Toronto teen opens up about his battle with anxiety and his decision to give up minor hockey

Tom Thomson remembers his son Lucas complaining about chest tightness and struggling to breathe. It was a November night in 2010 and Lucas, a 12-year-old at the time, had just finished an outdoor warm-up with his Vaughan Panthers peewee AA hockey team prior to a game.

“I didn’t know what was wrong,” Tom recalls from the family's home in Woodbridge, a suburb just north of Toronto. “I was trying to reassure him that everything was fine. He thought [it was] because he went outside in the cold weather and was running around and didn’t have warm enough clothes on . . . He thought he was going to be sick or have a heart attack.

“I tried to get him dressed in his equipment, but there was no way he was going to do it so I told the coaches. He went behind the net with one of his teammates who was suspended and just watched the game. [At the end of the night] he was fine.”

It wasn’t until a few months later that the Thomsons realized what Lucas had experienced that night at the rink was more than a small panic attack; He was suffering from an anxiety disorder.

He began disappearing from the table during dinners at home and his parents would catch him struggling to swallow food and making frequent trips to the washroom.

“I watched a TV show and one of the characters had chocked on a piece of food and died,” Lucas said. “That kind of got to me in a way that when I ate later that night I just couldn’t swallow anything.”

Both Tom and his wife Linda tried to explain that what he’d seen on TV wasn’t real, but nothing they said got through to him.

Lucas nearly stopped eating altogether for about two weeks. He stopped going to friends’ houses for sleepovers out of fear that he’d have to explain to people what was going on and he spent many nights alone in his bedroom crying. He’d sleep through the night, but wake up with no energy and have trouble focusing throughout the day at school.

“I was scared of death, scared of food, scared of everything,” he said.

He lost 12 pounds in three months – a lot of weight for someone who’s just over five feet and was barely pushing 90 pounds at the time.

“As a parent, the worst day for me is when we were up in his room and he said to me ‘mom I don’t know if I can do this for the rest of my life’ and as a parent you do not want to hear those words,” his mom Linda said from the couch in the family’s living room, her voice cracking as she tried to hold back tears. “There was nothing we could do. We were trying to help him, but nothing was working.”

Tom added: “I think that was the hardest part, not being able to fix it and for me more than Linda, not understanding it.”

Eventually, the Thomsons were able to get an appointment with a therapist at York Central Hospital and it was there that things began to turn around for Lucas. He was taught how to cope with the anxiety and how to try and prevent panic attacks.

“She said that ‘whenever you know the anxiety is coming on tell yourself that your brain is lying to you, that nothing is going to happen, [that] you’re fine,’” Lucas said.

While he still struggled with panic attacks after that first session, Lucas says that after three or four more sessions at the hospital, the anxiety thankfully subsided.

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Lucas is far from alone in his battle with mental illness. According to a Statistics Canada report released earlier in September, one in six Canadians said they needed mental health care in the last year. Teens in particular are under a significant amount of pressure with how competitive the battle for education has become and the uncertain job market.

“Today it’s become, right from Grade 7 and 8, students are worried about their grades and being competitive,” Toni Atkinson, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, told the Globe and Mail in February. “I see kids that are confused, overwhelmed, not able to experience things in a natural way because they have to move faster, they have to do more.”

That’s why, with Lucas beginning his first year of high school, both Tom and Linda feel strongly about the importance of him maintaining a close relationship with them – so that if something does come up in the near future that triggers his anxiety, they’re able to help him handle it.

“That’s where a lot of kids fall into trouble is when they can’t go to their parents and say I’m having these issues and they look elsewhere,” Linda said. “And after hearing what he said to me that night in his room, he can say anything to me and to his dad and know that we’re here for him and I think that will help him when he’s dealing with any type of anxiety.”

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Walk a few steps up the Thomson family’s driveway and it’s hard to miss the five or six hockey sticks leaning against a brown brick wall directly to the left of their front door. Inside, their eldest son David’s black and orange Don Mills Flyers – a AAA team in the GTA – hockey bag is lying on the living room floor and pictures of both he and Lucas on the various teams they’ve played on over the years sit atop a book shelf amongst other family photos.

Hockey has been a large part of the Thomson boys lives since they were toddlers. But this past summer, Lucas, now 14 decided he’d grown tired of the competiveness and politics that surround minor hockey.

One morning in August, while at a training camp with the AA Duffield Devils in Innisfil, Ont., Lucas woke up with bug bites all over his body and his right eye had swelled up so much “that it looked like I got punched in the face by Mike Tyson,” he said.

He called his parents who arrived at the camp that afternoon and when they took him out for lunch he started to explain to them that he didn’t think he wanted to play anymore.

“To be honest I think all summer long he was wrestling with [the idea] of whether or not he was going to play,” Tom said. “I think there was a lot of stress and he was afraid to tell me. I mean I grew up with hockey. I love it, I love the people and the interaction, the kids are fantastic, but he didn’t want to play [and] that was totally fine with me.”

Linda agrees and feels it was the anxiety of disappointing her and Tom, his coaches and his brother, who’s heavily involved in the sport that kept him playing competitively for as long as he did.

“I think he’s much stronger and happier now,” Linda said. “The decision about hockey was very difficult, but I think if he hadn’t gone through the anxiety than he wouldn’t have been able to make that decision and he would have still been playing hockey just because.”

But quitting his team doesn’t mean eliminating the game from his life entirely. Lucas says he’ll still spend afternoons at Westwood Arena in the winter time watching his brother’s team play and there will be plenty of hours spent on the outdoor rink just down the street from the Thomson’s home in Woodbridge once the ball hockey surface is converted to ice.

“I think that for Lucas [the outdoor rink] is great for just relaxing him so he can still get the hockey, but without the competitiveness,” Tom said.

“I still love the game,” Lucas added. “It’s just not as important to me anymore.”