Corey Hirsch’s Stanley Cup celebration did not last long.
Less than a day after he and his New York Rangers teammates drank out of hockey’s silver chalice to end a 54-year championship drought with their 1994 win over the Vancouver Canucks in Game 7, Hirsch couldn’t leave New York fast enough.
His inner demons had taken over. As the Rangers’ third goalie for that playoff run he ditched his chance for a hero’s welcome ticker-tape parade through the streets of Manhattan and was on the next plane home to Calgary.
“I figured if I just got home, all this stuff would go away; I was never educated on any mental health issues,” said Hirsch.
Hockey gave him nerves of steel and when he was in game mode he had no problem tuning out the feelings of self-doubt that came with allowing a goal in front of 20,000 disappointed fans. But away from the game, he could not control that feeling in the pit of his stomach that kept eating away at his soul.
Having lived through his own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Hirsch was in Prince George this week as the keynote speaker in a lunchtime address at the Mental Health and Addictions Symposium at the Prince George Conference and Civic Centre.
Hirsch projected on the big screen what he considers his favourite photo, a picture with him beside the Stanley Cup in the Rangers dressing room at Madison Square Garden, and he told the crowd that it was always his dream, from the time he was five playing road hockey, to win that Cup.
“What you can’t see in this photo is that I’m actually suicidal, and that’s why we need people to talk,” said Hirsch. “This kid should be on top of the world. Here I was with the Stanley Cup and there weeks later I would actually make an attempt on my own life.”
After three days at home with his parents the panic attacks returned and he headed to Kamloops to visit his girlfriend and their friends from junior hockey. But that storm brewing in his brain only worsened and he didn’t know where to go for help. Hirsch got behind the wheel of his turbocharged sports car and floored it on a straight stretch of road along a precipitous cliff that led into to sharp left curve. With the speedometer heading beyond 120 miles per hour, something clicked and he slammed on the brakes, skidded to a stop, burst into tears and prayed.
“I got this thought, what if you don’t die,” Hirsch said. “What if you go over the edge and you’re stuck with these thoughts the rest of your life, another OCD thought. OCD thoughts put me there and OCD thoughts saved my life.”
The way he felt that day, the utter hopelessness that there was no other choice but to end it, is not uncommon.
“Most of my friends with OCD have at one point tried to take their own life, that’s how debilitating it can be, and that’s what people don’t understand,” said the 52-year-old Hirsch. “I never talked about it, never told anybody anything, it was taboo.
“It can happen to anybody. The numbers are one in five, those who struggle with a mental health issue, I think it’s closer to one on three. Mental health doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t care if you’re a doctor, lawyer, construction worker, mowing lawns or shoveling snow.”
Changing attitudes toward mental health issues was needed in NHL
During Hirsch’s era, pro sports teams didn’t hire health professionals and sports psychologists to look after the mental concerns of their players as they do now. Showing those struggles back then was considered a sign of weakness.
“Heaven forbid, a goalie with a mental health issue, I would have lost my job,” he said. “So thankfully we’re in a better place now because we’re having conversations about it, but back then there was a stigma.”
Unlike a physical injury to a pro athlete that would instigate a prescribed course of action to treat it, you can’t see a mental illness, and in Hirsch’s hockey world nobody was steering him where he needed to go to get help. In fact, he was getting worse.
He had no motivation to train his body in the off-season and his excitement to come to the rink each day diminished. His numbers tailed off considerably in his second year in Binghampton, after winning the AHL’s top rookie award the previous season, and in April 1995 the Rangers traded him to Vancouver.
Despite his lax attitude to off-season workouts leading in to his first season with the Canucks he ended up on the NHL All-Rookie team. But the daily anxiety attacks returned. He lost his appetite and dropped to just 145 pounds. He ordered a meal in a restaurant in New York and couldn’t eat it, and his teammates had no idea what was wrong. He was heading into a full-blown panic attack and during the morning skate, Hirsch told Canucks trainer Mike Burnstein he was suicidal. But with Kirk McLean injured, Hirsch played that night and had a terrible game. The Canucks lost in overtime and he got into a fight on the ice.
The following day in New Jersey, during the shootaround warmup, Hirsch couldn’t see pucks coming at him and told coach Tom Renney he had to pull him out of the lineup, which he did. Renney called a team meeting to discuss Hirsch’s condition but nobody knew what to do about it.
“The embarrassment and the shame was just the worst thing I could imagine and I remember thinking I’d just thrown my NHL career away,” said Hirsch.
A few days later, Burnstein arranged for a psychologist to come to Hirsch’s Vancouver apartment and in one 20-minute session he found out he had OCD. All of a sudden, the hell he had been going through for three years had a name. While there was no cure, he learned it was highly treatable with the right medication.
That night he and the Canucks shut out the Dallas Stars.
So what exactly is OCD?
The American Psychiatric Association defines obsessive-compulsive disorder as: “A disorder in which people have obsessions, which are recurring, unwanted and unpleasant thoughts, ideas, urges, or images. To get rid of the thoughts, people with OCD feel driven to do something repetitively (i.e., perform a compulsion, also called a ritual). The obsessions and compulsions -- such as hand washing/cleaning, checking on things, and mental acts like counting -- are problematic. They are time consuming (for example, take more than an hour a day), cause significant emotional distress, or significantly interfere with a person’s daily activities such as social interactions.”
In Hirsch’s case, one of the most obvious warning signs was his need to withdraw from friends and family members and he chose to self-isolate to hide his condition, the reason he skipped the Rangers’ Stanley Cup parade. Other signs are erratic sleep habits, being late for appointments, a change in circle of friends, a drop in student grades, struggling to engage in conversation and substance abuse.
“Early diagnosis is the key, it’s like cancer; do you want to get diagnosed at Stage 1 or Stage 4?” he said. “I knew I was struggling but I waited three years and I lost 25 pounds. What happens is people don’t get help until it’s dire. By the time I did get help I was on death’s door.”
Alberta roots and junior hockey success brought Hirsch to Broadway
Born in Medicine Hat and raised in Calgary, Hirsch played his junior hockey with the Kamloops Blazers, backstopping the team to consecutive WHL championships leading up to their Memorial Cup win in 1992.
Drafted 191st overall by the Rangers in 1991, he started his pro career in the AHL and was called up to the Rangers in January 1993. In his fourth NHL game, against Pittsburgh, he gave up three goals in two periods to Mario Lemieux and was yanked. After that, he didn’t play again in the NHL for two years and he beat himself up over it the entire time trying to figure out where he went wrong. He hated himself.
Hirsch was living the dream in 1994. The Rangers loaned him to Hockey Canada so he could play in the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Pegged to finish fifth or sixth, the Canadians surprised everyone when they got to the gold-medal final against Sweden, a game ultimately decided on 20-year-old Peter Forsberg’s one-handed deke in the seventh round of the shootout. Paul Kariya had a chance to tie for Canada but missed.
Hirsch’s outstretched legs as he tried to make the save were forever etched in ink when Sweden commissioned a stamp that shows Forsberg's move, which became known as “The Forsberg.” A fan reminded Hirsch of his place on the stamp during his final pro season in 2005-06 while playing for Malmo in the Swedish Hockey League.
“I said to him, ‘hey buddy, every time you use that stamp you’re licking my backside.’ I’m not sure if he understood me,” he said.
Hirsch’s career spanned 108 games with the Rangers, Vancouver, Washington and Dallas. For his Prince George presentation Wednesday, Hirsch was sporting the Canucks jersey he wore for four seasons from 1995-99, and he passed around his 1994 Olympic silver medal to the crowd.
Hirsch first shared his OCD story publicly in an article he wrote for the Players’ Tribune website and it went viral. Within an hour of it being posted the story had a million hits.
“Before this article came out I was terrified, I talked about having obsessive compulsion disorder, anxiety and depression and I talked about a suicide attempt I made while I was playing in the National Hockey League,” he said.
“I didn’t tell anybody but family members for 20 years, but I wanted to get the story out,” Hirsch said. “I hid it for a long time, had a suicide attempt with it. Ridiculously, due to stigma back then in the locker room and all that stuff, being a man and sucking it up and not telling anybody, where did it get me? It almost killed me.”
Hirsch’s subsequent Players Tribune article, You’re Not Alone, touched on the help available to OCD sufferers and Hirsch also co-wrote a book, The Save of My Life, My Journey out of the Dark.
Speaking tours helping Hirsch shed stigmas of mental health
Hirsch now works with the 4,500-member Independent Contractors and Business Association and 90 per cent of those companies have reported to the ICBA they are affected by mental health challenges.
As ICBA’s wellness ambassador, Hirsch has spoken to 75 groups of Canadians across the country and every time he tells his story, “I lose one of my chains.”
His presentation in Kamloops to 2,000 employees of the Trans Mountain Pipeline project ended with 40 of those workers, some in tears, waiting to talk to him about their own struggles with mental health.
“The two main things I try to get across is if you need help, go get it, there’s no shame in it,” he said. “The second is that it’s not only important to be that person that raises your hand, it’s just as important to be that person who is receptive of someone raising their hand.”
Nearly 40 per cent of long-term disability claims in Canadian workplaces are related to mental health. While employers have gotten more educated about resources available to treat those conditions and are more accepting of their role to provide that help, Hirsch says there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
“People don’t want to lose their livelihood, they don’t want to lose their job to mental health issues, so they’re reluctant to come forward to their employer, “he said. “When workers see that they’re bringing me in with ICBA, they see that their employers care and that there’s a safe place to get help. Billions of dollars are lost every year in work industries because workers don’t get help and they’re afraid to get help.
“I played in the NHL while I was sick, and I was a way better player after I got help. The benefits of getting help to people in your workforce are astronomical, and not only that, you possibly helped save a life.”
Hirsch, who has three adult children, drew his inspiration to go public with his story from his girlfriend Julie. They were sitting together on her couch five years ago talking what they most wanted in their lives and Hirsch told her he wouldn’t mind a million dollars or a new car.
“I looked and her and she was like, I just pray to get through one more day,’” he said.
“She had a business, a couple little kids and I didn’t really get it. Three months later she took her own life. I had no idea. That phone call dropped me to my knees.
“I don’t want anyone in this room to ever get the phone call that I got, and if you have already I’m so sorry, because I know the pain that’s associated with it. I drank hard for a year after that, never had a substance problem before that, but I self-medicated with alcohol.”
It took a phone intervention from his good buddy, former Blazer teammate Darryl Sydor. He asked Hirsch if he could expand the call to include Dr. Brian Shaw, co-director of the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse and Behavioural Health Program, and several other NHL players and Hirsch agreed.
“I quit drinking right there on the spot there for about six months and I’ve had a love-hate with it since then,” said Hirsch. “The point of that story is I had six people in my life that cared about me enough to have that conversation. Who knows, I might not be here today without that phone call.
“We need to get in other people’s business. We have to make that attempt. I guarantee you that that person, if they ever want to get better, you’re going to be the first person they come to, and you might save someone’s life.”
