Shawn said Not Today

Unbroken

For anyone tempted to think that some people are just too broken to be fixed, consider the life and near death of Shawn Pendenque.

A victim of sexual and physical abuse as a child in a strictly religious household where the family went to church five days a week, Shawn was also taught to believe that being gay was a sin against God.  By the age of 16, he was living on the streets when he wasn’t being shuffled between hostels and group homes.

In spite of all of that, Shawn was able to make a success out of his young adult life. By his mid-thirties he became a highly regarded youth social worker, had a house and a car and was in a loving relationship.

“I think I had been mentally ill for many years I just had a really good cloaking mechanism,” he says. “I assumed I had it together because everything was working out for me. I didn’t look the part of someone in trouble.”

He did not realize it at the time, but in terms of his mental health, Shawn was on borrowed time. His Bipolar Disorder had not been diagnosed. Neither had his Schizoaffective Disorder.

His sister was the first to notice that he was beginning to act differently as his psychosis emerged. He describes being consumed by religious grandiosity, culminating in a 27-page letter, his ‘manifesto’, that he sent to every judge in the Jarvis family courthouse saying they were all going to be judged by God and sent to Hell.

With no one in the system recognizing that he was experiencing active psychosis, he was instead charged criminally with uttering death threats and immediately sent to prison to await trial.

It was there, in prison, that he was finally diagnosed with mental illness. It was there, alone in a prison cell, when he decided he was too broken to be fixed and tried to take his life. If not for the emergency intervention of a prison guard, his life would have ended right there.

A recent CAMH study found that people with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder are far more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and are at greatest risk if they are diagnosed after the age of 30, as Shawn was, and during the first few years after diagnosis.

“I felt cursed for having that diagnosis, I was so angry about being ill,” he says. “I hated myself and didn’t feel I deserved to live anymore. I lost touch with reality completely by trying to escape the pain I was feeling inside.”

But then, for the first time in his adult life, he started receiving treatment for his mental illness. He started receiving medication for his mental illness.

“I realized that I could see Jesus more as a friend to help me through this dark and lonely time,” he says. “I no longer felt chained by the piousness of my abusive childhood religion.”

Now in stable housing again and working as a peer support worker with racialized adults and complex mental health clients at LOFT (the same organization that helped him during his teenage years on the streets), Shawn looks back on his near-death experiences not with a sense of anger, but with gratitude.

“The mental health system saved my life and I feel a real sense of obligation to give back,” he says. “Now that my life has turned around, I have come to accept my mental illness instead of trying to fight it. I was spared the darkness of losing everything because of some kind and generous people and now it’s my chance to give some of that generosity back.”