HALIFAX—A small-town kid starts playing hockey at the age of five and takes to it naturally.

His parents see his potential and move to the closest city when he’s a young teen – they want him to have every opportunity to succeed.

In a few years, his ability to stop pucks buys him a ticket to an American college, and by the time he’s in his early twenties, he’s playing professionally.

It’s one version of a Canadian dream, and you’ve probably heard a story like it before.

Canada’s hockey stars are some of its most famed citizens, and we prize them for their physical strength, their speed, their endurance.

But there’s another hockey story that’s just as inherent to the sport, and fast becoming more common than the unlikely rise to the professional leagues: How players are struggling to stickhandle through mental illness.











Ben Meisner has lived both, and almost took his own life when the pressures of the game became just too much for him.

Meisner was a kid born to chicken farmers in New Germany, N.S. — population about 400 — who played his way to an NHL training camp.

“I got there,” he said in a recent interview with StarMetro. “All I ever wanted as a kid was to play in the NHL … I can check that box as a childhood dream.”

But it wasn’t a smooth ascendancy. On his way from the southwestern shore of Nova Scotia to Halifax, and then across Canada, North America and beyond, he was cut from teams and ready to hang up his skates on more than one occasion.

The precariousness of his place on every team roster put his mental health in an equally uncertain state.

“I found myself in tears daily. I was having panic attacks. I was afraid of anything and everything,” Meisner wrote in a long personal essay published last week in The Players’ Tribune, a digital sports publication. It was titled I’m Not Connor McDavid.

He was miserable. Vague thoughts of suicide turned into a concrete plan, and on one occasion, he came very close to acting it out, which he detailed in his essay.

Meisner wrote that he loved hockey so much, he forgot to love himself — a high cost for a dream.

The young goalie didn’t get an NHL contract. After playing goal for the San Jose Sharks for three weeks in 2015, first at the team’s rookie camp and then at its main training camp, he ended up sitting on his couch, without a team or any obvious prospects.

He spoke to StarMetro about that difficult time, a few days after his essay was published.

“I felt like I was gonna have options,” he said.

Like going back to the ECHL, a mid-level professional league with a couple of dozen teams across the U.S. and two in Canada.

Meisner had played on a few different teams in the ECHL for five seasons, but as the 2015-16 season approached, there weren’t any places for him in that league either.

After the elation of training with an NHL team, Meisner said he started sinking into one of his lowest lows.

It wasn’t the first time his thoughts had overwhelmed him. In fact, he’d obsessed over losing his place in the professional ranks for years.

Since joining an ECHL team after college, he’d developed an unhealthy fixation on the number of goalies he was competing with.

“I knew that there were 98 professional teams in North America … so there were exactly 196 jobs for goalies. I’d always come back to the fact that in North America alone there are usually around 320 free agent goalies from D-I, D-III, Canadian colleges, SPHL, AHL, ECHL and the NHL, fighting for what amounts to only a few open spots at any one time,” he wrote in that essay.

The pressure to hang on to his dream was causing him to suffer. It was exacerbating anxiety and obsessive tendencies that he said traced back to his childhood.

“I was so driven,” he said in our interview. “I was an anxious kid, and the fear of not making it, or the fear of not making the team was just debilitating.”

Even a decade ago, it would have been less likely for someone like Meisner to know there were diagnoses and treatments for what was plaguing him.

The public conversation around mental illness has cracked open in recent years, revealing its ubiquity and releasing some of the stigma.

When the turmoil in his head made him think about ending his life, he knew he needed help. He knew about psychological ailments called anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder. (He even has a psychology degree, “ironically,” as he put it.) And yet, he didn’t reach out.

For years, Meisner thought about going to his coaches and telling them what he was coping with, but he thought they would force him to take time off. Time off would mean he’d be replaced, and losing his place on the team would mean never playing hockey again, or so his logic went.

And there was another layer to his stress, and another reason to keep quiet: Meisner worried about letting his teammates down.

Talking about it in retrospect, his voice still had a serious tone, as if he could still feel some the weight.

“You don't want to be the guy cracking the glass that leads to the whole thing crumbling,” he said.

Hockey players “suck it up.” They train hard and they play through injuries, and Meisner said that for a long time, he held himself to the same standard when it came to his mental health.

Of course, professional hockey teams have swaths of people to monitor and support the physical well-being of athletes: physiotherapists, trainers, doctors. The same can’t be said for mental health supports, at least in Meisner’s experience.

No one from his teams ever pointed him to a counsellor or psychiatrist, and no one ever told him that taking care of his mind was just as important as taking care of his body.

Until Corey Hirsch.

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After being released from the Sharks training camp and from the ECHL, Meisner signed with a professional team in Germany for the 2014-15 season.

It was another major accomplishment in a career that many young athletes would envy, but Meisner was still struggling to balance his thoughts and emotions.

Unsurprisingly, other players have struggled like Meisner. In February 2017, Hirsch, a former NHL goalie, shared his personal story of a near suicide attempt, also on The Players’ Tribune.

At the mention of Hirsch, Meisner’s voice brightened while talking to StarMetro on the phone from Bad Tölz, Germany, where he’s now training for the upcoming season.

“I owe Corey more than what most people will ever know,” he said.

“I came home one day from practice … and I read his article and I said, ‘Oh my god, I just read about my life.’”

Meisner tracked down Hirsch’s email address and “half-heartedly” reached out, expecting that Hirsch would be too busy to reply. But within a couple of hours, Hirsch had sent Meisner his phone number and told him to call right away.

Their first conversation marked the first time Meisner had talked to anyone about his symptoms — the obsessive, dark thoughts that had been following him for years.

Hirsch suggested that he talk to a professional, but Meisner was apprehensive at first, for all the old reasons. Plus, he was in Germany and told himself it would be too hard to find an English-speaking counsellor.

“He was basically my psychologist for a while,” Meisner said of Hirsch.

“He sent me articles, he sent me things to read, he sent me exercises. He asked me about what I thought about medication, and at the time I was really against it.”

Meisner thought medication would compromise his game by slowing his reaction time.

Hirsch encouraged him to reconsider, telling him, as Meisner recalls it, “for the one or two or three per cent of your speed that you’ll lose, maybe, and it's a big maybe — you don't know that you will — you'll gain a clear mind, which will help you focus better and thus make up for it in the end.”

With a role model like Hirsch, someone who’d lived so many parallel experiences, Meisner did eventually get the professional help he needed to work on his mental health.

He said he decided to write the essay that went online last week because he wanted to take part in what Hirsch was doing: Witling away at the stigma of mental illness in sport.

Hirsch wrote a follow-up piece to his original essay in January 2018.

“I’m proof that there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Hirsh said to readers, encouraging them to talk about mental illness, share their struggles, and ask for help.

Hirsch and Meisner are now part of a small stream of hockey players who’ve spoken publicly about mental illness and suicide prevention.

The story of the small-town kid making it to the big leagues isn’t the only Canadian hockey story anymore. Or at least it isn’t the whole story, because the road to “making it,” is usually a rough one.

Jordin Tootoo, the first Inuk to play in the NHL, wrote about his brother, who was also a hockey player and died by suicide, in his 2014 memoir All the Way.

Another former NHL goalie, Clint Malarchuk, is open about his suicide attempt, which he attributes partly to the trauma of having his throat accidentally slashed open on the ice by a skate blade. He now speaks regularly about mental illness, psychological trauma, and addiction.

Hayley Wickenheiser has also become a mental health advocate, using her platform as a Canadian hockey icon to pull back the curtain on mental illness in professional sports.

Meisner doesn’t have the help of national fame to spread his message — which is that hockey players’ minds should be cared for at least as much as their bodies are – but he’s reaching people, nonetheless.

Within three days of publishing his essay, he’d received over 1,000 emails. Many of the messages, he said, came from people who saw themselves reflected in his story, people who felt crippled by the pressure of their sport.

He said he intends to answer every one of them. After all, he did put his email address at the bottom of the piece, and told people to reach out.

“I opened myself up for people to tell me, so there's not much point of doing so if you don't put your money where your mouth is.”

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