Ben Verboom initially resembles an ordinary student: 20 years old, studying Physical Education and Health at U of T. Approximately five minutes of conversation with him, however, reveal he is anything but average. Currently, Verboom is cycling across Canada to raise awareness about mental health, an issue he has direct and gripping experience with.

“I grew up in Ajax, Ontario,” said Verboom, “with my parents, my older brother, and my younger sister, and yeah, we were a normal, middle-class family. I had a very close relationship with my father, and how we bonded was through cycling—that was how we got away from everything, how we built our relationship.”

That all changed when Verboom was in grade 9.

“Everything was normal, family going great, and in January of 2004 […] I came home to find a police car in my driveway. I asked them what was up, and they said ‘oh, we’re just doing a routine check around the neighborhood, don’t worry too much about it.’ […] I thought it was kind of weird.

“A few hours later my brother, mom, and sister had all arrived home, and the police came back. They sat us all down, and told us that my dad had been found—that he had died. It was a gunshot wound. And they took my mom outside, and […] then she came in and told the three of us that he had taken his own life.”

Verboom’s father had suffered from clinical depression for several years prior, a fact that took Verboom and his siblings by surprise at the time of his death.

“For me it was extremely sudden,” said Verboom. “Because I was completely unaware that he did suffer from depression, and I didn’t know too much about mental illness—and I don’t think the average 14-year-old really does—which is [why] I guess what I’m doing is raising awareness.”

Immediately following his father’s death, and for many years after, Verboom felt mainly “anger, fear, and confusion—those three were big.”

“Because it’s one thing to lose a parent,” he continued, “that’s a terrible tragedy. But the confusion associated with someone choosing to end their own life [is] very hard to deal with, because you do question the role you played in it—what you did to cause it, and what you could have done to prevent it.”

In the past year, Verboom came to realize that the emotion and awareness his experience has brought him could be used to help others.

“The bottom line, I think, is that people suffering from depression feel isolated from society—pushed to the margins. There’s this stigma surrounding mental illness. The general public doesn’t know the basic facts about it.”

Verboom maintains that his primary goal is not to make the people surrounding a depressed individual aware of that depression, but rather to promote a shift in the nature of the dialogue concerning mental illness. He hopes to educate people about depression and the resources available to those suffering from it.

“We have to start looking at [clinical depression] as another disease,” insisted Verboom. “A physiological disease, like cancer, or AIDS, and not a moral issue—it’s a chemical imbalance in their brain, and like any other physiological disease, it’s not something you decide to have, it’s something you have, and you live with, and you try to cope with.”

In cycling across Canada discussing clinical depression, Verboom is attempting to reframe the dialogue in this manner in order to de-stigmatize the disease, allowing for an open and empathetic discussion of it.

Over the span of his trip so far, which began on May 20 in Cape Spear, Newfoundland, and will end in Victoria, B.C. in mid-August—9000 kilometres in 90 days—he has been amazed at the prevalence of depression.

“Basically every day I run into a few people who have gone through something similar to what I went through, or what my dad went through. And really, the reason we don’t realize how prevalent it is is because we don’t talk about it […] I suppose the number-one goal of this is to start a dialogue—a compassionate, and empathetic dialogue, where people who are suffering from depression can come out and speak comfortably, and get the treatment and resources that are available.”

WITH FILES FROM NAUSHAD ALI HUSEIN

For more info, or to contribute to the Cycle to Help campaign, see cycletohelp.org