The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - A Grieving Son's Fight for Better Mental Health Care

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Noah Irvine was just five when his mother died by suicide, and just 15 when his father passed away after an accidental prescription drug overdose. Now Noah has made it his mission to change the way Canada cares for people struggling with mental health challenges and addiction. In addition to writing over two thousand letters to elected officials across the country, Noah has memorialized his parents, his journey, and his vision for the future in his book, "Learning to Live."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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it. He's a good buddy. I don't think we would have gotten through a lot of stuff without Norman. And yeah, he fits the family well. NOAH IRVIN, I'm a local mental health and addictions advocate. And I guess we're here to tell my story. The book that I wrote, it's entitled Learning to Live. And it details the loss of my mom and dad to mental health. And it also details

a story of hope. And the hope is that the book is able to put a bit of a different spin on what mental health actually looks like. I didn't really meet Noah truly in the sense of getting to know him until after his dad had died. About a year after, about this time when he was in grade 11 and he lost his dad in grade 10. And he approached me. He approached me one day and said, do you know my story? We started something together called the Soup Club, which was a club for kids who had lost a parent. We found out there was a lot more kids in the school than we maybe realized.

So I met Noah when I came to GCVI as vice principal and then moved into the role of principal. So I've known Noah as a student, but also as a, I've known Noah more as him being an alumni and reconnecting with the school since he's been off to University of Guelph. Noah's been constantly in touch with the school and now giving back in so many ways.

My origin story, if we want to call it that, starts in about 2002, 2003, when my mom and I witnessed domestic violence. And in 2005, my mom, Leslie, took her life while an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital in the province of Ontario. Leslie was 24 when she died, and I was only five years old. Three years later, I was diagnosed with non-verbal learning disability.

The name may have changed in some of the literature, but it's a complex learning disability. The short and sweet is my spelling is somewhat atrocious, so thank God for spell check. My ability to do math, pretty poor. I'm better with the real world math. And understanding the abstract. I'm a very black and white thinker. Fast forward a little bit further, I go into high school. High school in grade 9 is always challenging for anybody,

but it became even more challenging at the end of grade 9 when my father, Kent, died of an accidental prescription drug overdose. He died the day after he was released from a treatment facility in the city of Toronto. And there's been a lot of points in my life where the system didn't know what to do with me. I lost my own father at 23, not quite as young as Noah, but had kind of a feeling of, you know, that weirdness of losing a parent earlier than you expected.

And I think that started to maybe bond us a little bit. The other thing I think that really bonded us was when Noah first approached me and told me the story. And I realized as mom had gone to this school, I immediately took him down to the archives and we figured out where it were years. And we found old yearbooks and we found pictures of it. And I think from then on, we've just kind of been,

you know, have each other's backs in some ways, right? No child in this country should stand at his parents' graves by the age of 15. That is a mark of absolute government and societal failure. And I am convinced, maybe more naive than I should, but I'm convinced that we can do better. So when it very first started, he was in a class here with a teacher by the name of Jill Goudreau, and it was first kind of civics and sort of like doing something active. And that's how it started.

And I don't even know if when he wrote the very first letter if no one knew that he was gonna take it to the extent he was but being Noah he just decided that I am gonna hit everybody with this and he did. In 2017 I sent a letter to every member of Parliament and I had pitched the idea of writing a letter. Writing a letter about my mom and dad's story and she was so moved by the letter that she encouraged me very quickly to send it. I didn't want to at first. At that time nobody really knew that I had lost my parents. I had kept that pretty quiet in school. With wanting to send that, nobody knows at school the story and then wanting to send that nobody knows at school the story and then wanting to

send that piece out not only opens myself up to people in the school knowing the story but also 336 strangers that's how many members of Parliament were sitting at the time and each one of them was going to get that letter so it was a bit difficult to want to send it, but I eventually ended up sending it on my birthday in February of 2017. I've done more letter writing since 2019. If you don't count repeats,

we're probably up to 1800, 1900. If you count repeats, we're well over 2000 letters that have been sent across the country on this, because I do believe there's a way forward. The reason I started with the feds when I wrote my letters was because this is a national crisis and it should be a national embarrassment that we have a 15-year-old child standing in his parents' graves.

And no federal parliamentarian should ever be able to say, that's not our job. Because it is. The federal government needs a stand-alone ministry and a ministry that takes charge on national leadership. Because at the end of the day, in all the reports I've read, you could slap any province's name on a report and it would be the exact same report. A PEI report will be very similar to a BC report. They are all experiencing the same problems, but I'm convinced that they can all experience the same solutions. The Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions in Ontario needs to be standalone.

We have an Associate Minister. He has as much power as a Parliamentary Secretary. He is not a minister that can write a cheque. He needs his own standalone ministry, so that the success or failure of this system, somebody is accountable. Both mom and dad, when they went to hospital, their primary caregivers were shut out of their health care. There should be a continuum of care and families should be included in that. It is wrong to shun families. It's an outdated model of care. So would be included in that. It is wrong to shun families.

It's an outdated model of care. So would that have saved my father's life? That's not for me to decide, nor is it for me to decide if my mother's story would have been different. But would they save another Leslie in Kent? I am 100% in the belief that they would. Dad went to Grand River Hospital, which is in Kitchener. He was a Kitchener-Waterloo resident. His father and mother were his primary caregivers. So he goes to Grand River, and his father is immediately shut out of the care that his son is receiving because he's above the age of 18.

He goes in, receives treatment, some of which included shock treatments that his father didn't know were happening. Was dad in the right frame of mind to consent to that? It would have been something where his father would have liked to have known. For mom, you know, an individual who had attempted her life numerous times, goes into a psychiatric hospital, and in said psychiatric hospital, she is able to say, I don't want to see my parents. Is she in the capacity to make that decision? When you are in hospital with a mental health condition, you're deemed unfit to be in the community at that time because you

are sick. Who is in the community? Well, your family. And my mom and my dad both went back to their families. Both received treatment that their families didn't know about and or waited months after to understand what had actually happened while in treatment. On this, for an individual, I would like those individuals who are in care to have some form of wraparound service.

And that wraparound service, I think, includes families. So we either fund family before it gets tragic, or we fund grief counseling and services for family after. We aren't funding either effectively. We aren't funding it at all well. The way forward out of this is to have one individual in Toronto and in Ottawa leading some form of transformative change in healthcare. The mental health disease burden is like one and a half times

higher than cancer and heart disease combined. The productivity lost, if we want to look at numbers, is enormous. It is billions of dollars that this country loses to those who are struggling. Leslie and Kent, in my book, look very normal. They do not look like they are suffering insurmountable demons in their minds, but they were. And I think that's an important face to show on this. I've got a lot of teachers that I could list off that took me to university to see that I could do it. But regardless of my learning disability, regardless of the loss of my parents, regardless of all of the hardship, that I could do it. That regardless of my learning disability, regardless of the loss of my parents, regardless of all of the hardship, that I could do it.

Those are Sandy Azond and Gerard Guthrow. Both of them played large roles in not only seeing that I was more than the narrowness of my past. They took me to Wilfrid Laurier, showed me, you know, this is what a post-secondary university looks like. Two teachers took time out of their lives to show me that the world is a lot bigger than just the story that I live with.

And GCVI, my high school, my alma mater, that is a school that saved my life. Without that school, I don't know if I would be doing this with you today. Public education has the capacity to save lives, and it did for me. So when he wrote the book during COVID, right, the pandemic, he, of course, in speaking engagements and things as well, he decided at some point along the way that he wanted to find his way to give back. You know, he just decided that any money he could bring in from that, a portion of that was going to go to this scholarship to help financially kids that are in a similar situation to him,

where a parent or two in some cases has passed away. And if he can help financially alleviate that burden and help those kids find their way on to the next step of life, that's what he's trying to do with it. So it's really, it's kind of noble. Noah often wants to meet, and he came very serious one day and asked about it, said it was time to start a memorial scholarship in the name of his mom and dad. And it's for students at GCVI that have lost a parent. And Noah was really, really dedicated to making sure that students who have lost a parent and have obstacles in their life have a scholarship for when they graduate and they go off to post-secondary.

I'm graduating in June from university. My parents are not here to see that. And it is a mission of mine that no other child in this country graduates from college, university, or an apprenticeship program without his parents there because we failed as a society to help those with mental health issues. I hope to go to law school in 2025. So as sad as the book is, the book is also very hopeful. Thank you.