Bill Guiney of Renews is hitting the road again in aid of helping Newfoundland mental health organizations and raising awareness about the cause. He plans to walk a complete loop from Signal Hill down the Southern Shore to Trepassey and back around the loop on the Salmonier side. He is also in the process of writing a book about mental health in the province.
By Alexandra Brothers, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter / August 25, 2023 Edition
Renews resident Bill Guiney is carrying on his annual effort to raise awareness for mental health this September.
Guiney turned 61 this month and has been organizing mental health awareness campaigns and fundraisers in the community for eight years. Mental health awareness is a cause that has a deep personal significance to Guiney. In the fall of 2015, Guiney’s two daughters were hospitalized within a week of each other for mental health concerns. Later that year, Guiney decided to take action to open a dialogue about mental health. “I told (my daughters) that I was going to start supporting mental health and supporting them so they wouldn’t feel that they were alone,” he said.
His first initiative was a push-up challenge that he shared over social media. This event became an annual thing “and it’s been kind of growing ever since,” he said. In 2021, Guiney walked 1,000 km across the island from Port aux Basques to St. John’s, raising $30,000 for mental health organizations in the province in the process.
This year, he will be walking around the Irish Loop to collect funds for his upcoming self-published book on mental health, Push. Proceeds from this book will go towards supporting local mental health organizations. The “Loop the Loop” walk will be roughly 330 km, beginning and ending at Signal Hill. He will leave Signal Hill on August 31 at 6:30 and walk along the highway towards Salmonier Line with the hope of reaching the Edge of Avalon Hotel and Restaurant in Trepassey on September 3 between 2 and 4 p.m. There, he will host a halfway point celebration. After that, he will trek back to Signal Hill, returning on September 6.
It was his walk across the province in 2021 that sparked his idea to write a book about mental health.
“The walk across Newfoundland was amazing,” he said.
Although when he began his walk on the West Coast nobody knew who he was, he quickly gained recognition and by the second week of his month-long journey, people began to join him for portions of his walk.
“People were coming out and they were walking with me for five or 10 kilometres… then they started to tell me their stories,” said Guiney. People have continued to reach out to the Guiney family to share their own mental health stories over the past few years. Eventually, Bill and his wife Susan decided to compile these stories into a book to help raise awareness about mental health within the community.
Guiney’s goal for his walk this September is not only to raise money to put towards his book, but also to gather more stories to include in it. The promotion for his walk invites people “to keep him pushing by sending your stories, poems, songs, or letters. He looks forward to reading and sharing what helped you and your loved ones with your mental health in his book.” He asks for people to email their stories to wilguiney@gmail.com with the subject “Push.”
The title Push has a layered significance for Guiney. “It means a lot of things to me,” he said. Not only is it a nod to his push-up challenge, which started his mental health initiatives, but is also part of a personal mantra that Guiney applies to mental health. “It’s just about pushing forward,” he said. Pushing forward can be as simple as “just getting out there, going for a walk, doing something physical, because that helps (with mental health),” he said.
Two thirds of the proceeds from the book will be donated to The Gathering Place and Ruah Counselling, an organization that provides counselling to those who can’t afford it. The other third of the proceeds will cover the expenses of publishing the book.
Guiney said it’s important to start conversations about mental health. He said that since mental health has become more openly discussed in the past number of years, it seems the number of people who are affected by mental health problems has increased. His explanation for this is that “before, it was kind of hidden, but now that people are talking about it, it seems that there’s more out there, but I think there’s always been this much out there, but it just wasn’t being talked about.”
He said the more these issues are talked about, the better for everyone. He said it is crucial to hear “real stories from real people” about mental health because they are a lot easier to comprehend than impersonal statistics on the topic.
“A lot of people don’t understand the statistics, but if you have a person that’s telling their story, like how it affected their family or it affected them, then people, and probably the government, will understand it more,” Guiney said.
