September is Suicide Prevention Month and the first step toward preventing suicide is shedding the stigma associated with mental illness and encouraging people to talk about it openly and honestly.
“The advice I give people in general is, try to normalize the conversation,” said mental health advocate and fundraiser Ken Debney. “You have to be talking about suicide and mental illness the same way you would talk about cancer or sports or whatever it may be.”
Talking openly about the issue is a Debney family commitment and Ken Debney even has a semicolon tattooed on his wrist to symbolize the depth of his commitment to the cause.
“Our family, meaning me, my wife and my daughter, have made a point of talking about it as much as we can, whenever we have the opportunity,” said Debney. “The biggest issue is that there has always been a stigma, that people kind of hide, and that is the problem.”
The cost of not talking about it in time came home to the Debney family in the worst possible way when their son and brother Gordon Clarke Debney took his own life on August 21, 2014, just three weeks short of his 30th birthday.
“Gordon’s birthday was September 14th,” said Debney. “That was how our first fundraiser started, actually. We were already planning a birthday party, so we decided to go ahead and that turned into an annual fundraiser.”
Debney, his wife Cristine, their daughter Melanie Bom and her husband Kyle Bom are the principal organizers of the annual fundraiser, along with help from a growing list of community volunteers and local business owners.
“We kind of made that promise,” said Debney. “We decided the night we got that news that we are not going to hide in the shadows about it. Not be secretive. We were going to shout from the mountain tops and do something about it so other people wouldn’t have to experience the same thing.”
For the first six years the fundraiser was held at increasingly larger venues in Cambridge and included penny-table prizes and in-person, interactive games such as Human Hungry Hippo.
“Our event grew to a point where we were using the Newfoundland Club in Cambridge on pretty much the same kind of night in September,” he said. “We were getting about 175 people out. The joke was that it was kind of like a stag and doe and the stag wasn’t there, but you had to bring the doe. Then COVID hit and we thought, we can’t do this live. So, this year like last year is a little different.”
The response to their first Facebook live event last year surpassed all their expectations.
“The previous year we had raised $10,000 on a live night so we kind of thought, maybe we might raise $5,000 and it just blew our mind in two ways,” said Debney. “One, was the support we still got. The big contributors from previous years didn’t hesitate to jump in again. Last year the Facebook live event raised $10,000 again.”
They are hoping for a similar response this year as they prepare for the 8th Annual Suicide Prevention Fundraiser in Memory of Gordon Clarke Debney. The Facebook live event runs from 7:30 to 9 p.m. on September 29. See the link for more details https://fb.me/e/3ItRe5z6H
“We have six main prizes that people buy tickets for,” said Debney. “They are raffle tickets, basically and the winners will be contacted whether they are attending the event or not. The dollars we raise are going to help people who are in immediate need of care right now. They can call the crisis line and be supported through the Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo-Wellington.”
The games and prizes help to draw people and raise money but even more important is raising discussion and reducing stigma around suicide and mental illness.
“I can tell you I get chills a little bit when I talk about it,” said Debney . “There is the indirect help and I don’t mean to toot my horn, but I know we’ve done a lot of good work. We’ve had more than one person express to my family, either individually or our family as a group, that we were the difference. I won’t get into the details out of respect for the person, but yah, for sure, I know we have definitely saved some lives.”
They have also helped family and friends identify symptoms and signs in people, such as Gordon, struggling with mental illness.
“If I knew what I know today I might have had a better opportunity to take action but, he hid it from us as well,” said Debney. “We knew that Gordon was not in his best place. He came across as lonely. He was out of touch at work. He came out of a year-long relationship that he hoped would continue. For all those reasons he was down I would say. I didn’t see a risk at the time.”
The fundraiser has been the Debney family’s main priority during the month of September since Gordon’s death and a fitting way to honour his memory.
“I saw a quote one time not too long ago that really nailed it for me,” said Debney. “It was, ‘At some point we have to stop pulling people out of the river, move upriver and find out why they are falling in’.”.png;w=120;h=80;mode=crop)
