Rehtaeh Parsons

Rehtaeh

        Her name is Rehtaeh Parsons, and she died after being taken off life support Sunday, April 7. Her death was the result of a suicide attempt that was ultimately successful. The vile circumstances that led to this poor girl’s death should serve as a wakeup call to all Canadians out there. Online bullying and slut shaming have reached scary new heights in our society. We must take action to ensure that the sick and twisted chain of events that cut short the life of Rehtaeh Parsons never happen again.

She loved all of her many pets

          One night in November 2011, Rehtaeh and a friend went to another friends’s house and had a bit to drink.There were four other boys there, and at some point during the night her friend left. She was only 15 years old when she was raped by the four boys. During the rape, one of the boys took a picture and decided that it would be funny to circulate it online. Though she was drunk and barely remembered the incident the next morning, no one would ever let her forget it. No one believed that it was a rape. Everyone just thought she was a slut. Her old friends abandoned her, and she moved away to Halifax to seek escape. The bullying continued, and she fell into depression. The shaming had become so extreme that Rehtaeh was admitted to hospital and on suicide watch for 6 weeks. Eventually she managed to move home and was able to start fighting the depression. She tried to hold her head up high, and tried to simply forget about what happened. 

           She attempted to prosecute the boys who did this to her. She went to the police, they did nothing for her. They said there was no case. They did not even interview the boys until the end of the investigation. No child pornography charges. No rape charges. No bullying charges. Nothing. 

Rehtaeh and her father just chillin

           Rehtaeh died from suicide April 7th at 11:15 PM. She was 17 years old.

           Rehteah’s father wrote a beautiful but heart breaking piece about her. The full article which I very strongly suggest you read and share virally is available by clicking the excerpt.

“I had to write something about this. I don’t want her life to defined by a Google search about suicide or death or rape. I want it to be about the giving heart she had. Her smile. Her love of life and the beautiful way in which she lived it.  The family I found out this afternoon my daughter saved the life of a young woman with her heart. How fitting. She also gave someone a new liver, a kidney, a new breath, and a new chance to love. She saved the lives of four people with her final gift of life. She was that wonderful. Someone out there is going to look at the world with my daughter’s eyes. The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.”

         The piece written by her father and interview with her mother almost brought me to tears. There is a strength and nobility in the way her parents are dealing with the death of their precious daughter. There are no calls for revenge, or vigilante justice. Just some good, honest people trying to do the best they can after losing the one they loved the most in this world.

        I guess the rest of it falls on us, the teenagers of today. It’s our job now never to tolerate another instance of a young woman being bullied and abused. Alcohol is not consent. Rape makes rapists out of the perpetrators, not sluts out of the victims. Let this tragedy be a turning point that forever changes how we view those victims.

Our demon-haunted world

     I spent a good part of the March break in Quebec City this year, and while I was there, I met a girl l have not been able to forget. While dancing with her one night, I glanced down, and I couldn’t fail to notice the raised pink scars lining the inside of her arm. Later I saw that her hips were also marked with the very same parallel ridges. I didn’t mention it, and neither did she. One look in her eyes, and I could tell she knew. 

     Only a few days later, I learned that one of my closest friends has been suffering with anorexia for months. 

     With all of these things happening at once, mental health (depression, eating disorders, schizophrenia) has definitely been on my mind. In this blog post, I’d like to take a look back into the history of mental health, and maybe even try to guess what lies ahead.

1800s Asylum

     From problems with the gods, to Prozac, the way society sees mental health has shifted drastically over the course of our history. Ancient peoples usually thought that mental illness came from the gods or demons. Charms, hexes, and ointments were seen as the best way to treat these problems. The  only light in this dark age was the Greek Hippocrates who classified paranoia, epilepsy, mania and melancholia. In the middle ages, people who were mentally ill were believed to have demons inside them, and they were killed. Joan of Arc, the warrior maiden who liberated France from British occupation, heard voices inside her head that she believed were holy. The church inquisitors believed her to be possessed by a demon and she was burned at the stake.

     From the Renaissance through to the late nineteenth century, confinement, institutionalization and torture were seen as the best treatment for deviants from society. Insane asylums were very profitable businesses at the time. Some owners would even let people pay a penny to see the patients being abused. Harsh treatments and restraints were seen as therapeutic. It was not until very recently that we started to try digging into the root cause and possible solutions to the widespread mental illness in our world.

Ashley Smith

     Psychoanalysis and prescription antidepressants now dominate the mental health landscape. The mental health facilities now are much different from the ones of the past, and far more effective. However, we still know little about these illnesses of the mind. Our treatments are far from perfect, as proved by the sad case of Ashley Smith who was in solitary confinement 23 hours a day at the Kitchener prison for women, and repeatedly choked herself with cloth strips. It seems clear that prison authorities had no idea how to help her. I hope that, in the future, we will have a good enough understanding of the brain to be able to identify and treat these diseases.

     In the words of Cardinal Roger Mahoney, "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members -- the last, the least, the littlest." Maybe one day, we will be able to say with pride that even those who are so ill that they can’t function in society are receiving the treatment they need. I hope that day is not too far off.