A woman is passing out brightly coloured shirts in Prince George this week as part of a personal effort to make mental health a conversation in communities across the province.
For the last three months, Denise Pekovich has handed out nearly 1,000 T-shirts with the phrase, "everyone's a little crazy" scrawled across the chest.
It's the 49-year-old Vancouver woman's first stop in the north after driving across Vancouver Island to Port Hardy.
Pekovich said the provincial health care system is overburdened, and while it provides support for those with addictions and homelessness, many with mental health problems fall through the cracks.
The orange and grey shirts, which are paid for out of Pekovich's pocket, also say "stop the stigma" on the back.
"I wanted to start a discussion about that," said Pekovich, adding she thinks communities should take more ownership of helping people in their midst. Making mental illness a public discussion is a way to help "so other people don't feel a sense of shame."
Pekovich has known that shame.
In April 2009, Vancouver police put out a release saying Pekovich was wanted on a province-wide warrant, warning she might be carrying firearms and labelled her as a woman with a "history of mental illness." Pekovich was accused of uttering threats, criminal harassment and breach of an undertaking and was taken into custody the next day.
Pekovich disputes what was said about her in the release and said her private medical information was made public. She said she felt the immediate effects of having her name so publicly associated with mental illness.
"They changed overnight," she said of her friends and family. "People treated you very different.
"I was stigmatized," said Pekovich, who is unemployed but was a piano teacher before the warrant splashed her name across all major Lower Mainland news sites.
"That pretty much stopped," she said of her work as a teacher.
She traces her struggle with mental health back to a sexual assault in 2001, for which she never got treatment.
After that, she said "it really snowballed for me."
She said in her experience the system doesn't adequately support those who have gone through trauma, which can be spurred by any number of things like grief or financial loss.
"It was enormously difficult to find help."
Over the last five years she's spoken to nurses, doctors and people with mental health problems who echo her concern.
"I thought my story was extreme," she said, but as she spreads her message, people have shared worse. "There's some really, really sad stories."
Pekovich said people have been receptive to her shirts, and she hopes having them worn will make visible the conversation around mental health - one supposed well-meaning friends have told to her keep quiet about.
"Not being able to talk about it is pretty much the crux of the matter."
