You would never know that Paige Willfong-Mackie is struggling. Bright, bubbly and engaging — she is the picture of health.
And that is exactly why she decided to make her battle public.
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“I’ve always been extroverted, a cute little thing so people would even say ‘I love being around you. You’re so happy all the time.’ So when people would react like that, I obviously would want to do that more often,” Paige said.
“You want to belong, you want people to like you.”
Almost two months ago, Paige tried to end her life by swallowing a bottle of pills. She woke up in the emergency room, angry and disappointed that her attempt had not worked.
“My mom found me as I was going unconscious,” Paige said Willfong-Mackie in an online confessional she posted in May.
“I just told her to let me go. I wanted to go so bad.”
In her Facebook video, she explained her lifelong battle with mental illness. In 24 hours, the video was watched over 17,000 times by people around the world.
In it, Paige talked about thinking about death, fantasizing about leaving the world as young as the age of four.
“I would just put on my mask, and that’s how I would act. I got really good at it. I think that’s what a lot of people do. You don’t want to be judged. The world is hard enough to live in as is.”
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Paige posted the video one month after her failed suicide attempt, spurred by the news of a suicide in Saskatoon that touched her family.
One of her sister’s best friends, a young Saskatoon woman, committed suicide in May and receiving the tragic phone call pushed Paige into action. She posted the video the next day.
“So many beautiful people in this world have taken themselves out because their brains aren’t healthy. They didn’t get the help they needed,” Paige said.
“They didn’t speak out about it. That was the same thing with my sister’s best friend.”
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Paige hopes to spread the message of hope to others struggling with mental issues. After four days in the psychiatric ward following her attempt in April, the medication she was on started working.
“The chemicals in my brain don’t function properly. I’m not a burden. I have a mental illness and that just makes me irrational at times,” Paige said.
“This medication is giving me what I need to just be me. And that morning, that fourth morning, I felt like me for the first time in a really long time.”
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With her inbox flooded with personal messages, Paige has seen the power of sharing her deepest secret, and hopes others will feel empowered to do the same.
“Someone with cancer, you say ‘what can I do to help you get through this.’ I want that to be the same with mental illness. It’s not necessarily an easy fix … it’s a long-term thing. But you can get help, and it will be OK.”
“You just have to invest that time into getting that help and the right help for you because everybody is so different.”
Paige has teamed up with the Canadian Mental Health Association in Regina and plans on becoming an advocate in whatever way possible to raise awareness in Saskatchewan.
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