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My name is Leif Gregersen. I am a very fortunate person in so many ways. I loved growing up in Canada despite the long, cold winters. As a child, I was always building snow forts, getting into snowball fights, skating, or cross-country skiing. I loved school, too; it was the most essential thing in my life. I wanted to grow up to be a lawyer, and most people believed I could do so. There were other things I liked about school. Though I didn’t have a lot of close friends, I played a lot of team sports like soccer, basketball, Canadian football and more. 

Elementary school ended in grade six when I was eleven. The summer was just over two months long, and I was able to get work on a local farm. I didn’t need the money to help support my family. I just wanted to have enough to pay for video games, pop, and comic books. The summer ended, and I went on to grade seven. This was where things really fell apart.

Everything in Grade Seven was different. We were expected to be adults, and all the things I used to love to do were considered kids’ stuff. I also didn’t know many of the people in my new class. In the first week alone, I got into about five fights. I recall having vivid dreams where I would go back to elementary school and stay a kid forever. I ended up making one friend, and we did a lot of things together. At the end of Grade Seven he just disappeared. I learned later that he had been in a hospital for a whole year in a psychiatric ward. Looking back, it seems funny that two people who had mental health difficulties just sort of gravitated to each other.

Grade Eight was a much different experience for me. I joined Air Cadets, a youth organization funded by the military. At first, I didn’t want to join, but my dad made me go to one meeting, and suddenly, I was hooked. I went back to playing sports, worked hard in the classes we were given, and got top marks. By the end of the year, I had done well enough to earn the right to go to summer camp on a real military base for two weeks. The problem came when I got back. No one else had changed, but I did.

After returning from camp, I was ten times more enthusiastic about being a cadet. It ran near the borderline of obsession. I would wear army clothes everywhere, even to school, and I was always carrying knives or matches. This really worried my dad because he had been a fireman when he was younger.

The worst of it all came when I bought a BB gun and shot holes in some windows without knowing I had done so. My parents decided that with all that had been going on and the problems I often experienced with depression, that I needed to see a psychiatrist.

I did go to see the doctor, but I didn’t understand that psychiatrists are highly trained specialists who can help people a lot. After a short interview, he told me he wanted me to come into the hospital for a week. Once I was in, that turned into two weeks, and to me, the shame and stigma of being labeled a crazy person caused me to give up on things like grades and even cadets. I imagined my bright future slipping away from me.

I went on to high school, but I did very poorly in the first year. There were things I liked a lot about high school, especially sitting at a table that only cadets ate at. Finally, I had people in my life I thought were true friends. This was around the time I started to drink alcohol. I would drink to lessen my depression and anxiety, but almost always go too far. This behavior drove my friends away from me. By the end of the year, I had failed half of my classes. I was devastated. I decided to quit cadets and focus on my part-time job as a fry cook and my studies.

The next two years, I had all the outward signs of what a happy person should look like. I had my own car; I later had a motorcycle. I had nice clothes and a few friends. My grades were even improving. But I felt so desperately alone and lonely, and I was in the worst state of depression any person could be in. I was struggling with illnesses that were completely untreated.

Because of poor grades in grade ten, I had to return for a second year of grade twelve. Halfway into the first semester, a close friend died by suicide. I was devastated, and I imagined that he was feeling a lot like I did when he killed himself. On top of this, I got a night shift job, which came with a lot of pressure and office politics. Then there was my dad. He was a heavy drinker then, and we fought constantly. Everything in my life was precarious, and I didn’t know what to do.

I first thought I could solve all my problems by being the perfect student, perfect worker, and perfect son. This was when I first started to experience psychosis. I slowly began to drift away from reality. Soon after, I was assaulted by my sister’s boyfriend, and I left their apartment but was screaming and shouting. The police were called, and I was taken to the nearby University Hospital.

None of the doctors seemed to know what was going on with me. Certainly, none of them told me what my diagnosis was. I felt I was just the victim of bad circumstances and wanted to go home so I could finish school. I only had a few more months to finish.

This lack of insight into my condition has a name: anosognosia. This is when you are ill, but you don’t believe anything is wrong. One of the worst things about being in this situation is that if you don’t believe you are ill, you won’t take medication, which is essential to someone recovering from a mental illness.

Over the next while, I was in and out of hospitals. I lost my job, my car broke down, I was kicked out of school, and I was severely ill. But somehow, the hospital I was sent to found medication to restore me to sanity. The hardest thing to accept was that all the delusional ideas that were reinforced by hallucinations and paranoia weren’t real. I understood this when I was on medication, but it would be years before I decided to take medication and advice from my doctors.

The next ten years seem like a blur. For most of it, I lived alone and had few friends. I read a lot, but my life was being wasted. Then, after being reasonably stable for a year or two, I lowered one of my medications without the doctor’s consent and became extremely ill. This time, I went to the hospital for six long months and was badly mistreated. I have nothing but bad to say about that hospital admission, other than the fact that when I left, I went into a group home rather than back to living alone.

Living in the group home meant I had regular meals, regular sleep, people to talk to, and regular medications. Plus, in a place where all residents either have a mental illness or are trained to deal with people who have one, there is almost no stigma. In this place, I began to thrive.

Soon after my release from the hospital, I found a job and saved enough to visit my sister in Toronto. I found that I loved to travel, and I took a few trips to Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, and more trips to Toronto. At this time, I was enjoying my life and also was able to finish writing my book “Through the Withering Storm,” which talks about my teen years as I struggled with untreated mental illness.

Everything seemed to just keep getting better. I got a great job that allowed me to pay for editing my book, and I started writing and publishing more books. I reunited with my very first girlfriend, and we became close again.          

My whole experience at the clinic is different now. I do have to get an injection every two weeks, but the person who gives it to me is like an old friend. We always talk and share books we have read. One of the things I am finding as I get older is that many of the skills I learned in cadets are incredibly good to have. In cadets, I took a public speaking course, a first aid course, a photography course, and completed a 2-week summer camp called Air Crew Survival, which taught me everything I ever wanted to know about surviving a plane crash or even just going camping.

I currently work for The Schizophrenia Society, and I give a lot of presentations to different classes. I am also often asked to give a presentation to our local police recruits about mental illness and how to deal with people who are in crisis. The income from the books and what the Schizophrenia Society pays me has allowed me to focus on my writing full-time. It hasn’t made me much money, but I am healthy, happy, and I do what I love to do.