, you feel a tremendous need to blame someone.

 

That’s when mental health became a part of my family’s story, and it’s one that millions of Canadian families can tell.

 

Fourteen  years later, in 2005, I got a call from Colleen. She told me her 25-year-old son, Jeff, had killed himself.

 

I was shocked, of course. But I also had to admit I wasn’t surprised. Ever since he had started school, Jeff displayed violent behaviour.  He had several learning disabilities, was very frustrated. He lashed out. He was suicidal and depressed from a very young age. Nothing was ever easy for him.  He seemed to struggle all his life. Colleen’s family was in and out of counselling for years but nothing seemed to help. The only time he was really happy was when he was motocross racing or installing car stereo systems. About three weeks prior to his death, he had a motocross crash that resulted in a fourth-degree concussion. We learned later that people with depression have a high incidence of suicide after a head injury.

 

But the real shock came at Jeff’s funeral, where 500 people crammed into the community hall in the small Manitoba community where they live. Colleen got up to speak and told the congregation that her son, Jeff, had committed suicide. Just saying this lifted the entire room and a wave of relief swept over all of us. It—his depression, his suicide—was in the open. She then told the room that for 15 years she’d suffered from depression and was still living with it. She put that right on the table too. I’ll never forget when she said: “I don’t want you to blame Jeffrey for taking his own life.”

 

Even more amazing was what happened after she sat down. The minister got up and described the warning signs of suicide and said if there was anyone in the hall who had these symptoms or knew someone in the community who did, they could speak to a counsellor after the ceremony. And yes, they had counsellors right there! It was time to talk, not blame.

 

Today, Colleen and I see a lot more of each other. She’s found a counsellor and an anti-depressant that help alleviate her own depression. As for me, well, I’ve learned a lot of lessons from my sister—lessons that I think Canada’s corporate community can learn as well.

 

In my position, I talk to a lot of CEOs and board members, and when I started writing this, I asked some of them about their views on mental illness. What amazed me was how many of them just started talking about mental illness in their families. It was most often depression, but I was surprised by their openness. This could well be because people recover from depression all the time; most mood and anxiety disorders are not permanent and can be treated—a fact that CAMH is a world leader in proving.

The day hasn’t yet arrived when a CEO will talk openly about mental illness in her or his family in an all-staff forum. But I’m hopeful that such a thing won’t seem either out-of-place or surprising in the not-too-distant future.

It’s one thing to offer employees confidential help-lines to speak to someone if they feel depressed or think a family member has a mental health problem. But my view is that the real breakthroughs will come when people talk about this disease from the top, in large groups and out in public.

 

Just like my sister did.