World Mental Health Day.

You gotta be shitting me.

Well, who knew. But apparently October 10th is “World Mental Health Day”.

What’s funny about Justin proclaiming “World Mental Health Day” is that his Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan, has been going out of his way to hide any historical event that would have damaged the mental health of children living on the Canadian Forces bases in Canada.

I don’t think that my mental health has ever been decent in any sense.

It’s always been so hard to try be “normal” while knowing that there was something horrifically wrong. You have to remember that from October of 1980 until August of 2011 I had absolutely no idea of the mental health issues that I had been flagged with. Everything had been hidden from me by my own father. Instead of getting me the help I needed, he drilled it into my head that I was just an immature cry-baby looking for attention.

As far as I was concerned, everything that was going wrong in my life was because I was a fuck-up.

I had no idea why I couldn’t make friends.

I had no idea why no one really liked me.

I had no idea why I always seemed to be on the receiving end of everyone’s derision.

After all, if there was something wrong with me, if I had been diagnosed as having issues, Richard would have done something, right?

Now, the laughable thing about World Mental Health day is that it is almost Im-fucking-possible to get help with mental health.

And believe me, I’ve tried.

But I think that even mental health “professionals” realize that there really is no way to actually fix mental health. Sure, you can medicate mental health issues, but you can’t fix them. You can teach a person with mental health issues how to deal with their problems, but that’s still not fixing the issues.

No, fixing mental health problems in the typical sense simply means teaching the person with the mental health issues how to keep their problems to themselves and how to internalize their problems so as to not cause others discomfort.

Tell me, how do you think the damage that Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke did to my brain from age 9 until age 11 can be undone? Just not thinking about it isn’t the correct answer. Nor does adopting the mantra “sometimes bad things happen to good people and if we just smile everything will be fine”.

How does one undo the sexual abuse that one suffered from the fall of 1978 until the spring of 1980 when they were 7 to 8 years old? Especially sexual abuse at the hands of a military officer and his 14 year old altar boy that often involved alcohol and physical and psychological abuse.

How does one undo the years of neglect and abuse at the hands of his own father who was found to be unable and unwilling to take responsibility for his own family, often blamed others for problems with his family, expected others to solve the problems with his family, changed his stories frequently, and told people what he thought they wanted to hear.

You can’t undo this type of damage.

I spent my entire youth being blamed by my father for having allowed the babysitter, P.S., to touch my younger brother.

In 2011 I was told by a case manager with the CFNIS that my complaint against P.S. was not credible. At the end of the investigation in 2011 I was told that the CFNIS could not find anything to indicate that P.S. was capable of the crimes I had accused him of.

During the 2011 CFNIS investigation it was suggested that I was a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military” and that I was only making my complaint against P.S. to get some easy money.

The Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan accused me of playing games and of playing an angle when I asked him for help in my matter.

In 2020 the Military Police Complaints Commission released their report into their review of my complaint against the CFNIS. The MPCC came to the conclusion that the Military Police in 1980 were well aware of the actions of P.S. involving young children on Canadian Forces Base Namao, that it was P.S.’s involvement with molesting these young children that brought Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Father Angus McRae to the attention of the military police, and that Captain McRae’s defence counsel tried using P.S.’s molestation of younger children to discredit his testimony against Captain McRae. The Military Police Complaints Commission stated that the CFNIS was in possession of these court martial records during the period of time that the CFNIS was investigating my complaint against P.S.

I get told that I should simply move on. That P.S. was the true victim in this matter, suggesting that I’m just some sort of whiny cry baby who just wants to shift the blame to P.S..

So again, please humour me on World Mental Health Day. Tell me what exactly it is that I have to do in order to make you happy and how I can keep my mental health issues from making you uncomfortable.

If you let me know, I’ll try my best to keep the damage internalized.