National Post (National Edition)
Isolation Nation strikes a chord
LANDSBERG’S NEW PROJECT EXPANDS PLATFORM TO DISCUSS MENTAL-HEALTH ISSUES
Michael Landsberg calls me at the appointed time and asks if we can delay our interview by a few minutes. He has a promo to shoot for his new show and he wants his dog to be in it. The dog, Wrigley, will be leaving for a walk soon, so it’s now or never.
Normally this might have seemed an odd request, but it’s perfectly in keeping with the times. I’m talking to him from one room in my house while my wife is on a conference call in another. He’s doing his TSN morning radio program from his kitchen table before doing his new program from the same spot. When you need to shoot a promo, you use what’s handy. What was handy was Wrigley. Good dog.
It is this weird new world that provided the spark for his latest project, Isolation Nation. Landsberg, the longtime host of TSN’s Off the Record, who has become a leading media voice on mental-health issues, is now talking about those challenges daily as part of his work with SickNotWeak, the charity he founded. A mix of celebrity guests and experts in the field join Landsberg to discuss mental-health challenges amid the coronavirus pandemic on a program — all produced remotely, of course — that airs at 5 p.m. ET on SickNotWeak’s social-media channels (it is not a TSN joint, though Landsberg has his employer’s blessing for the project).
Once the promo has been shot and Wrigley is off for a walkies, Landsberg explains that as the past month has unfolded it became clear that some of the things that have long been associated with mental illness are now being experienced by great swaths of the population. “It was almost, like, half the world appears to be struggling with anxiety and depression and panic and OCD and those kinds of things,” he says. The conversations that Landsberg has been having for years with a relatively narrow audience now suddenly applied to a much wider group of people.
“So now you have people who are going to, you know, say they wake up in the morning and all they can think about is lying in bed all day, and having a lack of motivation, a lack of purpose, a feeling of hopelessness, which is pervasive among people with mental-health challenges.” This isn’t just something that Landsberg thought up. There has been a steady stream of reports and studies in the past weeks about increases in anxiety and depression, even among those who hadn’t experienced such illness before.
Landsberg thought he could help those people, because he’s been doing that kind of thing for years. Not long after Off the Record, the TSN talk show, was launched in 1998, Landsberg says he came to realize that he wasn’t himself. He turned down an invitation to a movie première, and then he wondered why he had done that. He started to look back at the preceding months and he realized he had been avoiding people, keeping more to himself. Hiding in the bathroom at a family function. Skipping engagements. “I didn’t realize any of this until I kind of added it all up and then it was like, ‘Wow, there really is something wrong,’” Landsberg says. He sought help for depression and eventually started talking publicly about his experience. For more than a decade now he has spread the message that mental illness is a sickness, not a weakness. SickNotWeak was registered as a charity in 2018.
Being an advocate for mental-health issues has given Landsberg a unique perspective on the challenges that so many are facing today, stuck in homes and isolated, unable to live normal lives.
“I’m not saying that people who have COVID-related mental-health challenges are the same as somebody like me who has chronic depression, but I am telling you that they get a glimpse into that world and the glimpse into the world is that you can’t turn it off. You can’t decide, ‘Oh, OK, well, you know, I’m not going to pay attention to it,’ or, ‘I’m going to suck it up,’ and that is a pretty rude education for people who’ve never experienced it.”
Landsberg hopes that advice from professionals on his show will help, as will the discussion with guests like Olympians Hayley Wickenheiser and Rosie MacLennan. Given that just about everyone is going through something these days, just about anyone might have a perspective worth sharing.
“The common link between all of this is that everybody to some extent is having some kind of increased challenge,” he says.
One show this week included retired NHL players Jordin Tootoo and Sheldon Souray, who have each battled substance abuse. Souray has been sober now for a few years, and though he had never met Tootoo other than encountering him on the ice, he said that he was inspired by his journey to sobriety. He was one of his role models in getting clean. “That was a wonderful moment,” Landsberg says.
Amid all the seriousness, the new show, like his morning show on Toronto radio and the television talk-show before it, tries to have a little fun. “No one wants a massive dose of reality,” Landsberg says. “People want a little dose of reality.”
EVERYBODY TO SOME EXTENT IS HAVING SOME
KIND OF INCREASED CHALLENGE.