Why?

I am often asked why I choose to disclose as much as I do about my mental health. Some people call it brave. Others say less charitable things. There will always be critics. But the reason I speak is simple and deliberate.

First, it helps me stay well.

Being public about my mental health gives me a sense of control over my life and my narrative. Writing helps me think clearly about what I am experiencing on good days and bad days. It helps me mark progress and name obstacles. I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging. The people who read this are invested, either because they live with mental illness themselves or because someone they love does.

Second, I disclosed because of the young people and families I have worked with my entire adult life.

Long before I understood my own diagnosis, I worked with youth struggling with trauma, addiction, eating disorders, OCD, and serious psychiatric illnesses including bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and schizophrenia. I worked with their parents through suicide attempts, through grief after loss, through addiction crises, and through brain injuries and brain trauma. I helped build suicide prevention strategies for youth in Ottawa. I stood with families whose children did not survive.

When I began struggling myself, I believed it would be dishonest to conceal that reality. If children and families were coming to me in their most vulnerable moments, how could I hide my own experience from my colleagues, my constituents, or the public? Authenticity was an ethical decision.

I remain involved in mental health research, lived experience work, and advocacy because it advances my own stability and because it honours those families.

There are moments that stay with you forever.

In my 2007 election, my second campaign, I met a father at CHEO. My daughter was just over a year old. His son was sixteen, living with schizophrenia, and had attempted suicide. I ran into that father again just before Christmas. His son is now in his thirties. There were no easy words so we cried and I reached over to hold both of his hands so he would know he was not alone.

A week or two later, I attended the funeral of a young man I had worked with for over a decade. He became addicted to opioids. Together with a group called We the Parents, we fought the fentanyl crisis in Ottawa. He was a fierce advocate and he courageously and generously fought his addiction with everything he had and worked tirelessly to protect other kids. He lost his life shortly before Christmas. His father and mother embraced me at the funeral, surprised I had come now that I am no longer elected. I told him the truth. His son made an indelible mark on my life.

Then, over the past week, another father held my hands while telling me about his daughter, whose life is being ravaged by an eating disorder. Her life is at risk. Her parents are fighting for her survival every day, they, along with her, are in crisis.

In each of these cases, parents fought or continue to fight for their children. Their children are living with illnesses that hijack the brain in ways most people cannot imagine.

That is why I speak.

Breaking silence breaks shame for their families, and starts to end the stigma.

Mental illness and addiction are diseases of the brain, no different in legitimacy or seriousness than physical illness. The fact that we are still afraid to talk about them in 2026 is a failure of our systems, not of the people been torn apart by them.

If you are struggling, or someone you love is, please call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you are in Ottawa, contact The Ottawa Hospital mental health services. Help exists in moments when it feels unreachable.

If you have lived through this and are able to speak, your voice matters more than you know. Every time I share, I am not only speaking for myself, I am speaking for the young people who are scared, confused, and fighting to survive, and for the families doing everything they can to save them.

And I speak for my harshest critics because I never want them to know the heartbreaking reality of mental illness and addiction, but I assure you, if they ever do, I will be there to cry with them, hold their hand and hug them so they will know they are not alone.

It’s a pretty simple answer to a very easy question. Why?

With love,

Lisa