Around Town: Ottawa women raise $1.6 million for mental health

More than 400 women in this city have put their money where their mouths are by supporting an all-female philanthropic program that’s helping to transform the way mental illness gets diagnosed, treated, researched and publicly discussed.

The Women for Mental Health initiative was celebrated at a reception held Wednesday at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. There, attendees toured the hospital’s new brain imaging centre and checked out its state-of-the-art PET-MRI unit designed to help people, suffering from major depression and other mental illnesses, get better faster.

So high is the suicide rate that if you added up all of its victims, globally, it would be like erasing the population of Ottawa every year. “That’s totally unacceptable but we’ll be in a better position to change that now,” Dr. Pierre Blier, director of The Mood Disorders Research Unit, told some 70 attendees.

It was the unexpected and shocking 2010 suicide of 14-year-old Daron Richardson, daughter of popular hockey player-turned-coach Luke Richardson and his wife, Stephanie, that motivated Nancy O’Dea to lead Women for Mental Health. “Because it felt so close to home,” the luxury property realtor and former nurse explained in her heartfelt speech.

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