Idea of suicide ‘always there’

From today's edition of The Chronicle Herald:

Laing House a safe haven for youth with mental illness. It’s where John Goodwin found health, hope

By Lois Legge, Features Writer

JOHN GOODWIN has thought about killing himself most of his life.

He wrote his first suicide note in elementary school. And lying in bed each night, he still imagines a bullet travelling toward his head.

"It’s kind of always been there," he says of the depression that’s plagued him since childhood.

It’s still there. But about four years ago, Goodwin found a little hope at a little-known house in downtown Halifax that’s trying to help him and others stay alive and thrive.

"I probably would have committed suicide" without it, he says on a recent day inside Laing House, an eight-year-old day-time support centre for youth with mental illness — most commonly anxiety, but depression, too, and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and psychosis.

Youth is defined here as ages 16 to 30.

It used to be 17 to 24 but staff expanded the age range as membership grew. The three-storey house on Barrington Street — with meeting rooms and lounging areas; a painting room and full kitchen — now serves about 80 members who have often struggled with ostracism and poverty in addition to their conditions.

Goodwin’s been denied an apartment because of his mental illness and sees plenty of judgment elsewhere, a stigma he believes is intensified by media coverage or TV shows connecting mental illness with violent crime.

"Statistically we’re much more likely to be the receivers of a violent act; the receivers of trauma than we are . . . to cause a violent act," says the 26-year-old, who traces his own mental illness to a combination of genetics and being bullied repeatedly as a child.

But Laing House, he says, is a safe place, free of ridicule; a place that helps lift the "trance of unworthiness" he feels almost everywhere else.

"When you’re young and you’re struggling with an illness you feel so isolated and so alone," says executive director Shaleen Jones. "Everyone knows that if you’re a member here it’s because you have a mental illness so you don’t have to pretend anymore. When you’re here you can really be yourself . . . . So people form very fast relationships and really strong friendships here and that’s the core of what we do — creating opportunities for youth to connect with youth."

The centre also creates opportunities for education and employment and independent living, all often interrupted when mental illness takes hold.

The non-profit’s 14 staff work individually with members to help them find apartments or fill out resumes or apply for university. They’ve also organized things like cooking and painting classes or just been there to provide, as Jones puts it, "encouragement and cheerleading" — the kind of support founders Keith and Rosemary Hamilton envisioned when they set up the facility.

The Halifax couple — now retired and travelling around the world on their boat — created the centre after their son became mentally ill and they discovered how limited resources were for people like him. And they named the house after Rosemary Hamilton’s mother Nora Laing, a nurse who suffered from schizophrenia most of her life and left her family an unexpected inheritance when she died.

Stationed in Hong Kong during the Second World War, Laing had purchased shares in a bank there and forgotten about them for years. But when the Hamiltons inherited the shares, they used the money for Laing House, a place — Jones says — “where young people living with mental illness could go and be supported and en­couraged and take steps to rebuild their lives."

The members themselves have direct involvement in how the programs work and often help create them, which is cru­cial, Jones says, for people “who have had so many of their decisions taken away from them due to the fact that they’ve been ill."

Goodwin can’t remember ever not being mentally ill, although he’s tried to block out some of the early childhood experi­ences he thinks played a role in his chron­ic depression.

But he recalls being hit in the temple with a pool cue by a high school student who was trying to get into a gang. He re­members a girl trying to run him over with her car. And he remembers plenty of other confidence-destroying words and deeds he doesn’t want in print.

Even as early as pre-school, he says, “I can remember . . . sitting alone; that I was scared of the other kids."

“Around Grade 2 or Grade 3 I was writ­ing a suicide note at my babysitter’s, which is really early for most people be­cause usually it comes along at 16 or 17 . . . . (It said) just that I was worthless and . . . I didn’t deserve to live, stuff like that." By the time Goodwin reached high school, he thought about killing himself all the time.

“I felt worthless and I felt I wasn’t worth being around and I was quite frankly a piece of shit and that I didn’t deserve regu­lar things . . . .
“I spent . . . at least half a year that I just dropped out of school completely . . . in the late ’90s . . . 2000, something like that. I would have been in high school. I sat in my room all day. Well, I’d sleep all day and I’d stay up all night because then I didn’t have to deal with people . . . I’d just play on the computer for probably six months straight. I’d leave the room to eat and use the washroom but other than that I stayed in my room all the time."

Goodwin eventually went back, gradu­ated and started university, studying at Mount Saint Vincent. But he dropped out and is now — thanks to three different medications and support from Laing House —in the process of trying to start a public relations degree through distance education.

He’d just finished day treatment at the Abbie J. Lane Memorial hospital when he first came to Laing House (www.laing­house.org) four years ago. And he says the timing saved his life. He’d been in a major car accident (a car hit him while he was riding a bike) and broken both wrists. He didn’t have any friends. But the people he met here, including his now ex-girlfriend who is still a friend, helped him with ev­erything from eating to opening doors.

“If I hadn’t had those people then that depression would have continued, that de­pression would have got worse . . . and I would have fallen back . . . and I would have probably committed suicide."

Goodwin still has dark thoughts. But these days he gets some of them out on canvas, painting brilliantly-coloured mo­saics that everyone tells him they love (al­though he wonders if they’re just being nice); and speaking to school and univer­sity students about mental illness — which Jones says affects one in five young Canadians.

“The earlier mental illness can be dealt with, the less likely it is to have a debilitat­ing effect (and) of those five kids, only one of those five kids is going to get the help they need."

But 80 per cent of those who do receive support, she says, go on to live productive lives.

Goodwin hopes speaking publicly about his struggles will encourage others to get past the stigma and get the support they need.

In the meantime it’s helping him feel things he’s never felt before.

“I personally have spoken to about 4,000 students . . . . It’s a kind of a confidence builder because people are hanging on your every word while you’re telling your story, and for someone who at one point . . . had failed classes because I had to get up and speak . . . it’s kind of empowering."