Local musicians got together to raise funds for the Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health.
Her weapons are simple. Her goal is not.
Centretown resident Amy Read is fighting the stigma surrounding mental illness through song and conversation.
The founder of the benefit concert VOICES says she wants to show the audience that it’s okay to talk about mental illness, in the hopes that more people will get the help they need.
“The more we talk about it the more ‘normalized’ it becomes,” she says, adding that she would like to see people talk about mental illness the way they talk about any other illness.
VOICES is an annual concert for the Royal Ottawa that took place at the National Arts Centre. This year, it lined up with Bullying Awareness Week and a Movember campaign focusing on men’s mental health as well as prostate cancer.
VOICES features four local singer-songwriters, all onstage together playing. In between songs, they will share stories with the audience about how mental illness has touched their lives.
“It’s an intimate type of performance . . . almost like a conversation amongst everyone,” Read says.
A child of the 1970s, Read developed an anxiety disorder when she was only six years old. She kept her anxiety a secret, and went untreated for 17 years.
It’s still a taboo subject, says Renee Ouimet, of the Canadian Mental Health Association Ottawa branch.
“People are scared of being judged,” she says. “They’re scared that they will be rejected by friends and family.”
The CMHA’s Talking About Mental Illness program has a similar goal to VOICES – destigmatizing mental illness through conversation.
All the presenters in the TAMI program have lived with mental illnesses, Ouimet says, and they share their experiences with students.
Because when it comes to mental illness, silence does more harm than good.
“If I was diagnosed earlier, I could have known my experiences were normal,” Read says. “It would eliminate the torturous experience of loneliness and isolation.”
Bullying can increase the risk for mental health issues in young people, says Ernie Gibbs, a councillor for LGBTQ youth at the Centretown Community Health Centre. And the bullies are starting young.
“There’s quite a high degree of verbal bullying in Grades 6, 7, and 8,” he says.
It doesn’t end with the final bell, either. Texting and social media have made cyberbullying possible 24 hours a day, Gibbs says.
“You go home from school and you get more of it,” he says. “From Facebook and other online media.”
It’s difficult for young people to deal with cyberbullying on their own, he says. They can become so overwhelmed that they just shut down.
“It’s just such a difficult time,” says Read. “And if you’re dealing with mental health, bullying, or depression, it’s just that much harder.”
But young people who are being bullied have significantly less risk of developing mental illnesses like depression or anxiety if they have someone to talk to, says Gibbs.
If someone is dealing with depression brought on by bullying, Read says, the discussions help them realize they are not alone. That’s a powerful feeling.
These open conversations are only pieces of a much larger movement in Ottawa.
“There’s more of a trend towards openness,” says Ouimet. “There’s training in workplaces and the community that never would have happened 30 years ago.”
Read says she has also noticed the change.
“Over the last few years we’ve seen movement towards more openness. We can’t lose (the momentum) now,” she says. “We have to keep it going.”