The Carleton Ravens women’s basketball team had advanced to the national tournament in March 2013, but did so without one of its leaders, Krista Van Slingerland.
Van Slingerland said it’s time to break her silence about why she left the team just before the national championships. She said she felt guilty for leaving the team, but knew she needed time off because of how dark her life was around that time, and what it could have become.
About three months after her teammates celebrated their trip to nationals, Van Slingerland said she tried to kill herself—something she said culminated from depression she dealt with throughout her second and third years at Carleton.
“I was hospitalized after an interrupted suicide attempt . . . I didn’t get to the point of taking anything. I had the pills and everything and I was planning to overdose and not wake up. Thankfully, the police came to my house and stopped me,” she said.
Van Slingerland said seeing her friends’ and family’s reactions after finding out about her suicide plan was the wake-up call she needed.
“You ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ and ‘When am I going to feel like myself again?’ You don’t know yourself anymore and it’s startling,” she said.
While the interrupted suicide attempt was the only time Van Slingerland said she tried to take her own life, she said the thought crossed her mind constantly.
Van Slingerland said suicidal thoughts were not the only form of self-destruction she dealt with during her depression. She said she regularly had trouble sleeping and didn’t want to eat, which she said led her to take on even more dangerous measures.
“I ended up being self-harming as well . . . I was a cutter,” she said, and pulled up her sweatshirt sleeve to reveal faint cut lines on her wrists.
However, Van Slingerland said she’s doing much better now thanks to her strong support network, as well as regular counselling visits and anti-depressants.
Now, Van Slingerland is using her own personal experience to help change and perhaps save lives of other student athletes across Canada.
She teamed up with Samantha DeLenardo, a graduate from the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees women’s hockey team. Van Slingerland said they came up with an idea to create an initiative to help Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) student athletes battle mental illness.
DeLenardo said she wrote her masters thesis on the potential for a mental health initiative in CIS for football players.
She said her own life has been touched by mental illness.
“For someone who’s very close to me, if I had known the signs and symptoms of mental illness, maybe I could’ve stepped in earlier,” she said. “Fortunately, they’re okay now, but I don’t talk about it too much because it’s so hard to think about. That’s my motivation behind the project.”
DeLenardo’s thesis paper is actually how the two connected, as she said Van Slingerland reached out to her on LinkedIn after reading her work.
The Student Athlete Mental Health Initiative (SAMHI) is the product of the pair’s dream.
SAMHI launched March 14 and DeLenardo said it has drawn a lot of interest from several CIS universities.
“What we want to do as the program develops is to advocate for mental health services on campus and make sure they’re available for student athletes,” she said.
“We’re not providing mental health services ourselves. We’re just facilitating access to them.”
Van Slingerland said this organization is important because any psychology centred on athletes is virtually always performance-based—something she said SAMHI is looking to change.
“The mental health counselling at Carleton has wonderful people, but I found they didn’t really understand the varsity experience,” she said. “If something like SAMHI had existed then, I think it would’ve been a lot different for me, and I want other athletes to be supported and not go through what I did.”
As for her own athletic career, she said she’s ready to return to the basketball court next season when she plans to pursue a masters degree at another university with two years of CIS eligibility remaining.
Van Slingerland said her time at Carleton was extremely difficult, but she has to look at it as educational because of what it’s inspired her to do, improving her own life and helping others.
“My experience here was not great, but I’ve made peace with that,” she said. “It helped me turn a dark time in my life and turn it into something awesome in SAMHI.”
