Reader’s discretion is advised. This story contains recollections of war, mental and physical abuse, and child labour.

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In December of 2006, I felt safe and truly happy for the first time in my life. But very soon, my psychological problems started to surface.

Any psychologist with experience working with refugees will tell you this is normal.

When you’re being tortured or when you’re a refugee, your fences are up; you’re in survival mode, and you don’t necessarily exhibit strong symptoms of trauma. But once you’re in a safe place, your mind and memory start to review all the traumas and horrors that you’ve lived through. And that’s when your mental health can go downhill rapidly.

I started having panic attacks two weeks after arriving in Canada in December 2006. But I knew next to nothing about mental health and didn’t have a clue that I was having panic attacks. I was getting extreme heartbeats, and my brain was going blank unexpectedly. I thought I had developed heart problems due to years of long-distance running. And that’s what I told a general physician that I visited. He checked me out and said I was healthy. He also had no clue that I was having extreme panic attacks.

I say extreme panic attacks because as a young marathon runner, I had a very strong and healthy heart, but the panic attacks raised my heartbeat to over 220 bpm, whereas even at the peak of a very fast 5 or 10km race, my heart wouldn’t pass the 180 bpm.

But panic attacks were just the beginning of my psychological battles. After those panic attacks, it took more than 17 years to get properly assessed and receive proper help and treatment.

What was causing the panic attacks, you might ask. Let me take you back to 1991, the first of my high school years.

Street Soccer

In my teen years, I spent all of my free time playing street soccer. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved the running part of it because it made me exhausted, which numbed my senses and made my parents’ physical and emotional abuse feel less painful.

Before reaching high school age, I had endured years of constant physical and emotional abuse by my parents and teachers. But their level of abuse was so severe and

chronic that it can only be dubbed physical and mental torture and child labour. So, I grew up with constant feelings of anguish and exhaustion.

Anguish, because I was always anxious about the next round of physical or verbal abuse that was awaiting me.

And exhaustion, because after each round of beating or after each day of labour, I was exhausted and fell asleep, on many occasions hungry.

I will give some examples of their abuses and the childhood labour that I was subjected to in the next section.

So, extreme exhaustion was a very familiar feeling to me, and my mind associated extreme exhaustion with sleep; extreme exhaustion had a soothing effect on me.

One day, after everyone had gone home, I was sitting on the side of the street, not wanting to go home. Zein, one of the kids in the neighbourhood, was passing by. I think he was going to the local store to get himself and his siblings some snacks. At that time, he was a better soccer player than me, but unlike me and like most other kids, he played only half an hour to an hour a day. 

He came up to me and asked:   Why don’t you go home?!

I replied: There’s nothing to do at home!

This wasn’t the only time some kid or adult would ask me that very same question.

But I couldn’t tell them:

• I was afraid to go home.
• Staying out was my way of escaping my prison (my home) and the daily torture by my parents.
• Running is my painkiller.

Deep inside, I thought, “They wouldn’t believe me!”

But to me, the tortures were real. So real that although I was addicted to running and always had pain all over my body after the games, I kept playing because running had a calming and soothing effect on me. It helped me forget my emotional pains for a few hours.

I knew that when I went home, I would be abused again, and staying out was only delaying the daily abuse, but I still stayed out and played until exhaustion.

Let me give you a better picture of the home that I grew up in, and the abuses and childhood labour that I was subjected to.

Home or Prison?

Born into an arranged or probably forced marriage

I was born in a village in central west Iran, surrounded by mountains and far from civilization. I was the firstborn into an arranged marriage (in fact a forced marriage). My mom was forced to marry a stranger from a village far from hers. I have heard from my aunts later in life, that:

• She was an unhappy bride. Reluctant to socialize with my dad’s family, she cried a lot, often alone, locked in her room.
• Annoyed by mom’s withdrawal and cries, my dad would give her a beating once in a while; a total of 3 or 4 times when she was pregnant with me. He used his leather belt.
• She refused to breastfeed or even hug me as a baby; in my first few months, my mom left me on the hard floor crying for long hours until my aunts or cousins would hear me and come and pick me up. They fed me cow milk for a few months until my dad managed to make a trip to the city and bring some baby formula.

My Extremely Violent and Abusive Parents

My dad, a true coward in my view, ran an absolute tyranny at home and was extremely violent towards his wife and children.

My mom always had blue or dark bruise marks on her arms and always tried to hide them from me. I’ve been told that mom always had bruises on her back and thighs. I clearly remember a handful of times when she had bruises on her face and neck; she wouldn’t go out of the house for a few days so neighbours and relatives couldn’t see it.

What’s most painful and unacceptable to me is that she believed her husband had the right to treat her that way.

My mental picture of my mom is of an irritable, violent, and abusive woman. She was always physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive, literally every day. Her parenting methods and techniques were nothing short of a mad jailkeeper or a dark age slaver.

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My Daily Routine of Abuse and Labour

During my primary school and junior high years, I endured malnutrition and child labour along with daily beatings by my parents and teachers. I was often whipped by a leather belt or flogged with cables, metal rulers, or skewers.

Whipping with his leather belt was my dad’s favourite way of beating me and my mom. When he whipped me, my best response was to avoid resisting or running. Because he would get even more riled up and hold his belt from the tail end and beat me with the buckle, sometime.

It was best to find a corner and curl up into a ball to minimize the impact on my head, face, and private parts. He didn’t care where the belt landed.

I do vividly remember that when he whipped me, he would clench his teeth together and beat in a manner that in Iran is commonly known as “beat to kill”. Peeking through my arms to see if he’s tired of beating yet, I could always see his teeth showing, clenched together, and his jaws as tense as a crocodile’s.

These were the years when the Iran–Iraq War had increasingly more impact on Iran’s economy. In my neighbourhood in Tehran, all life essentials were rationed including drinking water. 

My mom had 5 young children and couldn’t leave home. I was her oldest. Although I was only 7 years old, she would send me to stand in lines for bread, milk, and other rationed food items for a minimum of 4 hours a day, even in the coldest days of winter. I had to do that, otherwise we wouldn’t have bread to eat, which meant we would go hungry, and I would get a beating from my dad when he got home at night.

I also had to stand in line for drinking water and fuel, a couple of times a week. I had to carry five or six 40L containers of water, for about a kilometre, the distance from the water tank to our house. The fuel containers were very unsafe and always leaked. My hands and clothes were always contaminated after getting fuel. As the oldest child in the family, I also had to do any chores that came up in the household, such as doing the dishes and (hand washing the) laundry, sweeping and dusting the house, cleaning the toilet, and babysitting.

I was always exhausted and depressed at the end of the day. But then I had to do my school homework and study for the daily quizzes. We were given an average of 50 to 60 pages of homework every week and had to complete one or more quizzes every day. Teachers didn’t have a lot of time to teach us, so basically, we had to study at home, learn the subject well, and do well on the quizzes and exams!

I was regularly punished by my teachers because I could never finish my homework.

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Running, my painkiller

Although I played with other teenagers, I couldn’t make close friends. I would just stay out after school and stand on the sidelines of a soccer game for a team to pick me up and let me play. Once the game was over, I was alone again.

I didn’t know anything about mental health. So, I didn’t know that because of what my parents did to me since birth, I was a very distressed child and later a very awkward and withdrawn teenager.  Even other awkward kids stayed away from me! And I didn’t understand why. But I knew that something was wrong.

Fortunately, I did realize that running and exhaustion served me as an emotional stabilizer and painkiller. So, as long as there was someone to play with, I kept playing. I was always the last kid to leave the game.

Later, during my university years, I took up running as my sport of choice. While studying engineering, I also joined a professional running club and advanced to the national level.

Towards the end of high school, I was convinced that going to a state-owned university was the only way to escape my torturers. Because state-owned universities had dormitories.

I knew that I wasn’t the smartest kid in the block, but I decided to study hard to get to the best engineering school in the country. I had to do that because it was my only way to escape home and fight the idea that I was worthless and didn’t deserve to live, ideas that my parents used daily.

As a child, I had no option but to suffer daily torture and child labour by my parents and teachers, but as soon as I was able to, I found a way to escape them. My escape route was admission to a state-owned university.

During my university years, I avoided going home or contacting my family as much as possible. I would only do so when the dormitories were closed for a handful of days each year.

Not surprisingly, my roommates and my classmates would sometimes ask me:  Why don’t you go home?!

Even dormitory caretakers and one of my professors asked me that question once or twice.

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My Ultimate Escape

Despite my efforts to stay away from the family, my parents’ abuse continued. After graduating from university, I had to serve in the military. But my country was ruled by dictators, and I was reluctant to serve in their military.

Besides, although I didn’t know anything about psychology, chronic depression, and anxiety disorders, I knew I was different from other young men and didn’t feel safe enrolling in the military!

But my parents and some of their relatives (who worked for their country’s intelligence services) locked me up and tortured me for nearly 4 months to force me to serve in the military.

Even my mom participated in the regular beatings. In one of the beatings, my mom left a deep claw mark on my neck that was more than two inches long. I still have a scar from that. I was a grown adult at that time, with two master’s degrees.

Eventually, they dropped my exhausted body at the nearest military base and told the officers that I was not willing to serve.

I was then sent to a remote military base. I was in that base for about two weeks before I managed to escape and find my way to a neighbouring country. But during those two weeks, they broke my left thumb and my right big toe.

I had to resort to smugglers to take me to the neighbouring country. Escaping the military base and travelling with smugglers was a scary experience on its own, but it was even more traumatic to travel inside another country with a different language, alone and without enough money. I had to get to their capital city and find the UNHCR offices. That was a horrible journey full of traumas.

Once I reached the UNHCR offices, I registered as an asylum seeker. A year and a half later, I was recognized as a UNHCR refugee.

Life as a refugee was extremely hard. For almost two years, I was without a safe shelter, and sometimes had no shelter; I wasn’t allowed to work, and many times I went hungry for 2 to 3 days in a row; and suffered continuous harassment. But worse than being homeless was the uncertainty. I had no control over my daily life or my future. 

Eventually, in December of 2006, the government of Canada brought me to the city of Edmonton, in the province of Alberta.

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Coping Mechanisms

When I arrived in Canada in 2006, I arrived with a lot of mental health issues, but I was blind to my psychological ailments and vulnerabilities.

I had no family nor any relatives to alert me about my poor mental health, my anxious behaviour, my vulnerable disposition, and my withdrawal.

Furthermore, during the medical screening process in January of 2007, no one recommended psychiatric screening, nor did anyone alert me about my poor mental health.

By mid-2007, I managed to see a community counsellor at a non-profit organization that ran a settlement program for refugees. However, the community counsellor only touched my issues on the surface. I was taught a deep breathing technique and a muscle relaxation technique and was told that with patience and persistence, my symptoms would decrease and eventually dissipate.

Relying on that advice, I embarked on life in Canada, not realizing that I wasn’t getting an adequate diagnosis and that a deep breathing and muscle relaxation technique was far from adequate treatment for my condition.

In addition, I kept a consistent routine of running and swimming and watched my diet and sleep patterns as part of my coping mechanism. But my condition persisted, yet I kept telling myself that “I’m getting better”. 

Six years later, after many failures and rejections in my career and social life in 2012, I had an episode of depression, a PTSD flare-up, and a few panic attacks. So, I went to a walk-in clinic and asked for a referral to see a psychiatrist.

After a few months of waiting, I got to see a psychiatrist. However, my conditions were not adequately diagnosed. I was told that I’m dealing with transient OCD and depression, which can be medically treated. I was recommended to try Prozac, which is a common medicine. 

When I look back, I was constantly suffering from nightmares, flashbacks, isolation, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, insomnia, memory dysfunction, and depression. 

But these symptoms had become a constant feature of my existence, and I was so used to them that I considered them normal. In addition, my love of science and my ability to comprehend advanced science had kept me blind to my mental ailments, like a curtain hiding the truth. And even my constant failures in social life and getting employed didn’t quite wake me up to the fact that my existence wasn’t a normal one, but a painful one.

After a few more years, I was still all alone with a great deal of vulnerabilities. After countless failures in my career and social life, being taken advantage of a few times, and living in poverty, I finally realized that I was dealing with a lot more than just OCD and depression; there were a lot more serious underlying issues that I had to uncover.

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Decisive Measures

Subsequently, I planned to take a few measures to investigate the root cause of my mental health conditions, to prevent further damage, and to protect myself from my vulnerabilities.

The main measure was to learn a lot more about psychology and psychiatry. In the meantime, I had to find ways to control my symptoms till I got a clear picture of all the underlying issues. That included two more measures: consistently taking daily notes and following a rigorous exercise regimen. I knew that daily long-distance running had served me as a great emotional stabilizer and painkiller in my high school and university years.

I was very successful in executing these measures. I learned a great deal about human psychology, physiology, and kinesiology. I reviewed and analyzed every event in my life from birth to the present, considered all the possible root causes for the traumas that I’ve endured, and came to terms with them.  As a secondary benefit of these measures, I was able to participate in a few marathons and triathlon events and perform very well.

In 2020, I moved to the province of British Columbia, and by the end of 2021, I was convinced that I've been living with Severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Severe Anxiety Disorder (SAD), and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), for many years.

So, I embarked on a systematic investigation of my physical and mental health conditions.

I broke my action plan down into the following phases:

• Thoroughly investigate my conditions.
• Get a professional diagnosis.
• Embrace medical treatment.
• Get counselling and adhere to professional recommendations.
• My investigations took nearly two years to conclude and involved asking my family doctor for referrals for various medical tests. Once I had the data that I needed (by mid-2023) I asked my family doctor for a referral to see a psychiatrist, to present my findings and get a final psychiatric assessment and a thorough diagnosis. 
• During the Covid pandemic, I had kept in touch with my former psychiatrist in Albert. Due to the circumstances, remote visits and prescriptions were permissible. However, by early 2023, my former psychiatrist could no longer continue the prescription (Prozac) because I didn’t live in Alberta. So, I stopped taking Prozac. 
• This was an opportunity for me to observe the full spectrum of my symptoms in the absence of Prozac. In the meantime, I kept on a rigorous and consistent exercise and training regimen. But in May of 2023, I sustained a sports injury that required me to completely stop my exercise and training activities. This acted as a catalyst for discovering the full range and depth of my mental health issues.
• In the second half of 2023, while waiting for my psychiatrist appointment, I continued my studies of psychology and my self-observations. Towards the end of 2023, I was convinced that I suffered from ADHD during my childhood and early teen years, and the daily abuse by my parents gradually turned my ADHD symptoms from mild to moderate and severe.
• In January of 2024, I was finally assessed by a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with severe PTSD, MDD, SAD, and OCD.
• After the diagnosis, I started on medication under the supervision of my family doctor.

• Shortly after, I also started receiving counselling services from a registered clinical counsellor.
• In February and March of 2024, I was assessed for ADHD by another psychiatrist. The tests took place after I started medication and counselling, and the assessment indicated that by then, I had reached stable mental conditions. The test results were inconclusive, indicating that I do not exhibit severe ADHD symptoms as an adult.
  

• Ever since I came to Canada, many people, including some medical professionals who have helped me, have asked me, “Do you go back to visit your family?”
• They would see my poor mental health and pose that question, thinking that visiting my family would help me, not knowing that I’d escaped from my parents.

Their question reminds me of the question that kids in my street and my university classmates used to ask me: Why don’t you go home?!

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For privacy purposes I haven’t used his real name.

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