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Depression and Anxiety

Almost 42 years ago in October of 1980 my brother my brother and I were sent for psychological review just after we had arrived at our new school on Canadian Forces base Griesbach. This was done after our teachers had noted our “odd behaviour” when we arrived at the new school.

Our father was also interviewed by the psychiatrist.

This is one of the observations of the psychiatrist “Robert sees his environment as being harsh, threatening and fearful, His world seems unstable and is full of aggressive, frightening events. Major concern and anger is directed toward his grandmother who he sees as authoritarian and oppressive. Robert indicated a strong coalition between he and his father directed toward the removal of his grandmother from the household.”

Further the psychiatrist noted “He indicates a feeling of helplessness and frustration as indicated by his comments , “my nerves are disintegrating, my mind tells me I’m going to kill myself, people are grouchy and mean, I’m best when no one is around me, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown if granny doesn’t leave our home soon”.

When interviewed by the psychiatrist, my father was found to not be surprised by what my brother and I had said. My father acknowledged and confirmed many of the family problems that my brother and I had indicated. Very little commitment was received from my father, so my family’s file was handed over to Canadian Armed forces officer Captain Terry Totzke, the military social worked from Canadian Forces base Edmonton.

When I saw Terry as a child, I only knew him as Terry. I wouldn’t discover until 2011 that Terry was a captain in the Canadian Forces.

When I was involved with Terry, he was very concerned that I had been caught having sex with another boy (P.S., my then 15 year old babysitter). Terry told me that he had the base military police watching me and that if they ever reported to Terry that I kissed or touched another boy that I would be going to the Alberta Hospital for treatment.

Terry had told me that what I had done on CFB Namao indicated that I was a homosexual and that homosexuality was a mental illness.

Looking back on things, I don’t think Terry had ever been concerned with how bonkers things were in the Gill household. Terry must have been absolutely certain that my issues were related to the homosexuality I had exhibited on CFB Namao

This explains why in November of 1981 our teachers at school called in Alberta Social Services to deal with my brother and I. This came as a result of the teachers and principal at Major General Greisbach School becoming frustrated with the inaction of Captain Totzke.

I went for another psychological review. This time I was found to be beyond despair and beyond depression. I was found to be terrified of my father and I was convinced that my father was going to kill me. The psychiatrist conducting the interview wondered if I had ever had a day free from extreme anxiety in my life.

By the spring of 1982 yet another exam had found that I had become sufficiently emotionally disturbed that it was recommended that I be placed into a psychiatric hospital for care.

And in the winter of 1983 just after Alberta Social Services tried to remove me from the home, both my father and Terry promised that I would be institutionalized at the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto.

I was caught between people who legitimately wanted to help me and people who wanted to help the Canadian Armed Forces keep a lid on the 1980 Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse sex scandal that occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao from October of 1978 until May of 1980.

At this point in time I’ll never know who was calling the shots back then. And at this point I really don’t care. I know that my father was a lowly cog in the wheel, a master corporal that was bound to follow his orders. Captain Terry Totzke would have been superior to my father and my father would have had no option but to obey Captain Totzke’s directives. And in turn Captain Totzke would have been following his orders from somewhere up the chain of command

The Canadian Armed Forces cannot find my records from the time I was involved with Captain Totzke. For comparison I have all of my civilian social service records and all of my hospital records from my childhood. If it wasn’t for my civilian social service records, I would never have known that I had been involved with military social workers on two different Canadian Forces Bases.

What upsets me the most about all of this is that it was known as far back that I was beyond depressed and dealing with severe anxiety.

I’d like to think that I’ve done a decent job of living my life the best I could with the demons of despair, depression, and anxiety living in my head.

Then along came COVID-19.

Where I work, I was put under an extreme amount of stress due to the age of the facility and the neglect of the facility and the need to have the facility cope with the requirements of COVID-19. And this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

About a month ago, after a couple of emergency consults with my family doctor I ended up with a prescription of escitaloprám otherwise known as Lexapro or Cipralex. I was started off on 5mg as a test run. I was then bumped up to 10mg. I’ve been on 10mg for a few weeks now. We’ll have to play it by ear, but the the length of time that I’ve had untreated depression and anxiety I’ll probably be on this for the rest of my life.

Escitaloprám is an SSRI. An SSRI is a Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor. Basically escitaloprám prevents the neural transmitters in my brain from reabsorbing serotonin. This means that it’s easier for the neural transmitters in my brain to send signals. And somehow this helps with major depression and general anxiety disorders.

What’s it like being on escitaloprám?

Well, I can think clearly for the first time in my life.

I’m not euphoric. I’m not exactly emotionally numb. I don’t have the depression and despair hanging around my neck anymore. But I’m not exactly doing cartwheels down the street either.

For the first time ever in my life I can actually go to bed, sleep through the night, and wake up in the morning before the alarms go off.

I don’t have to take three or four naps through the day.

Dreams. I’m actually having vivid dreams, not horrifying nightmares. The nightmares were typically replays of CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach.

The only thing that I have to watch out for at this point is if my body builds up a tolerance to the SSRIs. Apparently within 2 years, 25% of patients prescribed SSRIs no longer respond to the medications.

And having had a taste of “normal” for the first time in my life, I really don’t want to go back to the way things were.

What caused my depression and anxiety?

The typical belief is that 40% of persons with major depression had it passed to them through their genes. The other 60% received their depression through environmental and other factors.

I’m thinking that some of my depression came down via my father’s genes. He was a severe insomniac. He was also an alcoholic. Research has shown that the same genes that make a person prone to alcoholism will also predispose that person to major depression.

Drinking for me amplified the dark thoughts. I haven’t had a drink since 2011. And even before that I can count the number of times I drank on both hands. Seeing my grandmother drunk and seeing my father drunk and then dealing with the two of them when they were dealing with their hangovers wasn’t pleasant.

Growing up in Richard’s house was anything put peaceful.

Between his drinking, his anger, and his complete indifference.

According to Pat Longmore, when my father was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Nova Scotia, my mother and my brother and I would sometimes take advantage of the “battered wives club” and we’d go stay at friendly safe houses when Richard was dealing with one of his anger outbursts.

My mother left when I was 5. This was a very abrupt departure. When I talked with her in 2013 it seems that she may not have had much say in the matter. It seems that there were very specific rules that applied to civilians living in the PMQs.

When I was 7 in the summer of 1979, my father started dating the woman who would become my stepmother. She was only 13 years older than I was. She was honestly like the older sister I never had and yeah, we could fight like brother and sister at times.

I was sexually abused by both P.S. and Captain Father Angus McRae along with an older male that P.S. took me to see in the men’s sauna at the base pool.

After I was caught being sexually abused by P.S. I was frequently beat up by the older kids on CFB Namao. This led to my family being moved to CFB Greisbach.

At CFB Namao I was put in the care of Captain Terry Totzke, whose primary concern seemed to be giving me “conversion” therapy to cure me of the “homosexuality ” that I had exhibited by being sexually abused on CFB Namao.

When my father was forced to move to Ontario to skip out on my apprehension by Alberta Social Services, he used to unload on me for “fucking with his military career”. A lot of the beatings that I took from him on Canadian Forces Base Downsview were no doubt due to his frustration at losing his career as a CH-147 Chinook Mechanic that he had been specially trained for.

As a kid, school was a complete disaster. Richard only had a grade 8 education. To him school was nothing more than a glorified daycare centre.

The there was the sexual abuse at the hands of Earl Ray Stevens at the Denison Armouries when I was in cadets.

So yeah, I guess you could say that I’ve had a lot of episodes in my life that would account for my major depression and anxiety disorder.

So, we’ll see where escitaloprám can take me. I’m dealing with one of the side effects. And honestly I can handle this one with all of the peace and quiet that escitaloprám has brought to me. When I tell you that the war war in my mind has reached a cease fire, I mean that the war has stopped. And I’m hoping that the escitaloprám will work for years to come because I’m terrified of going back.

An Update

The matter is still with the lawyers, and it does seem to be moving forward.

The Department of Justice has indicated that the government would like to settle this matter out of court.

The DOJ is no longer objecting to me being the representative plaintiff due to my very public desire to obtain Medical Assistance in Dying at the conclusion of this matter.

The DOJ is even entertaining the inclusion of base brats that may have been abused by Captain McRae and his “agents” on previous posting such as:
Canadian Forces Station Holberg on Vancouver Island;
Canadian Forces Base Portage La Prairie in Manitoba;
Canadian Forces Base Kingston in Ontario from when McRae was at the Royal Military College at Kingston.
And any other base or station that Captain McRae may have been stationed at during his brief career in the Canadian Forces.

The feeling that I get is that the DOJ would like to exclude the children abused by McRae’s “agents” if they can.

“Agents” are the older kids that Captain McRae abused and groomed and in then in turn used these “agents” to bring younger children to visit with Captain McRae.

In my case I can remember five very distinct visits to the rectory at the base chapel. Each visit ended with me being given a tumbler full of what I remembered at the time as being a “sickly sweet grape juice”.

I have no memories of what happened after the “grape juice”.

I don’t even remember how I got back home after the visits.

And no, there would have been no one at home who would have noticed that their 7 – 8 year old charge was shitfaced drunk as both of his guardians were piss-tank alcoholics. My father was rarely home, and my grandmother was usually in the city on the weekends visiting with her husband in the nursing home, at the Rosslyn Inn drinking, at the Canadian Legion drinking, or just pissed drunk in the PMQ.

And yes, it doesn’t matter that I lived on a Canadian Forces Base in housing for military families. Dysfunctional families existed in the military community just as they existed in the civilian world. But unlike in the civilian world, it was very hard for the children of these dysfunctional military families to receive any type of assistance as the military communities on base were the epitome of the “company town”.

For instance, when my family was shuffled off from CFB Namao in the aftermath of the Captain McRae fiasco the teachers at the school for the children of military families ob CFB Griesbach brought my brother and I to the attention of the military social worker.

When our teachers brought us to the attention of the civilian social workers with Alberta Child and Family Services, the military social worker didn’t cooperate. The military social worker ran interference and acted to stymie our civilian social workers.

But back to the matter of “agents”.

The DOJ is trying to argue that the Government of Canada should only have to pay damages to those for whom Captain McRae was charged with molesting and that no damages are owed to the victims of the “agents” or the victims of Captain McRae who were drugged or intoxicated prior to their sexual abuse.

Remember that in my case when the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service conducted their investigation into my complaint against Captain McRae’s agent “P.S.” the CFNIS had in their possession the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the 1980 court martial transcripts that indicated:

  • that the investigation into Captain McRae was commenced as a result of the base military police investigation of Captain McRae’s teenaged “agent” that had been accused by numerous parents on the base of sexually assaulting their pre-pubescent children.
  • that Captain McRae admitted to the military police in 1980 that he took boys into the rectory of the chapel, gave them beer, wine, and alcohol, and then took them into the bedroom and “messed around with them”.
  • That during McRae’s court martial, his defence officer tried to use the fact that his “agent” P.S. had molested numerous children on base as a way to discredit the testimony of “P.S.”
  • That P.S. was in fact receiving treatment for his sexual attraction to children.
  • And that Captain McRae had confessed during his ecclesiastical trial with the Archdiocese of Edmonton that he had abused children for numerous year.

Yet, during the 2011 Canadian Forces National Investigation Service investigation the CFNIS was hellbent on the following:

  • Portraying me as a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military”
  • Portraying me as someone who frequently jumped from job to job and was unable to hold down steady employment and therefore I was only doing this for money.
  • Changed statements that I had given to them such as when I told master corporal Christian Cyr about the five visits to the chapel ending with the “sickly sweet grape juice”, master corporal Cyr entered into his log books that “Mr. Bees remembers going to visits at the chapel, but that nothing sexual ever occurred”
  • Master corporal Christian Cyr would try to convince me that I was confused and that I didn’t know what I was talking about in relation to the chapel as his insisted during our various telephone calls that the chapel I indicated to him didn’t exist in 1980, and no military chapel on that base ever had a rectory, and that the military chaplain never lived on base. The CFSIU paperwork from 1980 clearly indicates everything that I told him about the chapel was true. So did the blueprints that I obtained of the chapel.
  • Investigators with the CFNIS tried their utmost to convince me that I was “misremembering things”. For example they tried their damndest to convince me that there was no house fire at PMQ #26 in the summer of 1980 and that I was attributing a fire from a different base to my memories of 1980. It turned out that the CFNIS had the Canadian Forces Fire Marshal’s paperwork for the June 23rd, 1980 house fire that did $56k (1980) dollars in damage to a house worth $75k (1980) dollars and that a construction engineer suffered a fatal heart attack during the fire while trying to shut off the natural gas.
  • Warrant officer Blair Hart told the Morinville RCMP in July of 2011 that the investigation into my complaint was likely to go nowhere due to a lack of evidence. This was well before the CFNIS had tried to talk to any of the other victims / witnesses.
  • The CFNIS removed all mention of my grandmother from the investigation, and never questioned my father about his failure to mention my grandmother when I supplied the CFNIS with my social service paperwork in which my father acknowledges that my grandmother was brought into his house to raise my brother and I after our mother “abandoned” us.
  • The CFNIS had access to the CPIC of P.S. that indicated that he had numerous charges between 1982 and 1999 that were for sexual crimes against children. Even still, on November 4th, 2011 Petty Officer Steve Morris called me and told me that the CFNIS “just couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that P.S. was capable of the crimes that I had accused him of”.

Why would the CFNIS do this? Why would the CFNIS go all out to ridicule and belittle a victim of childhood sexual abuse?

No matter the PR spin that the Canadian Armed Forces like to give the public, the CFNIS are NOT independent of the Chain of Command.

The Minister of National Defence has unfettered command authority over the CFNIS via the military chain of command.

The VCDS is only a step or two away from the Minister of National Defence.

It is extremely concerning that the National Defence Act gives the Vice Chief of Defence Staff the ability to advise and issue instructions to ANY CFNIS investigation.

Yes, the Provost Marshal is supposed to notify the public of this advisement or of the directions, but the VCDS also has the authority to issue “lawful” commands to the Provost Marshal, such as to NOT release this information to the public.

Remember, under the National Defence Act that the penalty for “Insubordination” which is to disobey a “lawful” command from a superior is “Life in prison or a lesser sentence”. The Provost Marshal is subject to this, so is the CFNIS chain of command as are the investigators with the CFNIS.

No civilian police officer in Canada or for that matter anywhere in the western world faces life in prison for disobeying the commands of their superiors.

The only place you find civilian police officers under this type of threat are in third world dictatorships or in goon-thug theocracies.

I mention this for two reasons.

First is that in February of 2016 I met with then Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan at his constituency office on Victoria St. in Vancouver. Mr. Sajjan spared no time in accusing me of “playing games” and of “having an angle” insinuating that I was just trying to milk the Canadian Forces for some easy money.

Second is that the DOJ will rely heavily upon the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service to conduct investigations into the victims of Captain McRae and his various “agents”. I have no doubt that the CFNIS will conduct investigations in such a manner as to minimize the number of victims of Captain McRae and to totally prevent the establishment of a valid connection between Captain McRae, his various agents, and the children abused by those agents..

The Canadian Armed Forces are in a public relations battle with the general public. The CAF have been in a PR battle for a very long time. This is why in 1980 the court martial of Captain McRae was moved in-camera and why the number of charges against McRae were minimized and why the Canadian Forces refused to call the RCMP in to deal with the pedophile babysitter. It was a PR battle then, and it’s a PR battle now.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/military-leaders-told-sex-misconduct-scandal-was-a-pr-war

Can you imagine how the Canadian Public would react if it were to discover that the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence have been aware for a very long time of the problem of child sexual abuse in the military communities on base and how the chain of command would rather bury the victims instead of punishing the offenders, all for the optics of public relations.

Or for that matter, can you imagine how upset the general public would be to discover that victims of male-on-male child sexual abuse were treated as homosexuals and were given life altering “conversion therapy” at the hands of the Canadian Forces military social workers?

Mediated Settlement

Well, my lawyer has informed me that the Department of Justice and the Department of National Defence wish to initiate mediation in an attempt to reach a settlement.

Hopefully this matter doesn’t come with too onerous of a Non Disclosure Agreement.

And hopefully the DOJ and DND make good on their offer to compensate ALL victims of Captain Father Angus McRae.

Me

November 26 2022

Here I talk a bit about my involvement as a child with Canadian Armed Forces military social worker Captain Terry Totzke.

Captain Totzke was convinced that I was a homosexual because of what I had been found doing with the babysitter on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

My father bought into Terry’s horseshit.

I’m not sure if Richard bought Terry’s horseshit because Terry was a captain and Richard was a master corporal, or if Richard bought into Terry’s horseshit because Richard couldn’t accept responsibility for his sons being sexually abused for 1-1/2 years on a military base due to his refusal to raise his own children.

Either way, I still bear the scars from Terry’s “treatment” and my father’s decision to go along with Terry’s treatments.

These treatments in the modern day would amount to “conversion therapy”.

This conversion therapy has caused substantial damage in my life.

Also, as Terry was more concerned with the “homosexuality” I had apparently exhibited when I was sexually molested for 1-1/2 years, I didn’t receive any treatment for the major depression, severe anxiety, or other personality disorders I had exhibited as a result of the sexual abuse.

So, it wasn’t just the “conversion therapy” that caused me issues, it was the lack of treatment for issues that I had been diagnosed as having.

There is no modern day treatment that will erase this.

This shit will be with me until the day I die.

Again with the depression!

Okay, here’s a video on depression and what I went through in the aftermath of the Captain Father Angus McRae Child Sexual Abuse Scandal on Canadian Forces Base Namao

The time of settlements

First, a new video.

On November 7th and 8th my first lawyer and I will have a meeting with the lawyers in the matter of Earl Ray Stevens. This meeting is to see if all sides can reach a final agreement on the matter of an “out of court” settlement.

I don’t know what to expect with this meeting. The lawyer for the defendant in this matter has postulated that by the time Earl Ray Stevens abused me at the Denison Armouries when I was in cadets that I was already “damaged” from the abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao. He even seemed to have honed in on items from my foster care records that I wasn’t even aware of.

One such thing that he honed in on came about because my lawyer had requested a fresh copy of my foster care records from the Alberta government at the start of this matter. I had never seen the quoted text that the lawyer for the defendant read during the meeting because this was redacted from the copy of the records I had obtained in 2011.

In this formerly redacted section my father had told the psychologist hired by the Canadian Armed Forces in November of 1980 that he blamed my behaviour and the behaviour of my brother on his mother, specifically stating this “his mother was frequently cruel to his children, especially when she was inebriated”.

This by the way is the same mother that Richard wrote out of our family history when he gave his statement to the CFNIS in 2011.

So I’ll have to see what the future holds so far as this settlement goes.

I received an interesting telephone call from my other lawyer on Friday. It seems that the Department of Justice is curious to whether or not I would entertain the possibility of an out of court settlement. As this matter is a class action this would affect all members of the class. we don’t have anything to lose on this.

The DOJ and DND may insist that if we take the out of court settlement that we’d have to agree to be bound by an NDA. This is something that I would have to discuss with my lawyer.

That said, an out of court settlement in the Captain McRae matter from Canadian Forces Base Namao would resolve the matter in a fairly quick time unlike the 10 to 15 years that the DOJ had warned me they would drag this matter out for.

Questions that I would have are would there be any payments towards the families of the victims of Captain McRae and his 14 year old accomplice who committed suicide over the years as a result of the abuse and the failure of DND and the CF to look after the victims properly?

Would all of the surviving victims receive equal payments?

Would DND and the CF reveal the names of all of the children involved and ensure that these victims are made aware of the cash settlement being offered?

Would I be gagged by a Non-Disclosure Agreement much like the 14 year old accomplice agreed to in December of 2008?

I sure those details will be worked out.

The one thing that settlements in both matters allows be to do is to obtain medical assistance in dying in much my original time frame.

It was always my intention to die either in 2023 or 2024.

By going with settlements in both matters I can now rest assured that I won’t be spending the next 10 to 15 years dealing with this crap.

If I apply for medical assistance in dying on March 20th, 2023, it will probably take about 4 to 6 months for me to undergo the psychiatric review that would be required.

There would be a 90 day “cooling-off period”.

Then I would be given my prescription for medical assistance in dying. From what I understand the prescription would be valid for up to one year.

This would put my death into 2024. I’m okay with that. I’ve suffered 40 years so far, another year or two isn’t going to kill me.

Anyways, enough for now.

It’s bed time.

Saturday October 15, 2022

Why didn’t you tell anyone?

Why didn’t you report the abuse sooner?

The problem is the military police, the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit, and numerous other “adults” such as Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke were well aware of the abuse.

The man in the sauna investigation is dead.

Okay, here is my latest video. It’s about my meeting yesterday with Captain St-Amand and Warrant Officer Petruk of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service Western Region.

Did I do the right thing?

I this video I ponder if I did the right thing and if it was worth it at all.

So, did I do the right thing?

Well, I sure got played for a sucker, didn’t I?

Was it worth it?

Should I just have kept living my life with the opinion of Captain Totzke and my father that I was a homosexual and that I “allowed” the babysitter to molest my younger brother rattling around in my skull?

As my father said, did I go and make things worse by sticking my nose where I had no business to?

Right now it’s seven months until I find out if Parliament will follow through with the recommendations of the committee overseeing further amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada to allow foe Medical Assistance in Dying for mental health issues such as depression.

If you remember, I did submit a brief to the Committee reviewing Medical Assistance in Dying.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/AMAD/Brief/BR11776079/br-external/GarnetBobbie-e.pdf

So, did I do the right thing?