Bell Media #BellLetsTalk fails to speak openly about Massive Mental Health Crisis
in October 2021 @CTVOttawa, a subsidiary of Bell Media, knowingly covered up concerns of a massive mental health crisis, and contributed to a frenzied mobbing
As we know, today is Bell Media’s #BellLetsTalk Day,” a day Bell Media donates 5cents per qualifying text, phone call, tweet, or tiktok; or for one of any of another dozen-or-so engagements using your bell device, to mental health causes. So today at least you can feel good about your social media addiction.
The narrative claim from Bell Media’s national marketing campaign is that there is a stigma around mental illness and we should be more open as a society in talking about it instead of stigmatizing people.
Mental Illness takes many forms and in fact has many causes. News out of the US today tells us the first Wrongful Death suit has been filed by parents of a 12 year-old girl, claiming the deliberately addictive social media platforms directly contributed to the suicide of their daughter.
Another of the very significant contributors to mental illness is our society is bullying, abuse and intergenerational trauma, which lead to ongoing dysfunctions both in individuals and in society.
The bullying pattern dynamic, the toxic abuse of one human or group by another, can be found in family systems, in schools, in workplaces, in universities and in the public commons. It is absolutely endemic to social media. An abuser picks a target or targets and takes pleasure or extracts benefit by manipulating, punishing and attacking them by destroying self-esteem, reputations and lives.
Among us there are a stunning number of people who have had experiences of bullying and harassment in schools, workplaces and especially social networks, leading to anxiety, depression, and even to hypervigilance and fear-responses related to PTSD.
If you’re part of an extended family or close community or a church fellowship; if you’re a member of a work or professional community, or if you’ve ever met a troll online, you know what abuse looks like: because you can find it everywhere. You can’t avoid seeing it because it’s a sad human phenomenon where some people deliberately and systematically drain other people of their souls for their own sick pleasures. I am a survivor of childhood abuse. My father used to say, “I’m doing this for your own good.”
We know that traumas and toxic abuses have deep psychological impacts and mental health consequences later in life and I believe there are far more people who have experienced some kind of trauma-related mental health issue in their lifetime than we think so in principle I support the idea behind #BellLetsTalk, however Bell Media needs to tend its own garden first:
On October 19th and 20th, 2021, across from a high school in Ottawa, I joined Chris Elston (@billboardchris) and another brave soul, @ChanLPfa, a former Ontario High School teacher who no longer teaches because of workplace abuse, to stand outside an Ottawa Highschool to raise awareness for a serious mental health crisis affecting teens in Canada that has very significant correlations to internet addiction. The growing crisis of trans-health and Gender Dysphoria hitting teenage girls specifically in our families and communities. The numbers of trans-identified girls has exploded by 50-100 times since 2015/15 a milestone period in the internet age.
We faced a mob of hundreds of protestors egged on by the local subsidiary of Bell Media @CTVNews, along with CBC Ottawa and our recently announced candidate for mayor of Ottawa, Cathleen McKenney, (who goes by the pronouns they/them).
McKenney is allowed to be at a protest practicing their cheap brand of virtue signaling because she’s a politician, but the Bell Media subsidiary CTV News Ottawa chose to label us “Anti-Trans Protestors” contributing to a vigilante assault on Chris Elston on October 18th, and to a frenzied mob of three-hundred chanting, “You should die,” among every conceivable verbal abuse you could imagine.
CTV News Ottawa did a full 12-15 minute video interview with @billboardchris and published NOTHING of the actual reason we were there, but labelled us in a negative way, playing into bigotry and transphobic narratives, which contributed to the mobbing.
Over the coming days I was tagged as a hateful transphobe on Twitter by a local well-connected entrepreneur. I am a professional and business owner who has made his reputation on trust and relationships and integrity in Ottawa over two decades and this person looped in a major local #BellLetstalk fundraiser and media personality into this conversation. Joining them in their thread was a another #BellLetsTalk personality, head of a local company that places vulnerable people with developmental disabilities into employment-roles. That person, with a reputation as an all-around-do-gooder, joined the online abuse and pile-on with false accusations and character attacks.
I had to remind the instigator that speaking in such way, in writing, in public, and to a media personality from Bell Media, without any proof of such conduct, would result in lawsuits. When I demanded evidence supporting these character attacks, or I would pursue legal action, they immediately disengaged.
I pointed out to the CEO affiliated with #BellLetsTalk fundraising, that he has a safeguarding responsibility for the vulnerable people who work through him, that defending medical mutilation of kids, who in many cases share similar challenges, like autism, was probably contrary to his own business and reputational interests.
I believe that at some point defending transing kids will blow-back on him, especially where he was overtly supporting harmful medical practices in vulnerable children and abusing a person trying to bring this to public awareness. In fact his abuse was so memorable, I look forward to the day when the tide turns on this issue and I can name and shame him.
He gaslit me for a while, dismissing WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health) and USPATH former heads, medical experts in transgender health, Drs Anderson and Edwards-Leeper and their dire warnings about sloppy and insufficient care in transgender medicine for children; while contemptuously dismissing facts and research about the horrifying medical outcomes of medical transition for kids. It baffled me that a person with a safeguarding role for vulnerable people would be so abusive and dismissive of risks to his constituency.
This week, we have the public school boards, like the WRDSB (Waterloo Region District School Board Trustees) who have the same safeguarding responsibility, explicitly bullying, abusing and threatening anyone who questions the trans narratives taught in schools which overwhelmingly affect vulnerable kids with comorbid mental health issues, and which puts those kids on an irreversible path to becoming medical experiments. To give credit to CTV Kitchener, they didn’t stigmatize or amplify the false accusations of hate, bigotry and transphobia/anti-trans narratives in this case.
So #BellLetsTalk. Let’s talk about the CTV W5 Investigation released that same week of our small protest, which raised all the questions we were trying to raise on a public street, in silent protest, wearing signs that said, “Kids Cannot Consent to Puberty-Blockers,” at the same time as your local newsroom was implicitly and knowingly exploiting the mischaracterization of concerned and loving parents and a former high school teacher: that we were anti-trans, and bigoted, and transphobic and hateful.
The mob made for a great story, but this wasn’t journalism by Bell Media’s CTV Ottawa. CTV Ottawa embellished a narrative and in-so doing, caused and perpetuated immediate harm to us as well as demonstrated indifference to the health crisis facing our girls in the age of internet addiction and social contagion.
I’ll get over being mobbed by the blue-haired jackboots, in fact @billboardchris has returned to Ottawa and we plan another school protest on Monday January 31st in Ottawa.
Bell Media today, who is pumping themselves up in a national Marketing campaign they claim is about their sensitivity and compassion for people with mental illness, has been perpetuating the narrative that sterilizing children is a human right and that anyone who objects to interventions which lead to the sterilization of children is the hateful and dangerous one.
On a larger scale however, Bell Media’s #BellLetsTalk and CTV Ottawa News are guilty of participating in perpetuating the largest medical scandal in the history of medicine; the systematic medicalization of vulnerable kids, addicted to the internet, whose developing minds are exposed to deliberately addictive, and dangerous content on social media platforms, who are led to believe by a corrupt educational system that changing genders is not only, “cool,” not only “No big deal” but a human right.
Bell Media has a journalistic responsibility and even a billion hashtag clicks won’t cover for their failures to address the medical mutilation and sterilization of internet addicted teens. Bell Media, and @CTVOttawa are guilty of this, they are complicit in it because of their absolute failures to talk about a serious mental health issue.
So Lets really Talk.