Former Canadiens sharpshooter Stéphane Richer stares at the photograph: It’s everything an athlete dreams of captured in a single frame.

It’s a scene from TSN broadcaster Michael Landsberg’s compelling documentary Darkness and Hope: Depression, Sports and Me airing on Wednesday at 7 p.m. on CTV. It features Richer, Canadian Olympic legend Clara Hughes, one-time New York Mets slugging star Darryl Strawberry and Landsberg sharing their own struggles with depression.

Richer is sitting with Landsberg in seats preserved from the old Montreal Forum on the site where it once stood. He’s pretty matter of fact as he recalls the inner demons he battled while looking at pictures showing highlights of his career.

In the last photo, Richer is part of New Jersey’s Stanley Cup parade — he was the second leading scorer in the 1994-95 playoffs. He’s in a convertible with a cigar in his mouth and is giving Devils’ fans the thumbs up.

“I look pretty sharp, right?’ said Richer.

“You did,” said Landsberg. “You look like you got it all.”

“I got it all,” agrees Richer. “Just ’til about four days after, I tried to kill myself.”

Richer, Hughes and Strawberry hold nothing back in sharing the pain they’ve dealt with in battling depression. In Landsberg, they have an interviewer who knows all too intimately the despair of which they speak. He’s suffered from depression since childhood.

The documentary is part of Bell Let’s Talk Day. Bell has made Canada’s largest ever corporate investment in mental health, a $50-million, multi-year project aimed chiefly at anti-stigma, care and access, research and workplace best practices.

Hughes, spokesperson for the initiative, joins Landsberg after the broadcast for a live 90-minute chat on CTV.ca and the CTV iPad App.

Landsberg says having star athletes talk openly about their depression goes right to the heart of the stigma issue.

“When people see others talking about depression, talking about it without being ashamed, there will be people who go ‘Wow, doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe I will share,’” said Landsberg. “There will be other people who have always thought that depression was weakness who will say ‘Well, maybe I was wrong about that.’”

It was while doing research on Richer for an appearance on TSN’s Off The Record in 2009 that Landsberg learned the two-time Stanley Cup winner suffered from depression. He asked Richer if they could talk about it on the program as “something we have in common.”

The show triggered a huge response, emails from fellow sufferers and relatives of people with depression. That became a deluge last summer when hockey enforcer Wade Belak took his own life. Landsberg — who as a friend knew of Belak’s battle with depression — wrote a poignant online article about the former Leaf’s struggle. Landsberg said Belak, who had not talked about depression publicly, had told him he’d be willing to share his story on the documentary.

Landsberg said among the thousands of emails he’s received have been several from people contemplating suicide. A Saskatchewan man told Landsberg that he had been planning to hang himself with a belt, but then he started an email correspondence with the TV host following the Richer show.

He wrote Landsberg that every time he got up to kill himself, he heard the bong on his computer signifying another email. He wrote in the email that he remembers thinking “Even in email, this guy just won’t shut up” — the email was supplied to the Star with the writer’s approval.

He went on to write: “I’m here today because I chose to fight, I chose to live, and I thank you for not ‘shutting up’ that day.”

Richer reached similar desperate straits in 1995 while with the Devils, but believes his depression had its roots in his being a shy, only child who received little positive feedback at home and then was uprooted from his school and friends at 14 because of his hockey skill.

“I always say hockey choose Stéphane Richer; I never choose hockey,” Richer said in the documentary and repeated last week in an interview with the Star.

He was in the NHL at 18, won a Stanley Cup his first season and scored 50 goals two years later, but he never felt comfortable in his own skin.

“The media and the people in Montreal, they really hurt me,” he told Landsberg. “I came to Montreal, I was 19, I was a kid. To be criticized, to be judged, to have so many stories around me — I was gay, on drugs, party all the time. . . . I’m a pretty shy guy, I’m pretty quiet, I just want to be home. I was dying inside.”

Life didn’t improve for him in New Jersey as he was still dogged by depression despite success on the ice.

Just days after being on his second Stanley Cup winner with New Jersey, Richer was speeding along in his Porsche 911 at night and decided to turn the car’s headlights off just as he was coming towards a sharp curve in the road, hoping he would never make the turn.

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“I don’t know how I made the curve,” he told the Star. “I guess it wasn’t my time or my turn, you know.”

Richer got the dealership to pick up the car the next day. He made a lot of changes in his life, got professional help and cut the cord with people who “just liked the name on the back of my jersey; they didn’t like the person inside.”

Now 45, he lives in a quiet Montreal suburb with his wife and plays close to 60 games a year with the Habs alumni, which travels across Canada and will also play in France and Russia this year. He said he’s still learning being around the likes of Guy Lafleur, Gilbert Perreault and Marcel Dionne.

It’s clear, though, he yearns to get back in the game as an assistant coach, someone who could work with and counsel young players.

“I would do it for free if I had to, but I guess Montreal doesn’t feel they need some older guy to be around,” he said. “That would be the best job for me.”

To the documentary’s credit, there’s no attempt at a Hollywood ending. All the right messages are delivered — among Landsberg’s hopes is it will help those suffering in silence to not feel so alone and to talk to someone and seek professional help.

For the athletes involved, the battle is an ongoing one. Strawberry admits in the documentary to still having some days where he wishes he wasn’t here. His biggest struggle was when his mother died.

“It’s like a dark tunnel that you get in and it just gets deeper and deeper the longer you stay in it,” said Strawberry. “It becomes very scary. It’s a suicidal place. Your mind starts thinking insane stuff: What if I do this? What if I kill myself? Which way? How? You start going down all these paths of which way will be the easiest way?”

Hughes notes “there’s a lot of people who don’t realize the fine line that we are all walking.”

She certainly realizes it.

“I feel I know the signs, I know how to deal with them and I know what to do,” Hughes told Landsberg. “I have a system and my system works. I fear of that system breaking I guess when I think of it and I fear one day being in a place of no return, a point of no return, because when is it going to be too much. Am I going to end up being that athlete who cracked, who just couldn’t handle it anymore?

“I have this thing I say to myself that ‘tomorrow can be better.’ And I remember that period in my life where I never felt like tomorrow could be better. It was always dread for the next day. Sometimes it takes a long time to get through that and to make things turn in the right direction, which for me means just a positive direction and a direction where I feel like I’m motivated and thriving and inspired. But it’s like ‘Okay, I can make tomorrow better. It doesn’t have to be like today.’”

Richer, too, doesn’t pull any punches in the documentary.

“I can’t lie and I can’t hide this: Every day’s a challenge, it’s a big challenge. Every time when I get out of bed, the first step when I touch the floor, I say ‘Riche, today make sure you’re strong. You can’t be soft. You’ve got a beautiful wife. A lot of people around you love you. You have to be there. You have to be strong.’”

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