Hillary's Story

"She had a big heart, and she was the happiest person to most people who didn't know what she was quietly struggling with," says Patty Borthwick, speaking of her daughter Hillary Hooper who lost her life to suicide in December of 2020. "People told her she was like Robin Williams because she just wanted everyone smiling, and she was the life of the party. She would joke, and she was just always happy unless you knew the other side, but only if you were close did you know the other side."

Borthwick is dealing with the loss of her daughter by sharing her story in the hopes that bringing awareness to suicide will help save other people's lives and help improve mental health care in New Brunswick. Hooper took her own life while in the psychiatric ward of the Saint John Regional Hospital. She had been admitted for a suicide attempt, which notably wasn't her first suicide attempt, and still managed to take her own life while in the care of the Horizon Health. Borthwick is still looking for answers from the province on how her daughter managed to commit suicide while under supervision, but she also hopes sharing her daughter's story will help demystify the stigma surrounding suicide and depression.

Hooper's psychiatric problems first manifested as an eating disorder when she was in high school. "It started with an eating disorder, and she started to drop a lot of weight. She wasn't eating at all, so I took her to psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and doctors because a lot of times eating disorders are treated more as a physical disorder where they're really a mental disorder," said Borthwick. "It was a dentist that saved her, of all things because she loved her teeth, and he had told her you know what are you doing that you're hurting your teeth."
Although her eating disorder dissipated, Hooper's struggles with depression were still there. "In grade 10, she started cutting, which is I guess common for people who are depressed," said Borthwick. "Because they're in pain, so they want to feel the pain is what I've been told by specialists over the years."

Borthwick says Hooper had trouble trying to navigate the mental health system without finding proper help to get to the heart of what was going on. At first, Hooper had appointments through Public Health with councillors in St. Stephen. "I was going through a divorce, a very unpleasant one, and the counsellors put a lot of the onus on that -- that's why she's struggling! But I didn't really believe that, but we just had to keep fighting. Then when she got older and got out of school, the resources drop off. When you become a young adult, it's like you don't matter anymore so unless you you know do something terrible -- trying to get help in this province, to get a psychiatrist or a psychologist -- the wait can be up to a year. When when somebody is in that crisis mode even a week is too long. It ended up bad for Hillary. She had many trips to the ER with suicide attempts over the year and especially in 2020. We thought she was finally going to get help where she was in the Saint John Regional in December 2020, but it didn't turn out that way."

Borthwick says she wishes mental health struggles weren't so stigmatized because maybe her daughter would have had a better shot at getting the help she needed if she could have been more open about it.

"She was a female heavy equipment operator--she had a job in a man's world. The last thing you want to be tainted with is, 'Oh, she's got mental issues.' No matter how much we talk, there still is a stigmatism."