There’s no humiliation in asking for help. Know that.

I’m on several waiting lists for therapists covered by the system, and it would be a stretch to pretend the system itself isn’t stretched thin. So I wait. Quietly. Patiently. Like most people trying to access anything public in this province, you take your number and sit with your problems until someone calls your name.

I’m firmly pro mental healthcare. I think access should be expanded massively. My daughter’s been seeing a therapist for nearly six months now, and I do think it’s helped. It’d probably help more if she’d decided for herself that she wanted to go, but hopefully the seed’s been planted. Maybe later in life, if she needs help again, there’ll be less hesitation, less pride, less of that stubborn instinct to suffer quietly.

There should be no humiliation in asking for mental health help.

When I was just boydem Dayv, my mum took me to see a child psychiatrist a few times after my parents split. I remember it positively. Looking back, I think that planted the same kind of seed in me. So, when university depression came knocking, I didn’t hesitate to get help. Same thing lately, trying to process losing my mum while navigating the low-grade warfare of single fatherhood.

But therapy can be a proper hit-or-miss ting. You’re basically speed dating therapists.

Luckily, my daughter got paired with a genuinely excellent therapist straight away. I’m fairly sure the shrink my mum found way back “came highly recommended,” which may explain why we only went a handful of times. University was luck again. I ended up with an excellent psychiatrist in Ottawa who helped me properly, first in person, then later over the phone after I moved. Then he retired and I tried finding someone local after that, but like I said, it’s hit or miss. At the time, life wasn’t actively on fire, so I more or less gave up looking.

During my years of expatitude, options for help were fewer and the culture around mental health was often somewhere between nonexistent and “have you tried drinking about it?” So I coped the way a lot of expats do. With alcohol.

I gave up drinking in 2019. Since then, somehow, life has gotten worse and worse. Funny how sobriety doesn’t always mean sunshine and lollipops.

I signed up for help, and I keep my ears open for more options. My daughter’s therapist passed along a few recommendations, and one of them actually had room for me right away. That’s either good luck or a warning sign. Hard to say.

Fifty-minute sessions. Once every four weeks.

I’m not entirely sure how effective that schedule is meant to be. Feels a bit like trying to put out a house fire with a monthly cup of water, but that’s what an overstretched system offers, so you take it.

I’ve seen this therapist twice. The first session was standard enough. Intro questions, background, basic life inventory. Nothing felt particularly off.

The second session, though, had me looking around like I’d accidentally walked into a job centre instead. The therapist warned me that social assistance wouldn’t last forever and that I needed to find employment as soon as possible—even if that employment paid less than the assistance itself.

I had to stop and ask if I’d heard that correctly. Even if it paid less? That wasn’t advice. That was poverty cosplay disguised as professional guidance. I pushed back immediately. What kind of logic is that? How does deliberately becoming poorer improve literally anything? Was this therapy or recruitment for the worst employers in Ontario?

I’ve only been on assistance for about a year. In my mind, that’s hardly a lifelong hammock of laziness. My daughter is eleven. I left work when my mum was hospitalized because I literally could not get there on time anymore. Life rearranged itself around illness, and then rearranged itself again after death. These things do not snap back to “normal”.

And I’ve been in regular contact with my Ontario Works caseworker. Not once has there been any indication that my support is in danger.

In fact, I had a call with my caseworker yesterday, and there was full agreement that taking a job paying less than social assistance is, professionally speaking, a deadass gerb strategy.

And so the system is paying someone to improve my mental health, and their professional contribution is suggesting I should financially destabilize myself for character development.