I’m close friends with a couple who used to go to a chiropractor that made grandiose promises of healing, elaborate and lofty therapeutic powers that might rival those of Gandalf. Never mind the sort of thing you would normally expect from a chiropractor—a bit of relief for a stiff neck or persistent aches in the lumbar region. This guy claimed his employment of subtle vertebral adjustments could treat oily skin, acne, insomnia, seasonal allergies, constipation, erectile dysfunction, vertigo, and depression. Not only that, my friends told me they’d seen him treat their infant daughter’s mid back by carefully moving his hands an inch or so above her skin, healing her vertebrae without even touching her.

It’s the sort of stuff that might make you consider either weekly appointments for the foreseeable future—plus maybe a blood oath—or never going to see one of those hack, charlatan pseudo-healers ever again. I was—I am—skeptical, to put it mildly. And yet I am learning to be more careful when making claims about what I truly know. After all, who am I to talk: every Sunday I forgo a restful morning to sit on a hard wooden bench with a room full of people I barely know, where we profess belief in a whole suite of miracles, including a virgin birth and the promise of resurrection from the dead. The world is a strange and mysterious place, jam-packed with weird stuff. Even scientific discoveries are getting super weird. Paired electrons, separated by thousands of miles, will respond in kind and instantaneously when the rotation of one is altered. Neuroscientists haven’t got a hot clue about what consciousness really is or how it really functions. Astrophysicists from the European Space Agency launched the Euclid space probe in hopes it will provide some answers about dark matter and dark energy, something that hasn’t been observed or measured but which, apparently, makes up 95 percent of the universe. For all that we have discovered and understand, mostly we don’t know what’s going on. I sure don’t. Mostly, it seems, the universe is a mystery.

I see a chiropractor a few times a year, mostly for headaches, and I’ve been doing so since I was ten. But I have friends who’ve never gone because they consider the whole enterprise quackery. And who knows, really. If the universe is mostly a mystery, does that mean anything goes, you have your truth, and I have mine? If the universe is 95 percent invisible dark matter, does that mean I should simply go along with the promises of a chiropractor who says he can treat patients without even touching them? How in the world can I tell what’s really going on, whose promises are a scam, and whose are a mystery? If there are some strange things I don’t believe, is that simply an arrogant judgment of something I simply do not understand? How am I supposed to navigate this infinitely complex existence? Who and what am I supposed to trust? Can I even trust myself?

Over the past few years, I have occasionally gently praised the therapeutic emotional/mental benefits of fish oil, basic off-the-shelf stuff you get at the local pharmacy, the cheaper the better. I’ve been taking a twelve-hundred-milligram capsule every day for three years, and for a while my mental health seemed stronger and steadier than it had been in ages. I was less irritable than I had been in a long time, my thinking was clearer and less scattered, the intrusive thoughts less frequent and less pernicious, and the self-destructive fantasies were mostly gone.

I switched to fish oil after fifteen years of trying a variety of antidepressants. When I was nineteen, I tumbled into a prolonged depressive spell, and I lived through dozens of cycles of emotional troughs and crests until I was thirty-two. Suffering through a particularly debilitating time, I booked an appointment with our family doctor, who ran down her list of questions to make a mental health assessment: Have you noticed any changes in your usual sleep patterns? Yes. Do you find that you are more irritable and easily overwhelmed than usual? Yes. Do you have any cyclical, obsessive thought patterns? Yes. Have you had any suicidal thoughts? None that I would feel comfortable talking about with you, but yes. On down the list she read, and when she got to the bottom, she said, “You’re textbook depressed.” She wrote me a prescription for citalopram. “It’s not addictive; side effects are fairly minimal. It’s not going to fundamentally alter your personality, but it will help you cope. It will help with your mood and your mind. You should start noticing the effects in about three weeks.”

No doubt it was placebo effect, but I was already feeling better by day three. And other than occasional and usually fairly miserable experiments weaning myself off them, I took the pills faithfully for the next eleven years. I started to feel the terrible moods coming back, so my doctor upped my dosage, which triggered anxiety, insomnia, and headaches that felt like the back of my skull was about to crack. He switched me to a drug that cost six times as much and incrementally twisted my anxious thoughts up like a tornado, so I switched to another one. A few years later a counsellor friend casually suggested I give fish oil a try.

It may have been placebo effect again, but the fish oil helped me feel better. If I were less scrupulous, I’m sure I could capitalize on the experience and turn it into a side hustle, make a bit of cash if I really set my mind to it. I’d start a health-and-wellness podcast, find a sponsor, build a website with a “Click here to purchase” button. But I’ve got just enough science in my background to know that anecdotal evidence isn’t the same as the double-blind, peer-reviewed scientific experiment. There are too many other external factors from the last year for me to go around shouting “Fish Oil Cured My Depression!”

My mind certainly tends to be healthier when my kids are well. Julia, my eldest daughter, graduated high school and moved out of the house, a fifteen-minute bike ride away. She often stops in for hugs, a quick visit, maybe a snack or some of last night’s leftover chili or pizza. We all get excited when she comes through the door. She is a bright, lively presence with a wide hundred-watt smile, prone to spontaneous dancing in the kitchen, her waist-long silky hair swaying and shimmering. We love her to bits.

She has, unfortunately, inherited some of the troubling qualities of my depressive brain, which I inherited mostly from my mom’s side of the family, a bunch of sunshine-starved, melancholy Scandinavians, a big, beautiful, heartbreaking bunch of tender souls with some serious mental health woes. My oldest aunt lived with crippling bipolar disorder for more than fifty years. I only ever saw her as delightful, kind, intelligent, and eloquent, but as I got older, I heard stories of the hell she lived through: frequent and prolonged hospitalizations, reckless manic spending sprees, endless prescriptions for strong pills to smooth the insufferable crests and troughs, electro-shock therapy, suicidal ideation. For many years, my gentle and long-suffering uncle would drive home from work, steeling his nerves for whatever state his wife might be in: wild, energetic, and anxious or hiding under the covers, exhausted. There was always the fear she might be lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. I’ve got cousins who live with lifelong bipolar disorder or depression; two of them died by suicide in the past two decades. My own mother had some dark, rugged emotional patches when I was young, most of which she kept to herself. My own tendency toward melancholy turned abysmal that summer I turned nineteen; the mental health troubles have been rumbling along ever since, sometimes as a background hum, sometimes as a debilitating cacophony.

And now my daughter carries those tendencies in her. How much of this is nature, how much nurture? How much is in her genes, and how much did she pick up from me and the way I’ve carried myself all these years, the way every kid picks up hints and cues from their parents? Who can say: the world is a strange and mysterious place.

My daughter, she’s always been creative and expressive. In high school she started sewing her own clothes, decorating her bedroom walls with hundreds of photos and stickers like a giant collage, and filling one sketchbook after another with drawings. She was a gentle, timid soul, and my wife and I watched her suffer through the shark tank of middle school, surrounded by peers who could be smiling and warm one day, a blood-hungry frothing mass the next. We watched her tender heart get dragged around and stomped by tough girls who weaponized their own vulnerabilities in all the usual cruel and calculating ways. Then the Covid lockdowns hit. The day the schools closed for spring break plus an extra two weeks, I told the kids at supper, “You know, it’s possible this thing might go on a whole lot longer. I could imagine this going on for months.” Cut off from her fair-weather friends, she turned inward and onto her smartphone, that little glowing portal to infinity.

Eight months into lockdown, she started cutting herself, a not entirely uncommon practice for adolescent girls trying to deal with their pain, but terrifying for strait-laced, white-bread parents like my wife and me. My counsellor said self-harm isn’t necessarily a sign of suicidal thoughts or intentions, but my daughter was having those too. The counsellor said she’d be happy to see Julia as a patient, but after three sessions Julia decided counselling wasn’t for her. “Too hard,” she said. “Besides, it isn’t helping.” Christ almighty, I thought, talk therapy isn’t like stopping at a convenience store for a snack when you’re feeling peckish on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s more like learning to play piano. It takes practice to get good at it. “It doesn’t work for me,” she said. You haven’t actually tried, I thought.

Our attempts to sit down for even a brief serious discussion with our petulant, angst-ridden adolescent felt like pulling the plastic cover off a troublesome light switch and shoving a screwdriver around in the wires and connectors: dangerous, hazardous, and possibly harmful. As her troubles grew, we tried to speak with her directly and clearly about mental health, the signs of serious trouble, different ways to cope, things that might help, when to reach out. We talked about sleep, diet, and exercise, all of which had become real challenges with the lockdowns. We encouraged her to go to the doctor, to get some blood work done, because sometimes a terribly troubled mind can be directly linked to low iron or B12 or hypothyroidism. She told us she felt like dying. I told her that suicidal thoughts are a sign of hopelessness, of feeling trapped, the definition of unbearable, but that there were always reasons to stay alive. I told her suicide would take all her grief and suffering and detonate it like a bomb, multiplying it a thousandfold. I’ve been close to enough suicides to see how it supposedly solves one problem but catastrophically worsens and deepens the grief of everyone who’s left. I told her, “I want you to stay alive. We want you to stay alive.”

“That’s selfish,” she said.

“No, that’s love.” I told her that there are countless people who love her and want her to stay.

“Now you’re trying to guilt me into staying.”

I told her no matter how dark it gets, there is always hope.

“That’s what everyone says,” she said.

Some days, she would push pins way up into her nostrils to give herself a nosebleed. When she cut her wrists and thighs, she tried to clean up the blood and hide what she was doing, but her wounds bled through the Band-Aids, onto her sheets, and into her clothes. Whenever my wife found blades or scissors or broken pieces of glass in her bedroom, she took them out. And still things got worse. One night before bed she took a handful of Tylenol, not enough to be truly harmful, but more than enough to be truly alarming, and as she was drifting off to sleep, she told my wife what she had done. “In case I don’t wake up in the morning, I want you to know why,” she said.

We drove her to the hospital. The triage nurse was concerned but not anxious, the doctor caring but overworked. We brought her back home after hours in triage and observation and kept the medicine hidden away for more than a year. One afternoon after an especially vicious spat with thoughtless, cruel, self-absorbed peers, she locked herself in the bathroom and sat against the door, sobbing and wailing, refusing to answer us. When we finally picked the lock and pushed our way in, we found her sitting on the floor in a puddle of blood from cuts on her wrists, and I had to stand in the doorway and keep her from running so we could take her back to the hospital to get bandaged up.

For three years my wife and I watched our daughter struggle mightily with her demons, unsure whether she would survive the siren voices whispering in her ear, telling her that death would be preferable to living through the weight of loneliness, anxiety, fear, and self-loathing. We prayed for love and healing, and we prepared our hearts for tragedy. We made six trips with her to the emergency room: she’d swallowed too many pills; she’d cut herself and needed stitches; she asked if we could take her because she knew she was at risk, feeling unsafe. Once she spent a week in the adolescent psychiatric ward. We brought her some books, a stack of pictures to decorate her walls, her favourite stuffed toy, and a few of her favourite plants. Even when she was at her worst, she could still sometimes be a joy, and so she made friends with the other patients and made plans to go for walks with them when they all got out. My wife visited her every day, sitting with her for hours, barely eating, barely sleeping.

The day after she was discharged from the psych unit, we brought her home and settled her in for the night. I went to bed, but before I drifted off, my wife came into the room. “I need you to come be with Julia,” she said. “She’s outside and I don’t know what to do.” I went downstairs and followed my wife around the side of the deck, and there was my daughter, crouched down, her knees pulled close to her chest, eyes wide, panicked and sobbing. I coaxed her to her feet and helped her up onto the deck, and for ten minutes I tried to persuade her to come inside. She slowed her breathing, trembled, then jumped to her feet and tried to run for the back gate. I grabbed her and lifted her back into the house while she screamed at me, “This isn’t fair!” I was terrified she might run off and hurt herself, so I held her on the floor in the kitchen while she pushed against my arms, struggling half-heartedly to get free. My wife called the police. A squad car arrived quickly, lights flashing, and two officers came in, gentle but authoritative, and told Julia, “We have to take you to the hospital.” They put her in handcuffs for what seemed mostly dramatic effect and drove her to the emergency room. My wife promised her she’d come soon to be with her. We stood in the kitchen and tried to calm down, catch our breath, check on the other kids. After half an hour, Julia called her on her cellphone. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You said you’d come to the hospital right away. I was worried when you weren’t here. I thought maybe you’d had an accident. Please come see me, Mom.”

Over and over I tried to instill some measure of hope, repeating lines that even as I was speaking them felt crumbly and inadequate: I love you. We love you. God loves you. Many people love you, cherish you, are so glad that you exist. This is very hard, and you can get through this. I started every morning with desperate prayers, begging God for some kind of relief for her, some kind of undeniable life-changing encounter with love. I wanted magic, something to snap her out of the spiral. I’d plead with God. “If you need someone,” I’d say, “please take me instead. Give me cancer and drag it out, if that’s what it takes to snap her out of this.” I prayed and wept as I tried to think of something I might say that could change her mind, turn her heart around, something to break the spell that she seemed to be living under. “My life for hers,” I prayed. I wrote her letters, trying to nurture goodness, struggling for words that might break some dark thing in her the way words have broken dark things in me. I tried to write like Kathleen Norris or Henri Nouwen or Frederick Buechner, but before she could ever think of me as a wise writer, I would always just be her dad. I woke up every morning and ended every day with a heavy heart. “You are stronger than you know,” I said to her. “Mom says the same thing,” she replied with a sneer. “You are loved,” I told her. She rolled her eyes. “There are always reasons to hope,” I told her, struggling to think of something specific that might help. “Please, Julia. Don’t give up.”

All of this took place under the shadow of Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAiD) and growing government pressure to expand the program to include provisions for men and women who suffer from chronic mental health conditions. The government passed the first MAiD legislation in 2016 to allow physician-assisted suicide for men and women suffering from a “grievous and irremediable” terminal illness, those for whom death was reasonably foreseeable. In the first four years of the policy, nearly fourteen thousand people opted to receive assisted suicide, with the number of applicants increasing steadily year by year. In 2023 alone, more than fifteen thousand people received MAiD.

In 2019 the Quebec superior court struck down the law, saying that “reasonable foreseeability of natural death” was too restrictive. Since then the federal government has been busily employing lawyers, researchers, and policy-makers, working to expand MAiD to include people suffering solely from chronic mental health problems. In spring 2023 David Lametti, then attorney general of Canada, announced that the expansion of MAiD was being postponed. It needed more study, more careful guardrails. “But we’ll have it in place next year,” he said. The most recent deadline for new, expanded legislation is March 17, 2027, ostensibly to give the provincial health care systems more time for research, and to prepare regulations, guidelines, and other resources. This means that if the expansion of MAiD moves forward as planned, it will offer assisted suicide for people like me and my daughter, should we finally decide that we simply cannot live with all this anymore.

Could this be the long-awaited miracle cure? Will this ache for oblivion, this terrible longing for the suffering to be over, become medicalized, tidied, frictionless, and smooth, blessed and sponsored by the powers of the land? Compared with every other kind of mental health therapy, this is the only one that is permanent and irreversible. Does that make it superior? Is this just one more option for the catastrophe of lifelong suffering? Do we simply say, “Well, the world is a strange and mysterious place”?

When it comes to politics, I have the same range of friends a lot of people do. Most are opinionated on a variety of political issues, but only a few are active in local, provincial, and national politics. I’ve alienated some of them because of my lack of a strong and clear position on certain urgent and pressing issues, MAiD for example. My excuse is not that I necessarily disagree with them and their position but that my life is full and I don’t have much time for real, sustained political conversations and arguments.