I won’t lose my life to PTSD. Not Today.

A life changed forever in one minute

It was two days before Christmas. Firefighter Rob Leathen arrived on the scene of a two-vehicle accident on eastbound Highway 9 just west of Newmarket, Ontario. What he encountered there haunts him to this day.

A car and a van had collided head-on. The driver of the van was killed. The driver of the car, who was impaired by alcohol, survived.

Almost 25 years later, after countless other on-the-job traumas, he still had not come to terms with what happened that night. He couldn’t erase the memory of what he had seen. He couldn’t let go of the anger he felt towards the woman who caused the crash.

Only when his mental health began to deteriorate to the point where his wife was threatening divorce and he was becoming estranged from his children, did he seek help for the first time. Only then, when he was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder and suicidal ideation did he seek therapy and begin the journey that would help him let go of that anger and all of the intrusive thoughts and images from that night.  

“The hardest part is making that decision and taking that first step to reach out for help,” says Rob. “There is a lot of stigma about mental health with first responders.  Your ego gets in the way. We are the people that somebody calls when they have a problem and it’s hard to accept when you’re the one who needs help.  It’s hard to accept when your daughter tells you she doesn’t know who her father is.”

Since beginning treatment a little over two years ago, Rob has become an advocate for first responder mental health supports.  An active member of the first responder peer support group Boots on the Ground, he has done public speaking about the need for PTSD treatment and supports and maintains a blog where he writes in intimate detail about his recovery, as well as a gallery of his own digital artwork representing the PTSD experience.

“Treatment works.  I’m not where I want to be yet.  I’m not where I need to be yet.  But I am sure glad I am not where I was and that’s because of therapy.”

In addition to providing the kind of customized clinical treatment for PTSD that Rob has benefited from, CAMH is also on the leading edge of brain research that is looking at PTSD on a molecular level in search of new treatments and interventions.

For example, Dr. Fang Liu, Senior Scientist and Head, Molecular Neuroscience at the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH, has developed a peptide that has been successful in pre-clinical trials in preventing the formation of traumatic memories in the brain. Though it sounds more like science fiction, the very real hope is that this treatment can be developed in the form of a spray that first responders and others could take at the time of a traumatic event in a way that could actually prevent PTSD from developing.

“It’s too late for me for prevention, but so many other people could benefit. It is absolutely vital that we fund mental health research like this. It is important to me because I live PTSD and depression every day.  I’ve dealt with thoughts of suicide and I’ve had colleagues die by suicide.  It’s got to stop. If we can do anything to decrease that, it's going to be accomplished through research. For people like us, hope is everything.  The research going on at CAMH gives me hope.”