THE ROYAL OPENS ITS DOORS TO TEENS

Offers Sessions on Mental Health, Addiction

Arms folded, Dr. Raj Bhatla spoke only briefly, but to the
moment.

"If you go back five, 10, 20 years, you would never see this," the
Royal Ottawa's chief psychiatrist told a group of 50 high school
students from Almonte, just emerged from the morning rain.

"This is a real change."

He was referring to an outreach program that involves busing into the
Royal's auditorium on Carling Avenue about 800 high school students
for four half-day sessions on mental health and addiction.

During the next two hours, the Grade 11 and 12 students would hear
from an addictions counsellor, a neuro-scientist, a social
worker/communications director and an in-patient with a hopeful story
of recovery.

Indeed, if anything can be said about the Royal's approach to battling
mental health in the last couple of years, it is just this: the idea
that its institutional walls need to come down and the story - or
"conversation" to borrow their overused buzzword - needs to move to
the streets.

Thus, Alfie and the You Know Who I Am campaign, the Do It For Daron
youth suicide effort and this one, called Is It Just Me?

One of the effects of this heightened awareness is predictable. In the
wake of the Daron Richardson suicide a year ago, help agencies (from
CHEO to the Youth Services Bureau) were overwhelmed with calls for
assistance from newly vigilant families, some of them no doubt
over-reacting.

At the Royal's Mental Health Centre on Carling, in fact, wait times
for day-programs can be measured in hundreds of names and hundreds of
days (six to eight months is not unheard of).

Many is the day they could use more than 188 beds.

Monday and Tuesday's sessions are among the Royal's ways of responding
to some 500 annual requests to speak at schools, all across Eastern
Ontario.

The students made it clear that it is easy to find booze or drugs in a
small town. Boredom seemed to be a major motivator. Several said
"there's nothing to do" in a community that size and weekend parties,
sometimes in the bush, were the norm, not the exception.

"I know from living in a small town, it's way easier to get drugs than
alcohol," said Leanne Paisley, an addictions counsellor at the mental
health centre.

Some of the students agreed. Arielle Turpin, 17 and in Grade 12, said
after the session it's not unusual to see at least one student high on
drugs during school hours every day. "Honestly, there's nothing else
to do."

She also said mental-health services in Almonte are pretty much
non-existent, forcing residents to travel to surrounding towns or to
Ottawa.

It is easy to overlook how small is this high school community, unlike
in a big city, and what issues of isolation that presents. This
Almonte high school has but 470 students. Nor are they immune to the
alarm that spread around Perth in June 2010 when there were two
suicides connected to the same high school and four more in the same
school board.

(On the plus side, the community came together and a light was cast on
the thin support network available for troubled youth.)

Jake Rivington, 17, is also in Grade 12. He, too, said drugs are used
during school hours. "Marijuana is the most common, the easiest one to
get," he said later.

Kristin Shannon, 34, described her own struggle with depression, an
illness she knew virtually nothing about as a teenager. She had been a
competitive figure skater and a popular high school student.

"I had no clue what that meant."

In the last 15 years, she's had about 20 major depressive episodes,
the most serious of which landed her in the Royal for about two months.

Though outwardly social, she described a terrible descent into
loneliness and tears when she was a university student and how a
chance encounter with an acquaintance got her steered toward
professional help.

Later, even with a good job and the support of family and friends, she
often had feelings of complete despair, and contemplated suicide.

She encouraged students to reach out to a friend or a trusted adult
who might steer them toward help.

The session ended with an upbeat message from Dr. David Hayes, a
research scientist who studies brain circuitry as it relates to
emotions and addiction.

He left students with the results of repeated research about
happiness. It is not, he said, dependent on such things as wealth, IQ
or education levels, good looks, or having children.

He left them with a number of coping tricks which, at age 16 and up,
they will have a lifetime to employ.