A Man Who Killed Himself;Chapter 34 of Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe.

    A Man Who Killed Himself: Chapter 34, Part One.


      He was a kind caring man who killed himself and he wasn't alone. Peter Basilio was one of 3500 Canadians who kill themselves every year. Why they do this can depend on many things. They may be very depressed, or feel their heart is broken, or they may have lost all their money.
     Many more men than women commit suicide. "Women try more often to kill themselves," one sociologist said. "But men are far more successful in ending their lives." Men kill themselves at a rate three times that of women. Peter Basilio was alas, a typical suicidal male. This short dark haired native of Metro Vancouver was in his 40's when he committed suicide. He suffered terribly from bi-polar syndrome and couldn't stand life anymore. He swallowed a big dose of sleeping pills in the late 1980's and then he was gone.
     Basilio was not programmed to end his life this way. He grew up in the 1950's in a roomy house in the growing and prosperous suburb of Richmond, just to Vancouver's south on the other side of the Fraser River. His father was a professor who taught at the University of British Columbia. His mother was your typical 1950's housewife who raised Peter and his three other siblings. Yet then something went  wrong. His father and mother split up. Then the professor died in a car crash.
     Everybody in the Basilio household felt terrible. Yet Peter was hit the hardest. Now in his late teens he fell into deep depressions. He sought help with a psychiatrist who gave him powerful anti-depressant pills. His school work suffered yet he managed to graduate from high school. He ended up as a landscape gardener working for the city of Vancouver.
    This was a part time job so sometimes he went fishing on commercial fishing boats to earn some more money. The tough men on the boats sometimes turned him off. "They don't give a toot about anybody except themselves," Peter said. He lived in a small suite in a low rent rooming house in east end Vancouver. Peter identified with victims, and underdogs like the Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. Peter also ended up as a volunteer with poor people on the city's Downtown Eastside. Peter sometimes bought presents for his co-workers though some of these people didn't appreciate his gifts.
     Peter's siblings had their problems too. One of his brothers Michael or "Mike" as he was called worked in schools as a janitor." Mike's in some dispute with his supervisor," Peter once said. "He's always having trouble where he works." Mike also believed that the Central Intelligence Agency was lurking in many places. At one time he harassed a reporter at a local television station. He kept phoning up the reporter to ask him, "Why are you working for the C.I.A.?" Finally the police warned Mike to stop phoning the man. And he did. Yet he kept on seeing the hand of the C.I.A. everywhere.