Luka Magnotta, Out of the Blue, and why I believe Jan Wong is still out to lunch in the land of denial

I’d always followed Jan Wong’s career because I found her writing consistently interesting: her books about China and her tragic flirtation with Maoism—now there’s teenage rebellion carried to extreme—her work as a journalist there during the Tiananmen era, her articles about going undercover as a domestic worker, the occasional “Lunch With” columns, etc. etc. etc.

And then there was her work about the Dawson College shooting.

My son was at Dawson College on Sept. 13, 2006--a date “that will live in infamy” in my overloaded cranium, I’m afraid--and I’ve written about the Dawson shooting, too. But my slant was on the necessity for more and better gun control—Lepine, Fabrikant, and Gill all managed to legally purchase their lethal weapons—why were guns so easily available to these men?

Unlike Jan Wong, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the “why” of the shootings:

My response is not to launch a fruitless inquiry into the “root causes” of this catastrophic occurrence. I couldn't care a whit whether the perpetrator of last Wednesday's atrocities was refused academic admission to Dawson College, whether he was bullied as a child, either in school or at home. I think it's irrelevant if he grew up with a chip on his shoulder because of some imagined slight, or even if he or his family suffered in the past from some form of persecution, be it real or imagined, in Canada or elsewhere.

To me, there can be no mitigating factors for murder, whether the locus of attack is a college campus in downtown Montreal, a nightclub in Tel Aviv, a skyscraper in New York City, or some parched crossroads among the rubble of Afghanistan. Murder is murder is murder. Each one should fall under the rubric of “hate crime.”

But I’ve always had a feeling there’s something wrong with Jan Wong’s approach to the world, something I couldn't quite put my finger on, but something that made me uneasy nonetheless. Maybe she’s the sort of person who would be great in a war zones or in places undergoing great upheaval, but who can’t make a go of it in the quiet of everyday life in Canada. Too bristly, always looking for a way to make misery out of nothing.

A person obsessed with the notion that the main point of journalism is to afflict the comfortable.

In which case I doubt I will ever be a journalist, because I believe most people are fundamentally good, even if they’re comfortable (though look how far that attitude got Anne Frank…or Blanche Dubois!).

According to Anne Kingston in a recent issue of Macleans

When shots rang at Dawson, the third-generation Montrealer was the logical go-to for a big feature. Under tight deadline, Wong observed that the Dawson shooter, and the shooters at the École Polytechnique and Concordia, were children of immigrants. All three, she wrote, “had been marginalized in a society that valued pure laine,” argot for “pure” francophones: “Elsewhere, to talk of racial ‘purity’ is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

…[Wong] still contends she was misunderstood. She fishes in her knapsack for a piece of paper with the contentious paragraph. “Everybody is saying I said they shot people because of Bill 101. Where does it say that? I never said that!”

Let me make an admission here: unlike Anne Kingston, or Wong’s laudatory apologist Heather Mallick (who, unbelievably, is mentioned in the Out of the Blue preface and still managed to get a column published in The Toronto Star about Wong’s new “workplace divorce memoir”), I am not Jan Wong’s friend; I’ve never met her. However, I am both similar to and different from Jan Wong: a non-pure laine third generation Quebecer, albeit one who never left Quebec.

And, seriously, Wong as the go-to person? Why didn’t they use a Quebec-based journalist? Surely The Globe and Mail had some….

I found the episode as facilely presented in the above articles, and on Wong’s website and youtube video http://youtu.be/zxNQq366gfU , very disturbing, and not at all as I recalled it. I know I was hopping mad about Wong’s article when I read it at the time and remember firing off an infuriated letter to the editor in response.

So from the bowels of the internet, I pulled up the article Wong wrote about the Dawson College shootings.

Wong makes it sound like the origin of the uproar was a single sentence in the 3,000+ words of her 2006 article. But the truth is, she spent over 400 words on this whacko analysis: not a throw-away sentence but a major integral part of her piece. Her thesis is clearly that Quebec’s emphasis on ethnic/racial purity is profoundly alienating and is part of the explanation for Kimveer Gill’s—and Marc Lepine’s, and Valery Fabrikant’s--murderous rampages.

So I’ve been wondering when she’ll see fit to ascribe alleged cannibal killer Luka Magnotta’s rampage on Bill 101 and Quebec racism, too? Or maybe it’s our lack of acceptance of alt lifestyles that pushed him over the edge? Oh wait—Quebec is a Canadian leader in acceptance of gay lifestyles, so maybe that won’t wash. What about the psychology behind the Robert Picton, Homolka-Bernardo, or Russell Williams affairs? Any zany thoughts on the psychosociality of those criminals? Either she’s learned her lesson (though she denies it) or it’s only in Quebec that such links occur.

I remember reading Wong’s 2006 article and thinking both she and her editor deserved to be fired over it. It read like the ravings of some anglo-Quebec dinosaur from the Equality Party, not the purview of Canada’s newspaper of record.

I’m no great friend of the Société Saint Jean Baptiste--or of Bill 101--but I believe the fury that rained down on Jan Wong and The Globe and Mail as a result of her article was deserved, if in some measure disproportionate. Self-inflicted, even.

And if anyone in the article deserves to be skewered as racist, surely it was Jan herself:

For security reasons — security of the equipment — that is, the computer lab had three vast windows that looked onto the hall. All 50 or so students hit the floor, everyone that is, except for a couple of students who continued working at their computers. Were they Asian?

“Everyone asks me that,” says Alex laughing, much later, from the safety of his home. “One was a white guy who was writing an essay. The other was a black guy who was searching the Internet.” 

  

Maybe she thought she was being funny, or that this was QED--highlighting Montrealers’ racism.

I haven’t read her new book, Out of the Blue, but if the premise is that her depression came “out of the blue,” I’m afraid Jan Wong is still out to lunch in the land of denial. And I’m not talkin’ Egypt here.

Jan Wong’s depression sounds to me to have been pretty well self-inflicted, and I say this in sorrow and as a person not wholly unacquainted with depression. That The Globe and Mail used whatever pretext it did to fire her—and, eventually, editor Edward Greenspon--doesn’t surprise me. The article should have been rejected or those damning 400 words altered.

Wong’s book-long skewering of The Globe for firing her reminds me of the standard definition of chutzpah: a young man who murdered both his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan.

It was about her judgement. It was about her editor’s inability to save her from herself.

Maybe Wong's editor Edward Greenspon should have borne the brunt of the ire. Her writing crossed the line. As a seasoned journalist, a deadline doesn't qualify as an excuse when the result is provincial character assassination. It was her editor's job to rein her in, to correct her lapses. Another epic fail. Her remarks revealed an appalling ignorance of and lack of respect for the evolution of Quebec society over the past 30 years. Not to mention the sort of pseudo-intellectualizing that would have been shot down in a CEGEP termpaper. If there was still a CEGEP term, I mean.

I'm sure The Globe and Mail would’ve had a hard time printing an article--even one of "analysis" or "opinion"--that baldly asserted Marc Lepine's murderous instincts were the result of his Algerian Arab heritage. How, then, could it justify tarring an entire neighbouring community of millions of people?

A former colleague puts it another way: “The instincts that led her to Maoism in her early years never left her personality.” 

Yeah, I'll say.

And if you think this post is hard on her or if you’d like to really see Wong skewered, you should read  this Warren Kinsella’s blog post which starts with “What a load of deepest Annex bullshit” and proceeds to this conclusion:

Jan Wong is scum. She is human garbage. I was delighted to hear that the Globe eventually severed their relationship with her. And I am equally delighted that she continues to drown in her own bile, and her own irrelevance.

As long as I live, I will never forgive Jan Wong for what she did to our family.  May her misery be long and deep.

Kinsella’s diatribe links to the origins of his problem with Jan Wong in the piece “Eat this Jan Wong.”

Depression drugs may fight cancer (from the archives)

 

Groundbreaking McGill research yields compelling results

Beverly Akerman | Could the black cloud of clinical depression have a silver lining? A recent study by McGill researchers shows that commonly prescribed anti-depressant medications known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) may protect against developing colorectal cancer. The groundbreaking research was published in the April edition of the prestigious Lancet Oncology journal.


Previous work in mice demonstrated that SSRIs both retard the growth of transplanted human bowel tumours and make mice that are susceptible to developing colorectal cancer less likely to do so. "Serotonin has a stimulating effect on cell division and multiplication so [if] serotonin is a promoting factor, the logic for using antiserotonin drugs is strong," epidemiologist Jean-Paul Collet pointed out. "The strength of the study is that we started with a clear a priori hypothesis coming from animal studies. . . the question was to verify whether we would find the same type of association in human beings. What we found is that people with cancer had less use of SSRIs than the control subjects. This is why we think that SSRIs have a protective effect."


Jean-Paul Collet  
Photo: Claudio Calligaris

Russian doll syndrome

The study, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health, was conducted with PhD student Wanning Xu and Professor Stanley Shapiro, a colleague of Collet's in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Occupational Health, using the administrative databases of Saskatchewan Health and the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency registry. Although over 10,000 cancer patients and 40,000 age- and gender-matched controls were studied in the population-based, nested case-control study, it took Xu only about six months to perform the actual number-crunching.

There are some caveats to the results. "The study is large by number of patients but it is not an experimental study like a randomized clinical trial, [where] you administer a placebo or a true drug and follow patients prospectively. Randomized trials are the gold standard for evidence," Collet pointed out. Observational studies such as his can be biased by many uncontrolled factors. So in the conclusion, his Lancet paper notes "we support conducting more studies about this question and maybe studying SSRIs with high risk patients [who] because of genetic factors or polyposis would have a high risk of [developing] cancer. Another interesting population would be patients with cancer to see if SSRIs could prevent recurrence or metastasis."

Collet cautions that treating millions of people with SSRIs in the hope of preventing colorectal cancer in some hundreds of thousands would be a risky business. "This type of research is extremely useful to conduct more research to determine what is the real effect." Collet likens these studies to playing with nesting Russian babushka dolls: open one and there's almost always another one inside. He's confident there will be a definitive answer to the question of using SSRIs to prevent or treat colorectal cancer within 5 to 10 years, depending on international collaborative research networks and the attitude of the pharmaceutical companies involved.

Originally published in The McGill Reporter, March 30, 2006.

Suicide and its Survivors: When People We Know Kill Themselves

(My first commissioned professional article, Originally published in The National Review of Medicine issue of January 30, 2004. I reproduce it here because suicide remains an issue close to my heart. If you know of someone struggling with depression or suicide--or close to someone who is--please reach out. In Montreal, please contact Suicide Action Montreal, tel. 514-723-4000 or 1-877-277-3553. Outside Quebec, you can find helplines at http://suicidehotlines.com/canada.html.  Remember: concern and compassion work wonders. Godspeed.)

Eli Puterman is an engaging young man with a ready smile. Currently studying clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia, he was 22 when his partner committed suicide. Stephane was found in a field behind Eli's parents' home, clutching a photo of Eli. He expired in hospital of an overdose and hypothermia. Eli had just terminated their year-long relationship, several months after having found Stephane in their apartment, the veins of one arm slashed. 

Although news to Eli, Stephane had made several previous suicide attempts In the aftermath of the suicide, no counselling was offered or suggested. Says Mr Puterman: "one of the doctors was the only [person] to acknowledge that I was the partner, the boyfriend. He was the only one who asked me how I was doing, put his arm around me to see if I was okay. And let me speak for a bit. I was destroyed for awhile. I was a zombie. I had a friend, a psychologist, who called me once a week to make sure that I was okay, to see if I had gone into therapy yet. Finally she said to me 'What are you waiting for?' It took about three months for me to get into therapy. I didn't want to. I kind of thought that I should, wasn't sure, felt I could cope on my own. Therapy was the best thing I ever did in my life, to reach out and talk about it." 

GETTING HELP

Caroline Smart is a facilitator with the self-help group Family Survivors of Suicide (FSOS). Many of the people she encounters had no idea that their loved one was wrestling with death; half of suicides succeed on their first attempt. "I often recommend the Kubler-Ross book On Death and Dying to our survivors, because they go through the same sort of grief process dying people experience", she asserts, referring to shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The double stigma of suicide and mental illness differentiates the grief of survivors, however. Some survivors experience guilt-tinged relief, liberated from the stress of caring for or coping with a mentally ill person. 

After the first unsuccessful slashed wrist attempt, Eli had Stephane admitted to a local hospital. After three days he was discharged. What Eli interpreted as the system's callowness has plagued him ever since. "... they let him go. There was no follow-up interview. There was nothing! And I freaked out. I begged every single person in his life except for his family -- he didn't want his family -- to take him in, because I couldn't take care of him. And no one wanted to. Everyone had helped him already, they were tired of helping him."

HELPING OTHERS

Several years later, Eli was asked to facilitate a teen survivors group. He told them, "Many people feel guilty after somebody has killed themselves; they think 'I should have been the person who brought them to the hospital. I should have been the person who made sure they went to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist'. Everyone I know who has survived a suicide has tried to help the person who committed suicide. Everyone has tried to talk to them and to convince them to get help." 

Systematic study of survivors is in its infancy; Dr. Gustavo Turecki of the McGill Group for Suicide Studies hopes to develop a centre to support families and treat pathological bereavement. His multi-disciplinary group focuses on genetics, molecular biology of the brains of suicide completers (e.g. dense microarray gene expression studies) and clinical studies (e.g. psychological autopsies, family studies). Currently, support for survivors is mostly provided by self-help groups such as FSOS. 

Declares Caroline Smart: "We get people, sometimes, after 30 years; they have only just decided to talk." McGill's Social Work Faculty created the group in 1988, spurred by parent-survivors. It meets bi-weekly, from September to June. Catholic Family Services provides non-denominational referral backup, helping too with administration and planning. Survivors share their experiences, or simply listen. Self-expression, in many forms, is strongly encouraged. FSOS has semi-annual open meetings, and has organized other events, such as a vernissage of survivors' artworks. 

Meeting those who have managed to continue meaningful lives following suicide is a great comfort to the newly bereaved: "It shows them they can go on, and go on to have good lives, too." Caroline, a survivor herself, notes that invited speakers suffer from a credibility problem unless they too are survivors. Often what clients need most is to tell their stories. "We are trying to get the word out . . . we do get referrals from a number of sources already but don't feel that our name is out there, the way it should be," she says.