Tag: depression

Adverse Childhood Experiences

I normally don’t do self-help psychobable tests.

One of the problems that I’ve always had is answering these things truthfully as I had always been told as a kid to answer these types of tests with whatever I thought that the person administering the tests wanted to hear.

And besides, as a kid I had it drilled into my head that the abuse that I endured on Canadian Forces Base Namao was because I was an out of control homosexual. So of course I wasn’t going to answer anything correctly.

So, I gave this test a quick go, and I think I aced the ACEs test pretty well.

I scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on this test, and I didn’t even have to study for it.

I’m pretty sure that’s not actually a good thing.

This is me. Don’t be alarmed.
ace-questionnaire-for-adults-identified-english-rev.7.26.22Download

This one’s from California, but they all generally ask the same questions.

The only one that I really couldn’t answer is #6. I know that Richard had been in the brig at Stadacona before I was born. His service file doesn’t say for what. I don’t honestly know if he had ever been locked up after I was born. Makes me wonder if any of his “training exercises” were actually 1 or 2 week sentences.

Anyways, I’m hungry, so I’m going out to get something to eat.

Interests.

In this video I talk interests.

I’ve had interests in life. But they were always the wrong interests and I had these interests for all of the wrong reasons.

I wish that things in life had been different when I was a kid.

But they weren’t, so I can only live in the shadows of the aftermath and the destruction.

January 7th, 2024

Here’s a video that I made earlier today.

I’ve come to realize that if I am allowed to die via Medical Assistance in Dying, that I’m not going to live long enough to see the media take any interest in the two historical flaws in the National Defence Act that actively prevent anyone in the modern day from receiving any manner of justice for crimes they endured as children while living on Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada.

But, such is life.

So, sold off my 2020 Macbook Pro 13 today.

I think he was a college student, but needed a computer, so I gave him the Macbook for a good deal.

He seemed happy.

Now that everything is in a wind down phase I really don’t need to keep much anymore.

Time to start shedding all of my physical possessions.

The only real purpose that any of my computers served was for me to search for information, make FOI requests, and store and sort information.

But now that we are officially in the year 2024, none of this stuff matters anymore.

I have an iPad Pro 10″ that I’ll be getting rid of next.

So far I’ve gotten rid of anything that I had in relation to electronics.

Got rid of my soldering and desoldering stations, my parts bins, cross reference guides, etc. As I said before, electronics wasn’t something that I was really interested in, but I persisted in it thinking that one day a spark would light inside. That spark never came.

Same thing with computers. I just never had the creativity to create write programs.

Same thing with motorcycles. I’d ride them for a while and then get bored.

I donated all of my hand tools and power tools to a local shop that loans tools out for next to nothing to low income families that need to use tools.

Got rid of my Play Station.

There were only a very few games that I liked to play.

Didn’t want to go through the hassle of selling it so pulled the hard drive from it and put the play station in the computer recycling cage at work.

Got rid of my CD collection last fall.

Got rid of my movie collection at the same time.

Now, don’t think I don’t have anything left.

Still have my iPad, and I still have my desktop.

But there will come a time when I will get rid of the desktop and my drives of data.

I won’t have much use for any of the information that I’ve compiled over the last twelve years.

Disposing of the desktop and the drives will probably be done later in the year.

I’ve already disposed of reams and reams of hard copies. We have a shredding service at work that shreds all documents that are put into recycling.

I would have thought that the media would have shown the slightest interest, but it looks like consolidation and foreign ownership have turned Canadian media into nothing more than stenographer services for the institutions with secrets to hide..

I’ve eliminated a lot of my dresses. That still leaves me with a lot of dresses.

I’ll probably start whittling down the number of dresses that I have until the final weeks.

Then I’ll probably hold on to a good pair of heels and a few dresses.

Haven’t decided which dress and which heels I wanna wear at my procedure, maybe I don’t even yet own the dress that I want to wear.

I want a real intense ruffle dress. Maybe something with a robust petticoat.

I make my application in March of this year.

I have absolutely no doubt that time will fly past really fucking quick from this point onwards.

But, I’m already enjoying the peace and serenity that my approaching death offers.

The one thing that I’ll have to wait for until I obtain my approval from the two assessors is at which funeral home will I undergo my procedure and cremation.

A touchy subject.

Because I wish to obtain Medical Assistance in Dying and because I post about it on social media, the algorithms keep filling my feed with posts that deal with M.A.i.D.

There are those who are convinced that the government’s intention with M.A.i.D. is to save money on mental health treatment by forcing people with mental illness to undergo M.A.i.D. instead of living on social assistance.

Others are convinced that the government is going to send white vans around in the cities of Canada to euthanize the homeless and the elderly.

One of the major problems that mental health care faces in Canada is that our general population is overwhelmed by American media. American media is dangerous in the fact that it pushes an imaginary economic reality that does not exist. Americans believe in low, low, low taxes. Which is why they have massive infrastructure problems, crappy schools, non-existent social safety nets, and almost non-existent health care. That, and America’s defence spending is completely out of control.

Fellow Canadians see the low taxes that Americans pay, and so they demand from our governments that we pay the same stupidly low taxes up here as they do down there.

Which is why our health care is crumbling. Which is why mental health care is almost non-existent. And which is why mental illness is vilified as being due to laziness and poor personal choices.

America has had homeless mentally ill people wandering the streets and living in tents on the street for years, like since back in the ’70s and ’80s. And this problem is coming up to Canada.

American style austerity is a cancer.

But Canadians love their low, low taxes and their cheap imported goods, so don’t look for any kind of funding increases any time soon.

A lot of disabled rights groups and mental health rights groups want mental illness yanked as one of the criteria for being able to access Medical Assistance in Dying.

But the problem with doing so is that you deny people such as me the right to end our lives as we see fit. You also ensure that I suffer mental pain for 10, 20, or even 30 more years.

Better mental health funding wouldn’t have done anything for me. As I’ve said before, I was a “dirty little secret” and my lack of mental health treatment was due to the desire for secrets to be kept from the Canadian public. No amount of public mental health funding was going to change that.

And having the government of Canada rescind the right of Canadians such as myself to avail ourselves to a humane and painless death at the time of our choosing isn’t going to increase the funding for mental health treatment and housing for persons with mental illness.

To get Canada on track again, Canadians would have to eschew American style disaster capitalism and embrace full democratic socialism. Canadians would have to learn to understand that higher taxes do lead to overall better outcomes as any of the Nordic or Scandinavian countries can attest.

But changes like that would take years, especially when you consider how much money American right wing think tanks pump into Canada on a yearly basis to try to convert us into a mini-USA.

I don’t know what the solution is for the time being.

As I’ve said, I make my application in March of this year. Hopefully I get my two assessments by no later than July. So hopefully I can undergo my procedure and cease living sometime in December of 2024 or early 2025.

I don’t want to be forced to suffer as a casualty in someone else’s war.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to cause 500k new low income houses to be built.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to cause 500k new assisted living homes to be built.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to give those living with disabilities or mental illness $100k in yearly income assistance.

But banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness will prolong the suffering that persons like me have to endure, and I would envision that it would increase the number of suicide attempts and suicides as persons try to escape their pain and torment.

I don’t envy the struggle the mental health and disability advocates face, but please don’t fuck with my ability to die peacefully and painlessly.

My last and final FOI request

Yesterday while I was cleaning out some of my belongings…………

Yep, I figured skated from about 2006 until about 2014
Got rid of some old clothes.

…….I came across a Freedom of Information package that I had submitted to the Alberta Government last year in September of 2022. I received this package in May of 2023 and promptly forgot about it.

I had submitted this request as the oposing counsel in a civil matter that was wrapped up in 2022 had shown me quotes from my Alberta Social Service records that were redacted from the documents that I had obtained in August of 2011.

I had forgotten that I received these as they had been sitting on a shelf in my closet, unopened.

Reading through this version sure was eye opening.

It doesn’t say anything much different than what I already knew, but it does officially attach names.

I still can’t believe that I was actually in the first stages of foster care / residential care.

Children’s Aid in Toronto wasn’t able to get any help from the Canadian Armed Forces with contacting my father when we moved to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Toronto. CAST had to go through the public school system to find my brother and I.

Yeah, this was after our trip from Edmonton to Toronto over the xmas break in December of 1982. We stayed with Richard’s estranged father Arthur Herman Gill in Oshawa. There wasn’t a lot of closeness between Richard and his Father.

Richard’s “work schedule” often had him out of town on training exercises. I’m pretty sure that he was just signing up for as many training exercises as he could as that would get him out of the house. To Richard, raising children was “woman’s work” and not something for a man to waste his time on.

“In a loud and vociferous fashion”…… That’s one thing that Richard could do. He could turn on the drill instructor attitude and bellow his opinions. I remember when I was in grade 7 at Elia Jr. High and the music teacher, Mrs. Donskov, was pushing for me to take up bass guitar as my asthma made it difficult to play any type of wind instrument. She went so far as to load up her Volvo with one of the school guitar amps and one of the bass guitars. When well pulled up to the PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, Richard came storming over to us and told Mrs. Donskov to get that shit back in her car and that I was never to think of doing a stupid stunt like this again.

Richard always had a weird relationship with my teachers. He always wanted “more homework” so that I could spend more time learning and studying, but if I ever asked him for help with said homework he’d explode in a rage. When my teachers would call him trying to get me into extracurricular activities or arrange for me to go on trips, Richard would rage out. I feel sorry for any of my teachers that ever had to deal with him.

There’s no way that Richard would have really agreed to this program. Richard had a tendency to just say yes to everything with the hopes that the person asking would soon forget. I know that my opinion may be a little biased, but Rchard was not someone you could count on or depend on.

“A smack across the face or time in their rooms”. Richard was the master of the leather belt on bare ass. He had no problem with open handed smacks to the face or the head. He also saw nothing wrong with kicking either. Sue would grab and pinch, or use the fly swatter. Believe me, the fly swatter from Sue was far preferable to the leather belt from Richard. There were times when he lost control and blood was drawn. Both from the leather belt and from the smacks across the face.

“Robert’s prospects appear poor”. Yeah, they sure as fuck weren’t kidding.

Due to Richard’s and grandma’s superb parenting skills, not only were my brother and I fully feral. But we were at each other’s throats on a non-stop basis. When you have to fight for the slightest bit of affection you become like Hyenas. Even though we grew up in the same military housing on the same military base in Toronto, I don’t think my brother and I saw each other on a regular basis. He was off in his world, and I was off in mine.

Not surprising. Par for the course actually.

“She should be home making supper”. Way to go Richard!
Richard and Misogyny went together like hand in glove.
On numerous occasions Richard would refer to Sue as a “stupid bitch” or a “fucking cunt”.
I will never for the life of me ever understand what Sue saw in Richard and why she stuck around.
She was better than average looking and she was in her very early 20s when she moved in with Richard on CFB Namao.
She could have easily done much better than Richard.

Yeah, I don’t think there was an external source large enough for Richard to focus his anger and his hate.

“Mr. Gill states that his mother is an alcoholic who refuses to seek help or treatment for her condition”. What an asshole.
Richard was just as much of an alcoholic as Grandma was.
Funnything was, Grandma’s alcoholism didn’t deter Richard from asking grandma to come live with us on Canadian Forces Base Summerside. And it didn’t deter him from asking Captain Lynda Tyrell for a compasionate posting in the summer of 1978 so that we could move to Canadian Forces Base Namao so grandma and her husband Andy Anderson could move into the PMQ on base to raise my brother and I.
And no, Richard didn’t see anything wrong with expsoing Scott and I to grandma’s alcoholism from spring 1977 until spring 1981.
Grandma’s alcoholism only became an issue when Richard had some explainging to do with Social Services.

See, my issues had nothing to do with 1-1/2 years of sexual abuse on CFB Namao. Nor did my issues stem from a dysfunctional family. No, my issues were the fault of the school on base and the fault of mr grandmother. Nothing to do with Richard.

Understatment of the Year Award goes to “The Gill family is a rather confused and insular unit”.

This is the same mother that either Richard forgot to tell the CFNIS in 2011 was raising my brother and I from 1977 until 1981 or that the CFNIS asked Richard to forget in 2011. Either way, grandma had a major inpact on my brother and I.

This part was still redacted, but let me unredact this for you ” Mr. Gill appeared concerned about his mother’s drinking, suggesting she was emotionally abusive to both children, especially when inebriated. As well, Mr. Gill suggested that his mother attempts to undermine any closeness between him and his sons by telling them false stories”.
The only stories that grandma used to tell me, I can’t speak for my brother, but grandma always told me not to believe what Richard had said about our mother leaving, that when I was older I would learn what the truth was.

The thing was, grandma was a nice person when she was pissed drunk. She’d take my brother and I over to the base Canex to buy a toy or two. She’d take us to the base groceteria to grab treats. She’d even take us on the military shuttle bus into the city of Edmonton to go buy toys at Army & Navy. It’s when grandma was sobering up or even sober when she was cruel and angry.

Richard was the exact same thing as his mother. Nice guy when he was pissed drunk. Asshole when he was sobering up. Unpredictable when he was sober.

As per court records from PEI, Richard did in fact NOT have legal custody of my brother and I.

Richard, what the fuck was wrong with you?