Mental health is in the forefront for Ontario Hockey League (OHL) officials this season.
Partnering with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), the league developed the Talk Today program to bring mental health awareness into the locker room.
The Guelph Storm hosted a public awareness night at its Jan. 18 game where CMHA Waterloo Wellington Dufferin (WWD) representatives told spectators about Talk Today as well as other programs available in the community for the general public.
This year, under Talk Today, all players and support staff in the OHL were required to participate in mandatory mental health awareness seminars for the first time.
“What we’re trying to share with these young men is that it’s okay to be vulnerable, that strength doesn’t just mean physical strength that they’re used to on the ice but it also means mental and emotional strength and a big part of being emotionally strong is not being afraid to share with somebody that they’re not having a great day,” said Andy Best, communications specialist for the CMHA WWD.
Talk Today comes on the heels of the death of Terry Trafford, a former Saginaw Spirit player who took his own life in March of last year.
Best said that over the summer “there was a lot of public scrutiny and pressure on the OHL to take action and to make mental health a part of the conversation in the locker room.”
Talk Today was born out of an effort to fill that void.
Through the program all players and support staff participated in Safe Talk, a suicide prevention training seminar that CMHA WWD has been running for more than four years, said Linda Bender, a team leader for mental health promotion and education with the association.
“It really is designed to … help anybody be able to identify people who are having thoughts of suicide or maybe having thoughts of suicide and connect them to suicide intervention resources,” Bender said.
Each OHL team participated in its own three hour session that taught participants how to prevent avoidance when talking about suicide, Bender explained.
Taking it one step further, one or two participants from each team participated in Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), a two-day course that aims to provide the tools to “de-escalate a situation where self-harm is imminent or possible,” Best said.
“The goal of this training is to equip all the teams across the OHL with the skill sets inside of their organization to be able to recognize when something like this might be developing and then also to have the tools to help deal with that,” he said.
For one Guelph Storm player, the training was invaluable.
“It was really helpful and it definitely opened everybody’s eyes, especially the guys that haven’t really had it affect them yet,” said Storm defenceman Zac Leslie.
“I think it really opened our eyes to how important it is to be able to talk to teammates and the people around you,” he said.
“It gave us the tools to be able to, if we saw one of our teammates or one of our friends going through a hard time, then we would be there to help them.”
Though teaming up with the CMHA is a first for the Guelph Storm, the topic of mental health awareness is not new to the organization.
Last year, before Talk Today was implemented, #GetInTouchForHutch, an Arthur based anti-stigma and mental health awareness group, set up booths at a Storm game to create awareness and ran the 50/50 draw with the benefits going to the organization.
Now that the first year of Talk Today is pretty much completed, Best said the results were positive. Though there are no firm plans yet, he said he hopes the program will continue next year with the next crop of OHL players and support staff.
“We’re really optimistic that what we’ve done with Talk Today is going to be a good step forward towards providing the youth with the tools they need to cope with these kinds of situations and hopefully avoiding any sort of situation where self harm would ever occur again in the OHL,” Best said.
