Save Picnicface
Posted on | May 3, 2012 | No Comments
Today it was announced that the Comedy Network had cancelled Picnicface, a sketch comedy show that originated in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I felt like donairs had been cancelled.
The cast and crew are calling for us to sign a petition and save Picnicface. I am asking you to join them in this quest.
I am sure some of you might think to yourself that your time would be better spent filling out a petition against wars, famines, droughts, and civil rights abuses. Things is….signing a petition doesn’t really affect those things. Tyrants tend not to check Facebook and God ignores his inbox messages. Dealing with social issues such as advocacy for better services for the mentally ill involves a lot of hard work, debate and thought. Clicking a like button doesn’t do shit to feed the hungry, cloth the naked and stop countries from bombing each other and fucking shit up.
This is one circumstance where you can actually make a difference. Because networks need to give a shit what their audience thinks and we aren’t just talking about a TV show. We are talking about a Canadian tradition, a chance for us to show the people of the world how funny we can be. And truth be told, we are also talking about my friends. Read more
Failure of Imagination: Rants on Porn, Depression, Love and Tragedy
Posted on | April 27, 2012 | No Comments
The first time I really thought about the concept of Me, involved eating a chewy handful of mushrooms in my first year of university.
I was 18 years old, playing the friendliest game of NHL 94 in the history of time with my best friend. I was thirsty but all I had was orange juice and it wouldn’t go with the shit flavor in my mouth.
We refused to check each other and try to score points and frequently passed back in forth between teams. My face was lit with a mushroom smile, where you can feel the muscles in your face, breeding a second smile made of poisonous plant matter. He looked like a gigantic and peaceful gorilla.
“I have been having this thought,” I explained.
“Just one?” my friend replied.
“Yeah I think it’s brilliant in a stupid way.”
I’m sweating so much.
“You just checked me.”
“Instinct. I was thinking about how wonderful this is.”
“Can I check you back?”
“Sure. I was having this thought….”
“Yeah, I have feel like I am at a zoo. Everyone is wonderful and in cages.”
He might have been referring to my friends who decided to mix their shrooms with mescaline and acid and were periodically laughing, crying and kissing each other in the rooms upstairs. Through the open door, you can hear that they have settled on braying laughter for the moment.
“It’s about cages. Sort of about cages. I mean no metal. I mean the cages in our mind.”
High hyenas. Manic monkeys. Purple Pandas.
“I don’t really understand bars. People getting drunk and stupid. They should be playing hockey. Doing sports. Lifting weights. Getting a real job. Paying for dentistry.”
“It’s not really about that. Though I see how you went from cages to bars. Nice wordplay. I am talking more about how wonderful this is. How happy I am right now. How if I had the choice to be like this I wouldn’t. Not all the time. I’d rather be me than be happy. I like happiness but I want more from life than that. I like being me. ”
“You just scored a goal.”
“And I am a dick.”
Knock, knock.
A friend enters the room. She is little, and her face is delightfully animated. Like an adorable puppy. We beam at her and welcome her into the cave of friendship. We can see the tears in her eyes.
“I think I am an alcoholic.”
“That’s intense,” I reply, feeling like we are having a very important moment.
“I don’t understand bars.” Read more
Tags: anxiety > Colony of Losers > depression > imagination > love > media > money > porn > Raymond Taavel > too much coffee
RIP Raymond Taavel: A Life Lost, Left With Only A Dream, My City
Posted on | April 18, 2012 | 3 Comments
Since the death of Raymond Taavel, I have been inundated with emails, asking me to speak out against the mental health system that would allow Andre Noel Denny onto the streets to commit his murder. To extend some sort of olive branch in the form of shared communal rage at a world that would let the good die young and protect the evil embedded in the city streets of my hometown.
I don’t know what I can say that gives back all that has been lost.
Because a life is so much more than the meaning it has to us as a community. It’s the difference he made to his friends, family and lovers. It’s the people he inspired to love as their hearts told them, in a city that remains cold until the fiery rage ignites us from our blissful dream that Nova Scotia is what they sell to tourists, not the lies we grow up with as children. He taught love and he died defending it.
Nothing has been gained from this.
Raymond has lost the feeling of air as it goes down his lungs, the touch of a lover’s kiss, the words he could have found and we could have heard are gone. You can’t politicize this death and say we gain something by his absence. Precious people don’t die to teach us lessons. We are left without Raymond Taavel, a man I didn’t know, who’s death has shaken my city down to it’s very foundations.
We only have his dream and we clutch so tightly to it, because all of those possibilities, all the hope he had, which cannot be captured in signs or slogans, gives us something we can live for in his absence. The loss of his flesh doesn’t pay for the life of his dream. We can’t let it die.
We are left with what small and terribly inadequate gestures. People say nothing will change when Facebook pictures turn to rainbows, when journalists capture vigils and Gottingen remains a place where good people go to hide from our cities history of hatred towards the gay community, to our aboriginals, our blacks and our mentally ill. We could be lost in indignation, finger pointing and rage or we could offer each other the love that Noel Denny couldn’t provide to Raymond Taavel. We must find the imagination to love. The hard work necessary to change Halifax will not come without that imagination. Hatred is the failure of imagination, the burning hand of a certainty born of delusion.We must commit to make waken this dream from a sleep, to keep this passionate feeling a part of our lives not for a few weeks but for the years he should have had.
In this case it seems he died as a collection of societal failures, our inability to properly look after our mentally ill and the cross currents of hate that run through our sweet city. I don’t want to talk to about the mental health system and the way it fails people. That’s for tomorrow. For today I urge compassion.
The person who signed that release form might have been thinking about what it’s like to have no freedom. To offer a man a chance to feel the breeze on his face, to see the world he was born into, and for a moment not to feel broken. They are just a person who couldn’t have known the undercurrents of destruction that would trail in the wake of a decision that would prove monstrously wrong. They need us to love them. To acknowledge they are human and their life has value. That we too have made mistakes in the name of hope and the crushing weight of the days we each live.
On Huffington Post, I saw someone say that the person who signed the forms is as responsible as Denny for the murder. I ask for the love you feel for Raymond to extend to this person who didn’t know what they were doing. What we would be losing. For the same love to be given to the man Raymond died defending for he is another person who must be loved, for the guilt and shame of living must be defeated. It’s a time to hold hands, where grief is raw and emotions could break us. We must choose to love.
Halifax has hate older than the Citadel, which looms in silent shadow. We divide our city on economic and ethnic lines. Homophobia is casual and taught to our children in school grounds. A person with little to no understanding of what he was doing, knew enough to kill someone that our society told him it was okay to hate. Knew enough to take away someone that people love. Halifax comes together to mourn a tragedy. Will we stay together to prevent the next one?
Will we remember all of the African Nova Scotians that die in unsolved murders? The Sex Workers that regularly disappear to never be seen again? The Aboriginals who have been habitually abused. The mentally ill that have been lost in a system that cannot hope to meet their need. We have all lost and must remember that one life means more than a dream. That when someone is beaten to death in our city, it is everyone’s tragedy.
We stand at a moment where we can make things different. Where we can save lives of people like Raymond. Where we can make our city new and it’s going to take years, because we can hate instantly but it takes time for love to take root.
I want to see Halifax as it lives in a picture by Brian Mullins. Where gay or straight, we stood together and demanded change.Where poets like Tanya Davis capture the fragile nature of Nova Scotia. Where hundreds change their Facebook pictures to a rainbow flag. I say love is never little.
That we must protect the right to love as you want to. To love more than we want to.
It’s all that’s left.
My heart goes out to my city.
It’s time to hold hands. Tomorrow we can point fingers.
There isn’t a word for parents who lose their children
Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 2 Comments
I cried in my mother’s arms like a baby in the car with the smell of Dim Sum in the air, as we left the restaurant when it became evident I wasn’t going to stop crying. I often wonder what she was thinking of during that moment. Wondering if this was the beginning of a long slide into insanity. I never wanted her to feel like that again. Today I turn 28. I just talked to my mother and we laughed and those times feel like horrible nightmares in a past that doesn’t exist.
I was very proactive in trying to get better. Taxi drivers, waiters, friends, acquaintance and the Internet were all consulted.
The taxi drivers were not as much help as my therapist.
In Nova Scotia it takes between six months to a year to see a qualified therapist. If you want to jump through the red tape you have to go to an Emergency Room and tell them you are suicidal and that you have a plan to kill yourself. Not being suicidal I instead relied on my family to pay for professional help. This help costs 150 dollars an hour. Sanity isn’t necessarily within everyone’s budget. Sometimes you have to reach out to the wrong person. Because of this blog, I am often that wrong person.
This is a story of helplessness and fearing you are going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. A story familiar to parents who wake up one day and find their children joyless, terrifyingly sad in a way that can’t be solved by hugs, trips to the movies and the advice they have culled from the internet. This is for people who found themselves desperately needing someone else to keep their children alive. This is for youth care workers who have saved hundreds of lives and find themselves without jobs.
Mostly this is for a brave kid named Tyler who scared the shit out of me.
It’s Saturday night, late February.
I have had a few drinks with my best friends from childhood. I’m enjoying the strange sensation that comes from seeing that someone I know has managed to become a successful adult. High ceilings, comfortable couches, hundreds of LPs and a beautiful balcony stare out at the East End of Toronto. Married life looks pretty when I am looking at my two best friends from childhood who miraculously found the love of their lives in each other.
I’m enjoying that taste of rum and cokes that burns the back of your throat and the warmth that spreads through your belly into your brain. I’m excited for the evening ahead.
What shall I do?
I decide to check my Facebook because it had been about an hour since I had done so. My friend Gareth left me an inbox message asking for my number. He works for CTV and I figured he probably wanted to work out details for some sort of interview. It was February and I had done about a dozen interviews in the past month where I railed against injustice and the inadequacy of the Canadian mental health system. I was superman and I was ever so slightly drunk.
Only I was wrong.
“I’m scared,” he typed. “I need your help with something.”
“Whatever you need my man,” I reply in my most sensitive voice.
I figure we are about to have one of those conversations. I have a lot of those conversations.
“His name is Tyler. He needs your help. I don’t know what to say to him.”
Seems Tyler is a 17 year old kid that had been in an out of Emergency Rooms, traveling an hour back and forth from his house to hospitals to try to prevent himself from acting out the bad thoughts in his head. Each time he went, he was sent home as inadequately suicidal. He decided to call CTV and try to bring attention to the problem. My friend Gareth picked up the phone and he had been talking to the kid for over an hour and had run out of ideas and was scared as shit.
“Can you call him?”
“Sure. Anything you need.”
Comforting suicidal people is something I got good at it due to a lot of unasked for experiences. My best friends tell me not to play Gandhi. They know what happens when I get too involved.
I think I can handle anything.
I’m in their bedroom, dialing the number. Now it’s ringing and my friends are still trying to talk sense to me.
“Don’t fucking do it. You are an idiot. You aren’t a Doctor. You are a drunk”
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this Tyler? This is Michael Kimber. Gareth’s friend.”
The powerful realization that I have no idea what I am doing hits me.
“Hi. It’s Tyler. He said you might call. That you do this a lot.”
“Don’t do it,” comes from outside the door.
They were right and it’s rude to hang up now.
“I am not a doctor. Not qualified. Just love Gareth and I have been through some similar things. You not feeling so good?”
“I’m feeling pretty bad actually,” he replies. His voice is shaky, weak and frightened. In gauging sadness you get used to weighing things found in people’s tone. With depression emotion can get smoothed over in to an endless boring circle that grinds you down and makes your life exclusively about your pain and ways to stop it. He sounds like someone hanging from a cliff.
My words matter and I don’t know the right thing to say. Questions, I should ask questions.
“What is it like?”
“I just don’t want to hurt myself. I am sorry. I don’t want to do it. I just don’t know if I can right now. I just feel so bad.”
“Reaching out like this means you don’t want to do it,” I say, simplifying his problems into an afterschool special. Say something motivational. “You’re fighting back and you’re doing good.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I have been there.” I haven’t exactly been there. I was suicidal for 30 minutes. Not important for this conversation. Bonding through common experience. Keep it going. “I remember what it’s like when you forget all the good things. When you wish you weren’t born. I know what it’s like to wake up one day and be alive again. You should see it. It’s pretty good.”
“I don’t people to have to go through this,” he says. “The cops say they can’t believe this shit. When he took me to the Emergency Room. He says it is a fucking shame that our system fails children. It’s failing me.” There’s rage in his voice and there’s life in that anger. Something to fight for.
“Yes it is,” I reply. “I once had to take my little brother there. Not blood brother. Adopted by choice sort of thing. He was feeling real shitty and we spent the whole day trying to get him care. But he wasn’t convincing enough. You know that you need to have a plan. You tell them you have a plan?”
“Not exactly.”
“You need to have a detailed plan on how you are going to do it. I mean it’s stupid but it’s not even a bad idea to write a note you can give to your mother that she can give to the people in the Emergency Room. You know so they take you seriously,” I say, wondering about the legal consequences of giving such advice, and not really giving a shit about it, because this is a kid who’s life needs saving and laws should be based around saving kid’s lives.
“I tried to kill myself before,” he says. “When I was 15.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I climbed over my balcony. The cops were there. Ambulances. My mom and grandparents were crying.”
“Climbed back over the balcony?”
“Couldn’t do it.”
“Good.”
“I was getting better. Now I am not.”
“Why?”
He explains that he was in 4 South a short while earlier (the IWK’s Youth Mental Inpatient Service) and the nurses helped him feel good about himself. He tells me that he was learning to draw, and had written a few things. He realized he could do things he never expected he could do.
“There was this Nurse who really helped me. She understood what I was going through. She made it make sense. She’d been through it before. Like you. The people who helped me most are people who have been there. You know?” he says. “They got me sharing things I don’t talk about. I just want to be OK. I just want to go back. I don’t want to kill myself. Sometimes the feeling is so strong.”
“Things is you are helping a lot of people,” I tell him. “You are speaking for them. Bringing attention to this issue by seeking out Gareth. It takes some sort of guts to help others when you can’t help yourself.”
“Thanks man,” he says.
“Seriously, you are a smart motherfucker. We need people like you, who won’t go out quietly.” Should I have said go out quietly? Is that somehow encouraging him to do something horrible? Am I trying to make him into an activist? Am I politicizing a suicidal kid. “You are brave. Brave for being alive when it isn’t easy. You are going to be okay. You are going to get through this and you are going to help people.”
“Ok,” his voice is quavering. “I want to help people.”
“You can.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Someday you can be in over your head just like me.
“Will you call me tomorrow?”
I feel myself in deep and I can’t really offer him anything. We live in different cities. I don’t want to be someone he calls when he feels like he can’t live, I have enough strangers sending me notes at three in the morning. I’m not the person to help him. I’m just another wanderer on the same dark roads.
“Sure.”
Tyler was on CTV two nights later. His appeal reached thousands of people and created enough of a clamor to get Tyler the help he needs. The thing I remember is his mother talking about what it was like not to be able leave her son’s side, scared of what might happen. I am thinking a lot about mothers and fathers as I write this. A father got in touch with me and told me that his daughter’s day program at the IWK took him months to get her into was experiencing cuts and the loss of youth workers. That he was worried her recovery would be affected.
I can’t imagine loving someone that much, raising them, knowing the answers or something approaching them and then living in the conversation I had with Tyler. I have been in love before and it was bigger than anything I have ever imagined. I have been told your life for your child is that times 20. I can’t imagine that sort of terror.
Due to budget cuts, the IWK laid off 22 youth care workers. People who are there to help people like Tyler. Parents are taking to the streets to protest.
The NDP government wasn’t quite as NDP as we could hope, making a three percent budget cut in healthcare. In the media we have heard a lot about how the IWK miraculously cut wait times by sending out letters to thousands of families, asking if they still needed care and taking everyone off that didn’t respond. This is the sort of solution we have to wait times when we can’t provide adequate care within the allotted budget. When it can take years to get your children the help they need.
Right now the Adolescent Centre for Treatment(ACT), aimed at young people with behavioral issues and difficulties in school, Compass, a similar program for younger children; and the CHOICES program for teens dealing with mental illness and substance abuse problems are all being reassessed. These three programs include residential components, which will be moving from 24/7 to 24/5 to help reduce costs and better allocate resources. The question of what can be done for these children if they are feeling suicidal on the weekends was raised by concerned parents.
These kids formed relationships with the youth care workers who are being let go. I know the bonds I formed over months of therapy with my own therapist. I couldn’t imagine losing contact with him when I was still in crisis. I’m sure the IWK is trying to do their best for the people in their care. These are good people forced to make do with the resources they have. I’m saying we need to support them by addressing the NDP government who is responsible for not taking a stand for these kids, who cut the health care budget and put us in this situation. We don’t need apologies when children slip through the cracks. We need real answers, not stopgap solutions. Why does it take so long to help a child in need?
I’m terrified that Emergency Rooms fail kids like Tyler. I’m terrified that he needed me. I’m terrified that he needed two CTV broadcasts to get his needs addressed. Most people dangling on cliffs don’t try to save the world in order to save themselves. Most people aren’t Tyler, and parents lose kids. There is a word for when kids lose parents, for when you lose your spouse. There is no word for parents losing their children as if language was horrified by such a possibility and didn’t want to give a concrete reality to something so horrible.
We have had enough parents like Fran Morrison with the loss of children whose lives could have been saved if we had an adequate mental health system in Nova Scotia. Parents aren’t equipped to deal with this by themselves. There is no manual. There are, however, experienced people who have saved thousands of lives who aren’t able to do their work anymore. And there is the possibility that one day it will be your kids who need their help.
Get in touch with your local MPs, your city council and make your voice heard.
When our children look for help, they should be able to find it.
It’s up to you.
Botswana the Bus Driver and the Golden Handcuffs
Posted on | March 26, 2012 | No Comments
I love my job working on the documentary. The difficulty with contract work is that eventually contracts end. Usually directly before my birthday.
As such I’m contemplating alternatives.
“You can’t teach ESL,” says my long time friend, I unsuccessfully lived with a year prior.
“Yes I can.”
We are at party, three drinks deep and I’m at that phase of the evening where I have become somewhat hard of hearing and speak with less than proper volume control.
“You are too scatterbrained,” he says. “You need to have a license. They have licensed teachers.”
“I’d be a great teacher.”
“You’d be horrible. They won’t let you teach them.”
I am being lambasted. Now I get a little more passionate.
“They? They? Who the fuck are they?” I reply. “The ESL Mafia. I’m talking the underground, the black market, unconventional methods. Who knows ESL people better than I do? All my roommates are about to be deported!”
The reason my roommates all have English as their second language involves a flood and fire in the home of my former roommate, who is presently deriding my teaching skills and giving the impression he is less than a supportive friend. I believe his doubt in regards to my virtues to be well founded. Being scatterbrained is a nice way of describing my idiocy while in his domicile. Following the fire and flood it became sensible that I move out as soon as possible, Craig’s List offered me an unconventional answer to my problem. Thus roommates who speak English as a second language and will soon face deportation.
“I believe in unconventional approaches,” says the tall clean-faced man sitting next to me on the couch. “They could use a black market for language specialists.”
“He’s with me. He’s motherfucking with me,” I shout at my old roommate. I realize I haven’t introduced myself to my lanky new companion. How rude. “I’m Michael Gray Kimber.”
“Mouthful,” he replies.
“Everyone’s name is Michael. Figured people would remember my name if I provide the whole thing. Everyone’s name is Michael,” I say, and momentarily contemplate discussing my idea for union, where all Michaels work together to a greater purpose, and a memorial service for the great Michael we lost this year. Realizing that I haven’t gotten his name, I stop my rant before going to the point of no return. “Your name is?”
“Botswana,” he replies.
Mike Kimber speaks on MTV
Posted on | February 10, 2012 | No Comments
Speech at Ryerson: “Too Far From Heaven”
Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 2 Comments
Sometimes I think tequila is a good idea.
I once got so drunk on tequila in University, that I came up to my residence room, determined to get back to the party when the world stopped spinning, that I turned up Wu Tang Clan’s Ain’t Nothing To Fuck With, so loudly that it shook the walls, simply so that I wouldn’t pass out. I woke up at 5 in the morning, to realize that campus security wasn’t to be fucked with.
Last Friday, I got so drunk I could barely see.
I was trying to forget a Facebook message I received earlier in the evening from someone I knew as a child. She is one of those girls who looked made for giving you a hug on a rainy day. She told me that she tried to kill herself last weekend, by taking a bottle of clonazepam and a bottle of wine. Then she took a steak knife to her arm.
She wants to tell her story so that she could help other people when she can barely help herself.
She is strong because she’s alive and I’m drunk because I can’t stand the idea of someone who smiles like that feeling this way.
So I am doing tequila shots, trying to get warm because it’s hard to feel anything other than the cold in Toronto in February. And I am talking to a girl with curly eyelashes and red pants, telling her about the letter, wanting to have a stranger comfort me and she tells me she understands.
I ask her if she has received a similar letter.
She says she understands the girl. That she plans on killing herself in a few weeks. Drunk Mike tries to save her. Drunk Mike didn’t ask for her name, he asked for tequila shots.
My hangover was the type where you can’t drink water when you feel thirsty.
I’m here today and I’m not speaking for the Mental Health Commission. I’m speaking for the people who aren’t ready to speak for themselves.
I’m here because while I was writing this I received another letter from girl who lost finance’ to suicide and doesn’t know if she can live with the guilt and pain. I’m here because in her Facebook photo she is hugging her deceased finance and they look so incredibly young and sweet that I want to force them to live inside that picture, to have pictures of their children, pictures of the dreams they could have lived together. He was 22.
I’m here because these strangers keep breaking my heart and my head feels like it is going to explode.
We need to talk about mental illness and someone more important than me needs to listen.
I miss being a student.
I learned a lot about love at university. I can remember during my Frosh week when the attractive Frosh leader showed me how to fit a condom on a banana and I thought she was trying to seduce me. I remember nine years ago leaning over the railing of my residence building’s second floor, having my first panic attack, heart beating like a machinegun as MSN announced in the other room that another girl considered me as a brother, aka we were never, ever, going to have sex.
I was 18. It was seven years before I got treatment for my anxiety disorder. It was a week before I tried shrooms for the first time and played NHL 94 in the most polite manner. Laughing and passing the puck back and forth unable to score on each other because we were high enough to think we’d found enlightenment and NHL 94 was our Boddhi tree. Downstairs a friend of mine had thrown some mescaline on top of the shrooms and was hallucinating about putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. That night he started falling and it took him eight years to find the ground.
Mick Ford’s been lived with depression since he was 14. He didn’t kill himself, but he did try every drug in the world in an attempt to run away from his mental illness. One day he stopped running and he remains sober with the help of methadone.
I remember sitting in the chapel, when my friend Jason died.
Weeping with my friends not like babies, but like grown men who didn’t know that such a horrible thing would make them adults. Jason’s funeral was on the same campus where we had an April Fool’s Day water fight and he was the general. Where we surrounded the rest of the school and blasted them with balloons Simpson’s style.
I learned about mental illness by watching my friends die and become addicted to drugs.
I didn’t understand until I was at my first love’s birthday party, holding a heart shaped balloon, posing for a picture, wondering how in a week my life could fall apart. Staring at the camera, thinking, I’m sorry but I love you more than anything and I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t know to stop hurting myself. When she took that picture she didn’t know what was coming. It was just a bad week. She didn’t realize that our dream would become her sleeping next to an insomniac. She told me no matter what happened we would get through it together. And we did.
People say that mental illness is like a cancer you can’t see. There is a difference. Your love can’t affect cancer cells, but it can help save the people you love.
At 25, I suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by intense anxiety.
I was sent to a self-help group where I was the only person in attendance, where help was a human pamphlet reading a power point presentation without paraphrasing a single sentence. Imagine looking for help and not being able to find it. Realize that 2/3 out of people who suffer from mental illness don’t get treatment.
I didn’t recover because I was stronger than my friends. I recovered because I was luckier. My family was able to pay the 150 dollars an hour that my therapist charged so I had the privilege of getting better.
Everyone tells us to talk about mental illness but we rarely get a clear picture of what life is actually like for people living with mental illness. In the media we almost exclusively tell the success stories of celebrities who accomplish their miracles despite the obstacles in their way. Or we talk about murderous psychopaths who society failed to help or homeless men and women who can’t help themselves. We are either inspiring, terrifying or objects of pity. We are whatever sells newspapers that week.
We need to talk to people who don’t have stories that sell papers. Who get up, take medication, exercise and go to work every day no matter how they feel.
These diseases are more common than most of us realize. So is recovery. Every day we get out of bed, we take on step back to life. It isn’t a miracle that we get better. It’s an everyday occurrence too boring for most of you to write about. If I had a dream, it’s that we would start speaking about how life is, rather than how it’s supposed to be. Every time you try to make life fit a story, you are just selling advertisements. That there is some easy answer, that everyone who doesn’t find it is a failure. Some people can’t recover and it’s not their fault.
It’s not because they are weak, or stupid or don’t try enough. It’s because this is life, not a movie. You chose to be a journalist; you gave up money, reasonable work hours and a stable job market. Don’t give up your integrity. People buy what you are selling.
Every time we try to build mental health awareness in the media it follows a rare occasion when someone with mental illness hurts someone other than themselves. There is a problem with violence and the mentally ill and it gets worse every time we ignore it. Journalists feel comfortable talking about murder, we can’t talk about suicide. Right now suicide is the leading cause of violent death, not homicide. 4,000 people die of suicide every year in Canada, 32,000 in the United States. Silence comes both before and after suicide and it’s the silence before that we need to deal with most.
We can’t keep our children in the dark for fear they will never be able to emerge from it.
I’m asking you to begin the conversation with our youth to break the shame that is the foundation of so many of these afflictions. To eradicate this phantom idea of normalcy that makes so many of us feel hollow and broken.
I want you to make the politicians to talk about mental illness in Parliament, in cities halls and in cabinet meetings.
And I want their words to mean something.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech on MP David’s Batters funeral is some of the most beautiful writing on the stigma surrounding mental illness I have ever read:
He wrote,
“We need to know that mental illness like Dave’s is shockingly common in our society. It affects the great and the small alike despite the stigma that still too often surrounds it. “
The problem is that the same quality of treatment is not offered to the great and small alike.
Our rich can afford the quality therapy our medical system doesn’t offer the economically disadvantaged. Harper plans to build prisons for our drug addicts, who self medicate, rather than treatment centers, to jail the homeless and mentally ill rather than offer them the healthcare services they need. The Correctional Service of Canada reports that 13 per cent of male offenders in federal custody presented mental health problems when they were admitted in 2008. That’s up 86 per cent from 1997. For women, the figure reaches 24 per cent, and 85 per cent increase over the same time. There are offered to little no treatment. Yesterday Tory Senator Pierre Hughes Boisvenu said.
‘Basically I think that every murderer should have a rope in his cell and he can decide on his own life He advocated that criminals should commit suicide to save the taxpayers the high cost of keeping them in prison. He says to give them the rope.
It takes 6 months to a year to see a state sponsored therapist.
To get immediate treatment you have to be suicidal and have a plan and we clearly don’t have a plan for dealing with suicide when each year more people kill themselves.
Isn’t there more productive use for a rope? We scaled Everest with a length of rope and our belief we can do the impossible. Instead of hanging ourselves couldn’t we use the same rope to build a safety net to catch these angels before they hit the ground? What are our demons but angels that have lived too far from heaven for too long?
Who is to live in this better world Harper is creating, when we build the fences so high, that mortal men and women live their whole lives on the other side.
With ropes and pulleys we built the Wonder of the World.
Why would we use the same rope to protect to ourselves from the people we love?
Couldn’t we build a world they could live in, where they could experience that wonder? Couldn’t the 19 billion dollar that Harper intends to spend on prisons, be spent on building a dream rather than building a wall to protect us from our worst fears? Especially when the people we love are left on the other side.
You are our voice. You brought down the Berlin Wall, you were with Martin Luther King when a million men marched, you were there with Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepherd when they fought for the right to love as they wanted to, and you are here with me right now, ready to declare that we can be loved for who we are. That the one thing, great and small alike deserve is access to the help they need to live.
You are our voice.
Today we are talking about mental illness.
I want you to make the conversation mean something. I went to King’s College and grew up and watched friends become adults and die as children. No one ever told me about mental illness.
It’s up to you to tell everybody.
Tags: anxiety > come out campaign > depression > education > journalism > Michael Kimber > ryerson > Senator > stephen harper > stigma > suicide
We Have To Make It Better
Posted on | January 27, 2012 | 7 Comments
On June 28th, 2010 I came out about my experiences with anxiety and depression.
Any employer can do a Google search and find out about the battles I have fought and how close I came to losing them.
I write to remind myself that the best of what I am came from emerging out of that darkness. To remember how lonely it feels to live at the end of the world.
I learned about mental illness by watching friends die and lose themselves to drug addiction.
We only talk about mental illness when we have no other choice.
Inside the silence 4000 people die every single year of suicide in Canada; in it lies the 2/3 of people who suffer from mental illness who won’t receive help due to the tremendous stigma.
It’s time to talk about it.
My story isn’t special.
Do I have to tell you about the people I have lost to drug addiction, the children I have loved who never became adults; do I have to tell you about my nightmarish trip through insomnia and anxiety? Do I have to make you feel the tears as they slid down my cheeks or can I trust that you have wept? Must I tell you my story when I know that you have your own?
I know you’ve watched loved ones crawl into the darkness unable to stop them. I know that you’ve wondered if you could live to see tomorrow. I know that you’ve run away from yourself and wondered if you could ever get back.
Mental illness convinces us that our story is special. That we alone suffer this great darkness and that we alone are too weak to win it. To feel that you alone are not worthy of being loved.
I called it the Come Out campaign because the LGBTTTIQ community had to deal with a similar stigma when they took to the streets, announced their identity and became a political force that could demand the rights society was denying them. They could have remained hidden, they were an invisible minority. They risked their lives and careers for hope of living the life they wanted without hiding who they were. Nothing could be braver than sacrificing for a dream you can’t possibly imagine coming true.
People tell us it’s 2012 and things have gotten better. However you merely need to watch a GOP Presidential debate to realize they have a long way to go.
It’s 2012 and the World Health Organization says that depression is approaching epidemic levels.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech on MP David’s Batters funeral is some of the most beautiful writing on the stigma surrounding mental illness I have ever read:
“We need to know that mental illness like Dave’s is shockingly common in our society. It affects the great and the small alike despite the stigma that still too often surrounds it. “
The problem is that the same quality of treatment is not offered to the great and small alike.
Our rich can afford the quality therapy our medical system doesn’t offer the economically disadvantaged.Harper plans to build prisons for our drug addicts rather than treatment centers, to jail the homeless and mentally ill rather than offer them the healthcare services they need. The Correctional Service of Canada reports that 13 per cent of male offenders in federal custody presented mental health problems when they were admitted in 2008. That’s up 86 per cent from 1997. For women, the figure reaches 24 per cent, and 85 per cent increase over the same time. It takes a year to see a state sponsored therapist. To get immediate treatment you must be suicidal and have a plan. We have institutionalized discrimination against people living with mental illness.
There is a difference between words and action.
It’s 2012 and Canada’s overburdened mental health system is on the verge of collapse.
People ask me about how I recovered.
The answer is that I was lucky. My parents had money so I could afford to get the help I needed.
Most of us find a way to cope without getting the proper help.
For those of you beginning your journey all I can say is that falling down happens in an instant and getting up feels like it takes an eternity. That there is no simple easy one step solution that works for everyone. That recovery isn’t writing a blog, doing yoga or even taking medication. It’s about self-acceptance, realizing that you can’t cut yourself into pieces and live in only the “good” parts of who you are. Realizing that this is part of how you think. You cannot take this feeling away without taking feeling away.
I used to beg just to be free of this pain.
I took drugs, from doctors and drug dealers, I meditated for hours, and I scoured the Internet looking for the pill that would make me a better person.
I couldn’t imagine a life so fantastic as to justify such cruel torture.
Too often we look to forget through drugs and alcohol, we run away from the unbearable beauty of a life worth living for. We think that if we curl up and die, that if we starve our system of the things we fear, our demons will die. That if we isolate ourselves so that no one can see our degradation, we will be able to look in a mirror. When it’s only by rejoicing, by ravenously seeking life and the things that hurt us that we can find a reason to be here.
No one was born to sit on their couch and watch Netflix. No one becomes more of a person when they do coke. No one does honor to the things they lost by trying to lose themselves.
You aren’t broken.
You are whole. Which means you are filled with contradictions, love and hate so vast you can’t begin to understand it, created to give you the possibility of compassion for a world that is as crazy as you are. The desire to simplify the world, the desire to simplify yourself, is what creates the horrors in ourselves and in our world. It’s also the danger of awareness campaigns.
Recovery means different things to different people. Recovery is the courage to get out of bed in the morning, it’s looking for help when you need it, it’s going to work, it’s realizing that this crushing pain is something we can live with.
.This isn’t about false hope but a pursuit of real understanding.
All I can do is hope that when you reach out to the world we reach back. Too many of us look for help and don’t find it. In the pursuit of happiness, we have forgotten our right to suffer. No one can tell you that you don’t have the right to your pain.
We have to stop telling people it will be okay and start listening to each other.
Great changes begin with a single step. Until we are comfortable saying what we suffer, there won’t enough beds in hospitals, access to therapy will depend upon economic status not need, and we will continue to lose irreplaceable people. We can’t change the world by hiding from it.
It’s 2012 and the journey is nowhere near over.
This isn’t It Gets Better, there is no better future promised unless we make it.
Until we can admit who we are without shame, things won’t get better.
This is our story.
It’s time to tell it.
Tags: anxiety > Colony of Losers > depression > journalism > ryerson > schizophrenia > suicide
The Come Out Campaign
Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 3 Comments
I can’t save your life redux
Posted on | January 13, 2012 | No Comments
Dear Michael,
I happened upon your amazing post tonight. I wanted to contact you to say “thank you” and to tell you that you were also telling my story. I have bipolar disorder; I’m very open about it and how it affects my life. My family knows, most of my friends do.
The holidays are a misery for me. I am almost always suicidal from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, and this year was very difficult. Thanks to my family and friends (and my doctor), I pulled through without harming myself. Though I’m beginning to feel better, I am still very fragile right now. Unfortunately, my “best friend/boyfriend” can’t handle it when I fall into the abyss, and tells me I should, essentially, be “present” and “think happy thoughts.” I should have shot him, but I just broke off with him.
So, here’s the issue (maybe you have a better take on it than I do) that has plagued me since my breakdown ten years ago: I know my life has value to others, but why does it feel it has no value to me? Is caring how my demise will affect the people in my life enough to continually live through these murderous lows?
I don’t have any answers for these questions, and I don’t know where to look within to find them. Michael, what stays the hand? Do you know?
I’m not going to pretend to say its easy to come up with an answer to your question or say that your words don’t make me feel infinitely small in my inability to say exactly the right thing. Not because there isn’t one, but because to pierce through that gigantic darkness requires a patience and understanding of the person that I lack in regards to a complete stranger. And I’m not a trained psychologist. I highly advise seeking counseling and help if you feel like this. But I’ll say a little something because this is not the first time someone has asked me something like this. And I mean not the first time today.
So this is me just talking straight with you. I’m a poet so some of that straight talking is going to sound like Radiohead Lyrics, Hallmark Cards and Dr. David Burns masturbating to Ben Harper. But I’ll try my best.
I can tell you that I have been in the darkness that absorbs the past and blurs any concept of a future. Where I lived in a constant present moment that is made up of only my fears of the past and the future, my guilt and shame, my existence trapped in this ultimate nowhere. I have been in so much pain that I didn’t want to live or even have been born if I could escape it.
I also know that feeling is strange to me now. That outside of it, I can barely understand it.
You say that you always feel this way from Thanksgiving through New Years. I looked at the calendar recently and noticed there are all kinds of other months in the year. I understand how a person can forget that.
There also isn’t a guarantee that you always return to darkness. Sometimes things actually do get better.My bipolar friend Alan, said this to me in an email recently:
“I am 48 years old and am a self-employed and own a web design company. I was working on a term job in Canso Nova Scotia when I could no longer function and was later diagnosed with bipolar II (depression) about 15 years ago. Like yourself, I was informed of a six-month wait to see a specialist. Much noise was made to see someone within a month. I bounced around the system for many years before finding a drug that worked for me for many years. I stopped taking any medication in the fall of 2007 after suffering no relapses for well over 10 years.”
Basic summation of my Hallmark story without Full House music: even this can change.
The person you are right now drifts away and though they may come back you get to enjoy things that the dead don’t.
In the darkness you are blind. Recognize that. Rationality crumbles and your brain chemistry tries to take away everything you want and wish for to get away from the pressures of wanting it. Be easy on yourself. Remember that this feeling will pass. And if it comes again, it will also pass.
In regard to people telling you to have positive thoughts and the desire to commit murder as a result, I totally and completely understand.
You can’t base how you feel about yourself on the ignorance of a loved one. As you won’t understand this person when you feel normal again you can’t expect someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it. I’d go fucking apeshit on a person who told me to be positive when I’m depressed. May as well tell a cripple to run on broken legs.
However…they know not what assholes they be.
People are raised on happy endings and stick to it clichés. No one knows the right thing to say about mental illness. We don’t have training. Most of them mean well and speak not because they think they know the answer but because no one taught us how to shut the fuck up and listen. Everyone wants to help to not feel so helpless. Read more
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