PALMERSTON – Last week, Norwell District Secondary School (NDSS) celebrated and embraced Mental Health Education and Awareness Week with guest speaker Paulie O’Byrne, a mental health specialist with the Canadian Hockey League (CHL).
“Our board is focusing on Mental Health Education Week this year by providing the theme ‘five days of wellness’ and so each day in the week, they kind of have a different association to that theme,” said NDSS teacher and equity, diversity and inclusion lead Brayden Scott.
On May 8, Norwell delved into the science behind wellness and explored evidence that supports its effectiveness, and O’Byrne came to speak at an assembly in the school cafeteria.
Through a connection at a previous job, Scott knew O’Byrne and asked him to speak to students about his wellness journey and what to look out for.
“It’s not very often that men talk about their mental health and wellness and I know that’s also a subject that isn’t really focused on,” Scott explained.
O’Byrne has been asked to speak to over 500,000 people across Canada in the last decade, including sports teams, community groups and high schools.
Shortly after moving to Mount Forest from the east coast, O’Byrne said he was always “playing catch-up in life”, doing poorly in school, struggling with addictions and having several other things impact his mental health.
Without going into too much personal detail, O’Byrne shared this with students and his road to being hired as the first and only 2023-24 season mental health specialist in the CHL, working solely with the London Knights.
“Paulie has a really heavy hockey background – and knowing that several students here at our school are in the hockey program, or enjoy hockey or are active in some way, shape or form – I just thought like ‘this just seems to check all the boxes,’” Scott said.
O’Byrne told the Community News that speaking to high school students is “very important, especially in Norwell and rural Ontario.”
“I grew up in Mount Forest and sports like hockey was a big thing when I was growing up, and I know that hockey is still a very prevalent thing around Wellington County,” he said.
O’Byrne added a key thing he has noticed in rural Ontario teens, especially with involvement in hockey, is drinking.
“I think kids now have such a fast track to what could turn out to be a toxic environment for them,” he said.
“I think just giving them a heads-up… because life’s going to happen when you leave high school. No matter what, life is gonna happen.
“For me, I put all my eggs in one basket and it didn’t work out for me and I didn’t have any coping skills for life. I didn’t have any life skills. And that was the sacrifice that I guess I made subconsciously.”
Now, with an educational background in child and youth care as a practitioner and being a certified peer support worker accredited by Peer Support Canada, O’Byrne owns his own business providing peer support services in Huron County called Sunset Recovery.
He said he does this as a “passion project” on top of working with the London Knights and public speaking engagements.
“I speak at a lot of high schools, and the thing that really stuck out for me [at NDSS] was that there weren’t any kids on cell phones; every single student that was there was engaged in what we were trying to accomplish there,” said O’Byrne.
“I just felt like it was really successful. And I couldn’t say enough about Norwell, and I really appreciate them asking me to come and speak.”
