NewmarketToday continues its annual tradition of marking the giving season by celebrating Newmarket’s Community Angels — the people whose kindness, compassion and community spirit help make our town one of the best to live in the country.
Sajel Bellon has a personal mission: lower the suicide rate.
The Newmarket psychotherapist has made a name for herself talking about suicide and first responder health. Through her work, she has pushed forward new ways to help first responders and will be giving some of her time to the Toronto Police Service over the holidays to help officers there.
Part of that mission is “to rehumanize our work and life experiences, because I think we’ve lost touch with all the beautiful things that make us human,” she said. “That buffers us from stress and dealing with life’s challenges.”
Bellon runs SOS Psychotherapy in Newmarket, working with locals with a specialty in occupational stress and relationship management for first responder couples. Besides her clinic, Bellon has become a keynote speaker, travelling around the world to deliver speeches on addressing suicide and her work and methods of helping first responders. She has worked with a range of organizations including the RCMP, Canada Revenue Agency and the Toronto District School Board.
Bellon said she knew for a long time that psychotherapy would be a field of interest for her.
She said she was fascinated with human behaviour as a child and knew she would land in the professional space. However, learning business management in her teens and 20s allowed her to expand her scope of work to include education and speaking.
Her interest in first responders came from a personal space, with numerous family members serving as first responders, including her husband. In a TEDx Talk, she described how occupational stress injuries “invaded” her home, with her firefighter husband, Vincent, struggling with those injuries and suffering from the trauma of recovering burned bodies. She talked about how that stress changed him and made him angry, and her struggles to find resources or help for it.
“I followed him down his endless black hole,” Bellon said in that public talk. “Vincent, like many first responders, bear these burdens alone, because they think it’s just part of their job … The system has failed here.”
She took it upon herself to try to change that system, offer help for first responders and teach others about doing so.
“It’s been a very lonely road,” she said about her efforts to address occupational stress. “Nobody wanted to acknowledge it back then. It’s nice to see, in the last five to 10 years, we’ve started to gain momentum in terms of the recognition that this type of sector needs.”
There were issues with “a lot of the external work exposures that were showing up in the house,” she added. “We didn’t know. Nobody told us. So, now, I’m telling everybody and I’m sharing it wide.”
It can be rewarding work. She said one of the most amazing parts of it is getting messages on Christmas Eve from people she has helped years ago, thanking her for saving their lives.
“We’ve seen some gains,” she said. “People are starting to talk about it. We’re developing a language which feels safe and normal and destigmatizing a lot of the social condition that we’ve had.”
Her efforts in the sector earned her one of the King Charles III Coronation Medals for Newmarket-Aurora, awarded to 20 people for exemplary efforts in giving back to the community.
“It hasn’t quite settled in, to be honest, because it’s been such a lonely and difficult road,” she said about the medal. “You can imagine the sacrifice my family makes in order for me to do this kind of work … When they see me getting up on stage and being recognized, they can see that I’m not doing it for no reason. I’m doing it because we’re actually making a difference and saving people.”
Information about her services is available at sospsychotherapy.ca.
