One teacher’s struggle with mental health

It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just been discharged from the psychiatric ward of Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Hospital, where I’ve spent the last 31 days undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Who can forget the brutal ECT scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? I know I couldn’t when my doctor first broached the subject. Thankfully, ECT is nothing like what was depicted in the movie. It’s a medical procedure that occurs in the hospital. I’m put under, a doctor induces a seizure, I wake up after 15 to 20 minutes and return home an hour later. In simple terms, my brain gets rebooted. I normally wake up with a slightly sore jaw and a mild headache that can linger until the next day, but for me, ECT’s positive effects have been nothing short of miraculous. My family and friends say that my eyes look alive again, and I feel like a giant weight has been lifted. “Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind,” as the song goes.

Why did I end up in the middle of a mental health struggle? The simple answer is why not me? You see, like others in our profession (I surprisingly wasn’t the only teacher hospitalized in the mental health unit), I’ve been dealing with the effects of stress for a long time. Talking with the other teachers, I learned my story is far from unique.

In my case, I reached the point where I could no longer deal with the excessive stress of the work environment, and that led to my mental breakdown. I was eventually diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder, becoming sick enough that I needed to be admitted to hospital. During my struggle, I also had various doctors and counsellors describe my situation with conditions like burnout, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD.

The truth is that teaching is a wonderfully rewarding and noble profession, but it can also be grinding and exhausting. In my 35-year career, I’ve been fortunate enough to have coached numerous teams, sponsored everything from peer support to coding clubs, acted as a mentor teacher several times, and I was president of my local for ten years. I accepted multiyear roles such as a new curriculum lead in my division, department head, webmaster, grade coordinator, technology lead teacher and department lead teacher at my school. I felt lucky to spend time in front of kids and loved every minute of it.

The year I became sick, I had my dream schedule, and I was sponsoring a multidepartment robotics club that had amazing student buy-in and achievement. During what I considered to be the very best year of my career, I also had to deal with some things completely beyond my control. I had a sick child at home, my workplace dynamics were becoming increasingly unbearable, and we were first hit by the uncertainties of a global pandemic. The stress grew until I reached a breaking point with what I considered an unsafe re-entry plan. In the first days of the new school year, for the first time in my life, I suffered successive panic attacks that were severe enough to put me on sick leave. I sent in three days of lesson plans and crawled into bed, into the darkness, unable to sleep, eat or breath. Ten days later, while recovering but still on sick leave, I received a formal reprimand (another first for me), for not having provided more lesson plans.

Being reprimanded crushed my soul. I was utterly devastated and instantly disenfranchised. I am my own harshest critic, and receiving such a letter left me completely in shame. I snapped and then broke, falling into a deep and consuming depression caused by the uncertainty of “am I worthy to be a teacher?” My breakdown occurred three years ago, and I haven’t been whole since.

My journey to mental health is not over. I’m slated to continue ECT treatments, three times a week for the next month. Realistically, I could be receiving ECT much longer as my doctor “tapers” the frequency over the months to come. I will also need to continue psychotherapy and taking a daily cocktail of meds that paradoxically range from amphetamines to keep me awake and alert during the day to strong benzodiazepines that help calm me down sufficiently enough to function. But thanks to all these therapies and my positive response to ECT, there’s now a glimmer of hope for me to eventually be well again and have a successful return to work.

“Mental health in the workplace” is getting a lot of ink these days. Some employers respond with blanket emails about exercise, proper diet and mindfulness—although well intentioned, wellness is truly about so much more. To me, wellness in the workplace is about feeling heard and having a sense of belonging; it’s about feeling valued, appreciated and supported; it’s about recognizing limits and lightening the load before the weight is too much to bear. What does it mean to you? What does “supporting mental wellness” really look like in action? I hope that sharing my story sparks conversations that seek to answer these questions so that fewer people find themselves asking, “Why did this happen to me?”