United, inspired, rewarded

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/05/2016 (3492 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A young man had died by suicide. In the shared grief of the moment, not knowing what to say, someone who knew his parents said this to me:

“There are no words.”

I knew what he meant.

But this week, a group of four Vincent Massey Collegiate students offered me a lesson about there never being enough words when it comes to grieving someone who has taken their own life. Or enough words when it comes to taking the stigmatizing sting and myths out of mental health.

The death by suicide of 18-year-old Vincent Massey student Miguel Labossiere last June — on the day before the last exam — left the traumatized school body with no time to mourn collectively. And it’s also what brought the four together at the beginning of the new school year. Every week for nearly five months, they would meet as a committee with principal Tony Carvey and vice-principal Colleen Roberts to plan a way of memorializing Miguel’s life. But also in the hope of finding a way to learn about mental health in a way that opened minds and, yes, opened mouths.

The result has been beyond simply inspiring.

And May 16, as a result of what they ended up accomplishing with one full February day of gathering students in the school gym — and the demonstrable impact it has had — the four Vincent Massey students are being honoured by the City of Winnipeg with one of its annual Youth Role Model Awards. Although, judging by the few words Carvey was allowed to write in his nomination letter, I don’t think the judges on the citizen equity committee truly appreciate just how important the group’s work has been at Vincent Massey.

It was the students who approached the principal and, over time, it was the vice-principal who began to think of them as the Breakfast Club because of the similar sort of diversity the four shared with the characters from the 1985 movie about teenage angst.

There was tiny-but-big-hearted Loizza Aquino, a friend of Miguel’s who — reacting to two other high school suicides in Garden City the month before Miguel’s — had formed a group called Youth Against Mental Health Stigma; Julia Drybrough, the take-charge leader of the school gay-straight alliance; Tony Campbell, large as a football lineman who has overcome his own mental-health challenges and considered Miguel to be a brother; Graham McCallum, the athlete in the group — an elite badminton player — whose role was as the artist who drew up the poster for the event that became known as Strive2Thrive.

That became the hashtag, too, when kids from around Winnipeg were invited to Twitter-feed their questions about mental health to a panel of experts seated in the Fort Garry high school’s packed gym.

Roberts recalled the moment at one of their meetings with the Breakfast Club when the name Strive2Thrive was mentioned — and the message of hope it sent.

The idea came out of the school’s phys-ed department, which, coincidentally, was piloting a Pembina Trails School Division Grade 10 curriculum on mental health.

Part of the program Miguel’s parents, then-premier Greg Selinger and 1,200 students observed was a Youtube video Loizza put together featuring young people from around the city who volunteered to tell their personal stories about mental health. The video and stories offered a powerful opener to get the panel of experts and moderator Ace Burpee started.

But, as Julia said this week, “We didn’t know how successful it was until afterward when we saw the influx of students in the guidance counsellor’s office and people who now feel comfortable talking about it and understand that their anxieties were going to be taken seriously. A lot of kids didn’t think that anxiety was a mental illness. They just thought they were so nervous that they needed to suck it up.”

To know now that they weren’t alone, Julia suggested, and they could go to someone and talk about it made the difference.

Carvey said the impact has gone beyond the lineups at the school guidance counsellor’s office and the addition of a therapist who visits the medical clinic attached to the high school.

The conversations and sharing about personal struggles have been going on between student and teachers in physics, English and keyboard classes. And even in the hallways.

Naturally, the Breakfast Club is looking forward to receiving its youth role model award later this month, but Friday, as we stood in a Vincent Massey hallway, big Tony Campbell was more interested in talking about the guys on the football team who are now coming up to him and sharing their own struggles.

That, to Tony and the others, is the most important legacy of Strive2Thrive.

“That’s more rewarding than the award itself.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca