Donald Schulz says the key to his recovery from depression was volunteering to help others with mental health issues.
When he reached his lowest point, Donald Shultz delayed his suicide plan long enough to write a letter.
“I despise myself every morning when I shave,” he wrote to his only confidante, a psychologist. “Sometimes I think I should take the blade out of the razor . . .”
His recollection of the letter ends there, but Shultz remembers exactly how he planned to kill himself.
That was in 1988. Shultz spent the next four years in and out of treatment centres, where he was monitored constantly.
He was diagnosed with severe clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic pain.
Shultz, now 58, says his problems began when he was bullied as a child.
Due to a heart condition, he was a small boy with limited physical abilities.
As a teenager he weighed 65 pounds and could barely walk to school. Sports were out of the question.
He couldn’t keep up with the other kids, so they shunned him. Shultz says he had no friends.
His isolation extended into adulthood and his feelings of loneliness were compounded by confusion over his sexuality, he says.
When his coworkers at an Ottawa computer company began making snide comments about his job performance, childhood memories slowly resurfaced until eventually, Shultz says, he “blew a gasket.”
That was then.
More than two decades later the same man cracks jokes and chats animatedly about his past, while picking at a ham sandwich and mushroom soup in a Bank Street coffee shop.
The turning point, he remembers, came after spending months in a hospital bed.
“I was lying there waiting for someone to fix me,” he says.
Eventually Shultz realized that medication and doctors could only bring him so far, and to help himself he would have to get over his anger.
Shultz says he progressed slowly, but credits his health to his volunteer work with organizations like the Canadian Mental Health Association and Psychiatric Survivors of Ottawa, where he helps others deal with mental illness.
Earlier this year Shultz received recognition for his volunteer work in the form of a Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award. As much as his work helps others, Shultz says it has changed his life by bringing him out of isolation and connecting him to a supportive community.
His eyes light up behind large, square bifocals when he talks about his current projects. Shultz visits high schools to speak to Grade 11 and 12 students about mental illness, spends time with people who are socially isolated, and “makes fun” of his personal experience with mental illness through stand-up comedy.
His wheezy bursts of laughter, impromptu impersonations, and well-timed jokes liven the coffee shop on an otherwise dull, rainy Saturday afternoon.
Comedy is a way for Shultz to make light of his dark past and to shrug off the things he can’t change, like the attitude of his
parents.
Shultz says his father has no idea he has a mental illness or that he is gay, and his old-fashioned dad would not accept either.
“There’s no way he’s going to have a queer son, never mind a queer son who’s mentally ill,” he says, laughing.
“That’d be a double whammy.”
Shultz’s mother, on the other hand, knows about his mental illness but is in denial about the severity.
“She thinks it’s like a cold,” he chuckles.
Then Shultz is serious for a moment, taking the opportunity to criticize those who adopt a casual “pull up your socks” attitude when dealing with mental illness. It’s just not that simple, he says.
But after a pause, he drops a punch line.
“And if it’s a cold I’ve had it for a long time!”