Tag: mental-health

Okay, so it should come as no surprise that I have a fixation on Medical Assistance in Dying when mental illness is the sole underlying condition.

Mental illness has always been my constant companion.

Not since the days of my youth on Canadian Forces Base Namao have I been free of mental illness.

Having obvious but untreated mental illness is a torment that no one should ever have to go through. What’s much worse by far though is having diagnosed mental illness but being actively prevented from receiving treatment for those issues.

My father’s been dead for seven years now. But I did examine him for federal court back in 2013, and when questioned about my diagnoses back in 1980, he claimed to know nothing about this.

But then again he also claimed to know nothing about Captain Terry Totzke either.

Much like everything else to do with the Canadian Armed Forces and the events related to 1980, I don’t think that we’ll ever know 100% of the truth.

All I can say is that my father was a master corporal and Totzke was a captain.

And I still maintain to this day that as fucked up and depraved as the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao was, the period of time between October of 1980 and the spring of 1983 was far worse.

In the current day it’s very hard to separate what currently is from what could have been or what should have been.

For example, my gender. Even before CFB Namao I had more or less a preference for being female. I remember being around five or six that I was upset that I wasn’t going to be a girl.

During the period of abuse on CFB Namao I had often wondered if the babysitter was doing what he had been doing because I was acting like a girl. Maybe if I had been more like a boy then the babysitter wouldn’t have touched me.

The day that I was caught being buggered in the babysitter’s bedroom, the teens that beat the shit out of me before I could get back home were calling me a homo, a queer, a fagot.

In the days and weeks after the final sexual assault the kids on base started referring to me as the babysitter’s girlfriend, the babysitter’s wife, and that if I didn’t watch out that I was going to have the babysitter’s baby.

In October of 1980, when it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to fit it at Guthrie School on Canadian Forces Base Namao my family was moved 10 km down the street to CFB Griesbach.

I was a social pariah and an outcast from the word go. But to make matters far worse was my involvement with Terry.

Terry was adamant that I was suffering from a mental illness called “homosexuality” and that I was responsible for allowing my younger brother to be sexually abused by the babysitter. During our various sessions together Terry would remind me that boys are supposed to be attracted to girls, and that homosexuality was a crime and that I would be sent to the Alberta Hospital if I still insisted on kissing and touching boys.

Why Terry chose to ignore my diagnoses is anyone’s guess. Even if Terry was still alive these days, I don’t think that he would tell the truth.

It was during this period of time that my bed wetting started to occur at an alarming rate. The cure at home for this was to let me go to school smelling like stale piss because I was obviously wetting the bed just to get attention.

Now, you have to understand that as a child I had very little understanding of the things going on at the adult level. I lived on a military base. My father was in the military. My social worker was in the military. Matters were discussed at a level that I would never have been privileged to.

Even though I lived on Canadian Forces Base Namao during the time of the Captain McRae fiasco I never knew anything about McRae other than he was the father at the chapel and grandma took us for Sunday service.

So when Terry and my father had picked me up from school one day to go for an appointment and we drove past the military prison on CFB Griesbach and one of the two said to me that “if I stayed a homosexual” that I would end up in prison “like the priest”. At the time I had no idea of the whole Captain McRae fiasco.

I went through my teenaged years hating the fact that I wished that I was a girl, as this was obviously why the babysitter had sex with me, right? The babysitter (so far as I knew at the time) wasn’t getting into trouble because it’s perfectly normal for boys to fuck girls. Well, that is what Terry and my father were always going o about. And let’s be honest, the military was extremely misogynistic back then. So, it was obviously my fault that the babysitter abused me for as long as he did. If I didn’t like the abuse I could have stopped it at any time, right?

And while all of this was going on I was becoming more and more withdrawn.

Because of my untreated major depression, severe anxiety, and my out of control haphephobia I was not a pleasure to be around. And as one of my teachers noted, I was ostracized and often made a scapegoat.

None of this got any better when my family came to the attention of Alberta Social Services. In fact, once I became involved with Alberta Social Service in November of 1981, things at home became much, much worse. And this wasn’t due to Alberta Social Services per se, it was due to Terry’s and my father’s reactions to Alberta Social Services.

Alberta Social Services realized that I was having significant behavioural issues. But Terry and my father never once mentioned the events of CFB Namao to Alberta Social Services. Instead my father would try to convince Alberta Social Services that I was acting up because I missed my mother, or because I was just seeking attention, or because my grandmother had been cruel to my brother and I.

What didn’t help this matter was that I was told by both Terry and my father that Pat and Wayne were involved with me because of my homosexuality. Of course I wouldn’t learn until August of 2011 that Pat and Wayne were child care workers with the Alberta Government and that Terry and my father were both employees of the Canadian Armed Forces and that in hindsight Terry and my father didn’t appreciate Alberta Social Services sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted.

My father had no issue whatsoever in the privacy of our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach venting his frustrations on me for “fucking” with his military career. This would often be delivered by either the belt or by openhanded backhands. Or going to bed without supper.

There was a time in which the relationship between my father and his girlfriend Sue was at risk of falling apart. She had threatened to leave him. Richard sat my brother and I down and basically explained to us that if Sue left, that he was going to kill the two of us, stuff our bodies into a duffel bag, get rid of us where no one was ever going to find us, and he’d move into the barracks like nothing ever happened. The terrifying thing about this was the look in his eye meant that he was deadly serious and that he obviously had put some serious thought into this.

I remember having been expelled from school in the winter of ’83 because I apparently was still attracted to boys. And I remember the sudden move in the spring of ’83 because Pat and Wayne wanted to give me drugs to make me stop liking boys and my father didn’t want me taking those drugs so we had to move so that he could save me. Learning the truth about that in 2011 doesn’t change the pain and anguish that this caused. Nor does learning the truth about CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach change how devastating life became for me on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario.

The truth about ’83 is that I wasn’t expelled from the MacArthur Program for exhibiting “homosexuality”. Nor did Pat and Wayne even seem to know anything about my alleged “homosexuality”. No, the “expulsion” and the sudden move were due to the fact that Alberta Social Services wanted to remove me from my father’s care and place me into protective custody. As I was officially Captain Totzke’s client Alberta Social Services had to inform Totzke about their plans to place me into foster care or residential care due to my father’s outright refusal to participate in the family counselling, and that if he continued to refuse and continued to not seek treatment for his anger issues, that my issues were never going to get any better. On January 26th, 1983 Captain Totzke was told about these plans. On January 28th, 1983 Captain Totzke informed Alberta Social Services about my father posting to Ontario that had just been approved.

Alberta Social Services asked my father if he intended to tell me about the move, he said that he would not. However, both Terry and my father said that I would be placed at the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto to receive psychiatric care. This never happened. In fact there never were any applications or inquiries made to Sick Kids.

On Canadian Forces Base Downsview my mental health continued to plummet. On CFB Griesbach and on CFB Namao, my exposure to other kids was limited to other base brats or to other kids in the Westfield / MacArthur day program. And that was it. Canadian Forces Base Downsview didn’t have a school on base for the children of military families. We were all punted off to the local North York public school like Sheppard Public, Downsview Public, Elia Jr. High, Pierre Laporte Jr. High., C.W. Jeffries, and Downsview Secondary School.

And unlike on base, where kids like me were shunned and ostracized, in public school we were targets for beatings from the civy kids.

And one thing that that I was going to become extremely familiar with is the fact that sexually abused children with emotional issues were magnets for sexual deviants and perverts. When your own father blamed you for the sexual abuse you endured previously this means that you don’t dare mention the sexual abuse that you are currently enduring as you know that you’ll just get blamed again.

Having been sexually abused meant that I was expecting just about every male adult that I was somehow involved with was going to sexually abuse me or expect sexual favours for good marks or good grades. But the truth is that none of my teachers ever tried to touch me. Even teacher that my father had called homos and faggots, like Mr. Ford or Mr. Bowles, or even Mr. Cross.

But, because of my father’s reactions to anything homosexual, I knew that I had to keep my distance from these teachers, or anyone else of the male persuasion that wanted to help me because it was obvious that they must be trying to be nice to me because they just wanted a blow job from me or to get into my pants.

So yeah, this made school very fucking awkward for me.

And by this time my depression, my anxiety, and my haphephobia were all in overdrive. The years of neglect and the mental abuse were starting to add up and to take their toll. School would keep asking my father why I was late, and why I was sleeping in classes, and why I had such a negative attitude. His response always was that I was just acting up to get attention and that he didn’t understand why I wasn’t waking up on time and why I was sleeping in class all the time. I guess that he never told my teachers or the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto about the sexual abuse I endured, about the major depression, severe anxiety, and haphephobia that I had been diagnosed with, but not receiving treatment for, and I’ll bet you that my father never once told the schools about the fact that he’d come downstairs into the basement every night where my bedroom was, and that he’d smoke and watch TV until about 02:00 to 02:30 in the morning due to his severe insomnia.

Yes, he had his own daemons to endure, but that didn’t mean that he had any right to subject me to his daemons.

So I was constantly in trouble at school which only ensured that I was going to get “corrective punishment” at home.

By the summer of 1985 his anger and his temper had reached a boiling point. Luckily my brother and I were up in Edmonton for the summer. Richard had raged out in the PMQ and went on a major destructive spree. Furniture had been thrown out the windows, holes punched in the walls, drapes and curtains torn off the rails. It took three military police officers to restrain him. Only with my father in custody and at risk of being courts martialed out of the military did the chickenshit neighbours start to tell the military police and the brass about the way in which Richard had been neglecting and beating us.

This wasn’t the first time in Richard’s military career that he was anxious about being thrown out of the military for one of his outbursts, but he wasn’t. Not the previous times and not the time in 1985.

What was odd though is that from this point of time onward there were yearly reviews noted in his service file. In 1985 he only had 8 years to go until retirement. Did someone in the forces feel sorry for him due to his involvement with the HMCS Kootenay in 1969?

Looking back I can only wonder why no one in the Canadian Forces could have shown me 1/100th the sympathy they had shown to Richard.

But again, this isn’t about Richard. This is about why I desire Medical Assistance in Dying. Unfortunately I can’t go into the reasonings for my desire for M.A.i.D. without explaining to you how I was failed by the Canadian Armed Forces, by my father who was an employee of the Canadian Armed Forces, and by Captain Terry Totzke who not only was an employee of the Canadian Armed Forces but who was by virtue of rank my father’s superior.

There is absolutely no therapy or drug that will free me from the memories of CFB Namao and how I was dealt with in the aftermath of CFB Namao.

There are no treatments or therapies that will free me from the damage of long term untreated major depression, severe anxiety, nor haphephobia.

My long term gender issues will not be solved by an apology or a settlement.

The damage is done.

In fact a settlement may actually make things worse as this will mean that things didn’t have to be as bad as they were and that I didn’t have to suffer through untreated mental illnesses due to a desire to keep things hushed, and gender confusion that was drilled into my head due to institutional homophobia.

Living a life where I am reduced to drifting along as flotsam on the ocean currents working in jobs that I fit into because of the high skills that I bring to positions that typically don’t pay the wages required for these types of skills.

Never having had the safety net of a family that I could fall back on if I tried to take a risk in life and took a misstep meant that trade school or other educational endeavours were forever out of my grasp.

Having grown up with a father that drilled into my that I was a worthless cocksucking piece of shit and that I was the cause of my brother’s sexual abuse and subsequent criminal behaviour really didn’t foster an attitude of excellence.

The only time that my father ever gave me any helpful advice was back in 2006 when we talked about the babysitter and I told him that I was working up the courage to report the babysitter to the police. He told me that I have to watch where I go sticking my nose because I might not like the smell of the shit.

Even before I started to learn the full truth about the child sex abuse scandal from Canadian Forces Base Namao I had wanted to die.

I tried with a plastic bag two times on CFB Griesbach.

When my father was posted to CFB Downsview I tried again, usually under the guise of taking risks.

I used to go to Bloor and Yonge and wait until the trains were approaching and then I’d run and jump off the platform and jump over the 3rd rails and then hop up on the other platform. The thinking was that if I got hit “accidentally” that it wouldn’t hurt as much.

I did this until a fellow cadet in sea cadets told me that his father was a motorman on the TTC and that suicide jumpers fucked up the train drivers.

Then I became fascinated with jumping. The Bloor street viaduct over the Don Valley Parkway always seemed to be a hotspot. But how does one accidentally fall from a bridge?

When I moved back to Edmonton in 1990 I tried the High Level Bridge.

I really, really needed my suicide to look like an accident. My fear was that if I committed suicide that my father would just tell everyone that I was just seeking attention and that I had committed suicide to escape my responsibility for allowing my brother to be sexually molested.

Again, you don’t fall off bridges accidentally.

May of 1994 found me on the underside of the Lions Gate Bridge with a six pack of cheap ass beer. I was trying to work up the courage to get pissed drunk enough that I would no longer care about what my father would have to say about my death. And besides, it was perfect. Who takes a six pack of beer to a fucking bridge and climbs onto a service gondola underneath the bridge to get drunk. Must have been some idiot looking for a thrill, right? Definitely not a homosexual pervert looking to escape the responsibility of letting his young brother be molested, right?

I didn’t drink back in the day, so I was completely hammered off 3 of the 6 beers. I started to hallucinate my father and the babysitter, P.S., together at my funeral laughing their heads off at me. My father was telling me to stop blaming the babysitter for what had happened, that it was my fault. I cried for a couple of hours after that. I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.

I was determined to jump in front of the Skytrain in 2006. That didn’t pan out.

I was determined to jump out of my apartment window in July of 2011 when Master Warrant Officer Terry Eisenmenger told me that there was very little chance of bringing charges against the babysitter as there was no evidence against him.

Again in November of 2011 when Petty Officer Steve Morris told me that the CFNIS could find absolutely no evidence to indicate that the babysitter was capable of what I had accused him of.

Then there was July 19th, 2012 when I was interviewed by the Military Police Complaints Commission for my statement. It was during this interview that both Peter Cicalo and Claude Bergeron told me that they had reviewed the 2011 CFNIS investigation and that they couldn’t find anything wrong with the CFNIS investigation and in fact the investigators with the CFNIS went above and beyond the call of duty as this was a historical case. I kept walking in circles between the Burrard Bridge and the Granville Street bridge working up the courage to jump. But again the same thing kept coming back. If I jumped then the MPCC, the CFNIS, the Canadian Forces, my father, and P.S. win. I get written off in the annals of history as being a fucking attention seeking homosexual nutcase that was trying to shirk his responsibility for what he had done on CFB Namao.

Since about 2016, I have been pinning my hopes on receiving Medical Assistance in Dying. This became even more so after the 2019 Truchon decision in the Quebec Superior Court and the Senate’s suggestion that Mental Illness be considered as one of the criteria for obtaining M.A.i.D.

Why?

To receive M.A.i.D. you have to have a verifiable mental illness. I have them and no one can deny them and no one can negate the horrific effect that they’ve had on my life.

But even more so the unquestionable evidence shows that the Canadian Armed Forces, my father, Captain Totzke, and various others knew of the full extent of the abuse that had occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao and that instead of allowing me to be a victim, I was vilified and denied treatment all in the name of keeping a lid on the secrets of CFB Namao.

The DOJ, the DND, and the CAF can all mew and cry all they want now. And believe me, they will deny, deny, deny. They will paint me in the public eye as a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the Canadian Forces. I should know this, they did this to me once already.

But what they will never be able to deny me is that there is a hell of a lot more to this story than just poor widdle P.S. getting touched by Captain McRae.

My hope is that win or lose, that I can be humanely put to sleep after the court decision. Because at this point in time the genie is out of the bottle. The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence are no longer going to be able to portray me as a psychotic loser making up stories and lies.

I can go to sleep knowing that I did my best to get the truth out, and that it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

I can go to sleep knowing that I never have to deal with assholes telling me to fucking smile more, or to simply fucking forget about it, or suggesting that I take some responsibility for my life, or that other people have it hard in life therefore I should shut the fuck up and stop whining like a little bitch.

I didn’t ask to be born into a defective family. I didn’t ask to be molested by perverts of Canadian Forces Base Namao. I didn’t ask for untreated mental illnesses. I didn’t ask for relentless victim blaming and shaming.

I just want to go peacefully and respectfully.

No more nightmares. No more teeth grinding. No more being touched and then getting chewed out for “overreacting”. No more being told that I just need to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. No more being told that I just have to get a degree or a diploma and my life would be so much better. No more being told that I’m too smart.

All gone.