Former NHL and Olympic goaltender Corey Hirsch trades his pads for the podium as he tells the story of how he faced down his toughest ever opponent
“It’s the summer of 1994, I am standing at the edge of a cliff in Kamloops, British Columbia, and I am checking out.”
This is how Corey Hirsch told an audience of millions about the time he came a stick’s width away from taking his own life.
One of the first men in North American professional sports to speak openly from a public platform about mental health, Hirsch was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) during the 1996-97 National Hockey League (NHL) season, while with the Vancouver Canucks organization. Today, Hirsch is living a new life as a mental health and wellness advocate and motivational speaker. He uses his remarkable personal story to console, affirm, and inspire others, all while nudging the hockey community and Canadian male culture in a more positive direction. This October, he’s bringing his country-crossing public advocacy performance to Essex County.
If you watch hockey and are of a certain age, you’ve probably seen Hirsch play at some point, even if you don’t remember it. Hirsch was something of a journeyman at the NHL level, but his list of accomplishments in the sport—particularly in the early parts of his career—is deceptively impressive. A Canadian Hockey League goalie of the year and Memorial Cup champion with the Western Hockey League’s Kamloops Blazers, Corey Hirsch backstopped his country to an Olympic medal, made his NHL debut, and celebrated a Stanley Cup victory. Then he turned 23.
Most impressively, Hirsch started between the pipes for Canada at the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway—the last Winter Games before the NHL began sending players. He helped Canada to a silver medal while playing behind an uneven team that included future Hall of Famer Paul Kariya. Somewhat cruelly, he is now immortalized on a Swedish postage stamp, having conceded a spectacular tournament-winning goal to the Scandinavian superstar Peter Forsberg.
Drafted in 1991 by the New York Rangers, Hirsch played 108 NHL games over parts of seven seasons with the Rangers, Vancouver Canucks, Washington Capitals, and Dallas Stars. He also spent several years on the North American minor league circuit, eventually finishing his career in Europe with stints in Sweden and Germany. He retired in 2006, after 15 years in the professional game. In retirement, Hirsch worked for many years as specialist coach based in Arizona.
Today, in many circles, Hirsch is best known for contributing to The Players’ Tribune, an online publication that pairs professional athletes with professional writers to tell their stories directly to the public. His first and most widely read article is 2017’s “Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark,” a powerful 4,500-word personal essay Hirsch tells me is “deadly accurate.” The paradigm-shifting piece came together through connections in the NHL’s corporate offices. “I knew my story needed to get out there,” he explains.
In a very real sense, the story changed Hirsch’s life. The year the piece was published, helped in part by his newly heightened profile, Hirsch took a job as an on-air analyst with Sportsnet 650, the Canucks’ radio broadcaster. He held that position until 2022. That year, such was the lingering effect of Hirsch’s story, the Players’ Tribune asked him to co-host 21 episodes of its podcast series “Blindsided” alongside the psychiatrist Dr. Diane McIntosh. The popular digital audio show gave world-famous athletes a meaningful platform for speaking openly about their mental health. In October of 2022, HarperCollins published The Save of My Life: My Journey Out of the Dark, Hirsch’s memoir. The book, coauthored by Sean Patrick Conboy, editor-in-chief of the Players’ Tribune, has been well reviewed; it is often cited as a source of positivity and understanding for people living with mental illness.
Hirsch’s story, you can tell by now, is very well documented. Here’s the abridged version: Following his Olympic experience, during the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs, Hirsch began to experience sudden depressive episodes characterized by dark, “screaming” thoughts during a low-key night socializing with fellow players.
Despite a largely stress-free, idyllic childhood and what seems now like a mature, uncomplicated attitude toward the inherent pressures of his day job, Hirsch had struggled with insistent, negative feelings before. But never to this extent.
Hirsch held on for his life for the rest of the postseason—the Rangers would go on to win it all for the first time in half a century—but was on a plane back home to Calgary well before the parade. He spent the rest of the summer in particularly dark place, at one low point coming within moments of steering his sports car in the direction of his own certain death.
Hirsch survived the summer and resumed his NHL career in the years that followed, but he continued to struggle with several familiar signs of mental illness, including acute homesickness, bouts of dramatic weight loss, and debilitating difficulty getting out of bed.
Obsessive compulsive disorder, the fourth most common mental health disorder, manifests differently in different people but often leaves the afflicted stuck in an impossible search for certainty; for Hirsch, it’s often taken the form of a barrage of overwhelming thoughts—a spiral of dark hypotheticals. About one percent of Canadians are diagnosed, but it probably affects two to three times as many people.
I spoke with Hirsch from his Vancouver home on an early late-summer morning, a couple months ahead of his appearance in Essex County.
Two years on from the publication of his book, while he wouldn’t want you to think things are always light, light, light, light, light, Hirsch is in a good place. Now in his early 50s, the Medicine Hat, Alberta native has
committed himself full-time to mental health advocacy and motivational speaking, which has allowed him to translate the helpful influence he’s had on sports fans to other segments of the population.
“It’s been amazing,” he beams. “I’ve probably spoken over 200 times, to at least 20-to-30,000 people since the book came out. It’s been very positive. We’ve helped a lot of people. I tell my story, and I try to educate a little bit. I don’t want the audience’s experience to be we feel sorry for Corey and we go home. That’s really not what it’s all about.”
Lately, Hirsch has concentrated his message on men in the construction industry. “We have a middle-aged man crisis in this country,” he states plainly, “because as men we don’t ask for help.”
While Hirsch likens his early 20s—on the surface, at least—to a “rockstar’s” experience, you can imagine Hirsch fitting in well today amongst the lunchbox crowd. Hirsch greets his public with a hardened but friendly, approachable exterior these days: hair a bit thinner on top than it once was, forehead creased like a well-loved trapper. He speaks plainly and certainly without ever lecturing.
Because construction sites are still mostly male-dominated environments, they tend to default to “that locker room mentality,” in Hirsch’s words. “When you get around the boys, [you’re socialized to] be a man, toughen up, and don’t talk about your stuff,” he relates, “but mental health does not discriminate. We do all, in some sense, have mental health issues. There’s nobody out there that has a perfect brain. The brain is the most complex thing any of us have—scientists don’t even understand 80 percent of it yet! It’s ludicrous.”
Broadly, one in five Canadians suffers from mental illness in some form; Hirsch believes that number, is inaccurately low.
It’s tempting to use Hirsch’s example to tease out theories and observations about hockey and the structures around it, but this characterization seems flatly incorrect. In Hirsch’s own eyes, he has always only been a person with an illness working in a high-profile field.
For example, in hockey lore, goaltenders are commonly understood as oddballs or eccentrics. It does seem to make sense the first prominent NHLer to share his mental health story on such a public stage would be a goalie. But Hirsch isn’t having that. “I think that comes from goalies in, the 60s and 70s, when they didn’t wear masks,” he explains. “Those guys were crazy. But really, the sport has nothing to do with it.”
Hirsch continues to stress that we tend to cite the wrong circumstances as examples of debilitating pressure and stress. If anything, even during his lowest ebbs, he felt at peace out on the ice. “Doing something you enjoy and getting paid handsomely for it?” Hirsh poses. “As far as hockey and goalies go, that’s life. Worrying about rising housing prices, or how you’re going to put food on the table for your family? That’s stress.”
In all likelihood, Hirsch’s mental illness would still have developed had he never laced up a pair of skates—and his Junior hockey career would have developed as it did had he a clean bill of mental health.
While Hirsch’s keynote speeches are designed to be universal, his own experiences as a man with OCD are, of course, specific. More than maybe any other mental illness, OCD is often used casually, or even jokingly, to describe relatively harmless behaviour. We all have a type-A friend who claims to “be OCD” without a clinical diagnosis. While Hirsch doesn’t consider this common usage dangerous, his story draws a very clear line between, say, perfectionism or persnicketiness and serious mental illness. “We don’t go around saying I’m so cancer,” he notes. “But ultimately, it’s fine. I don’t waste my days worrying about people making jokes about it. But in terms of educating people: OCD goes much farther than [the common understanding]. It can be debilitating. Most of my friends, if not all of them, who really have OCD have been debilitated to a point where they’ve tried to take their own lives.”
Much of Hirsch’s writing and public speaking frames his experiences in a generational context: it’s not right, but that’s just how things were back then. While cultures evolve over time, these shifts only happen because people in positions of influence do something about it. So, I wonder: did Hirsch’s three grown children (two daughters and a son) grew up differently than he did? What can we do today as parents to ensure the next Corey Hirsch has a gentler experience? “The home needs to be a safe place,” Hirsch insists. “That’s where the conversation needs to start. Parents have to understand that just because little Johnny has a mental health issue, it doesn’t make them less of a person than anybody else. That is absolutely what I’ve made it with my kids. They have struggled too at times, but because they were able to come and talk to me, we were able to get them help a lot earlier than I did.”
As for the nature of the help available to people with mental illness, Hirsch has recently begun to focus on advocating for psychedelic therapy for mental health issues. “It’s a shame we’re keeping it from people, not allowing people to access it,” says Hirsch, who points to statistical evidence of psychedelics’ helpful impact. “While I do believe there is, of course, a place for pharmaceuticals, it’s disappointing we make stuff that’s naturally a part of the world illegal. We struggle with trying to help people with mental health; we need to give everybody all that is available to us.”
Hockey Canada named Hirsch to its board of directors in November 2023. He’s hoping to help steer the beleaguered organization in the right direction amidst a deepening black eye for the sport in the public eye. Restoring the Canadian public’s trust in the sport’s governing body is “a big task,” Hirsch admits, but “there are a lot of good people now on the board. It’s a big shift from what’s gone on and what’s happened. I think the board is going in the right direction, but it’s going to take time.”
It’s possible to read Hirsch’s work as just one part in a gradual sea change in the sport. “Absolutely people should be optimistic,” he stresses. “There are people in hockey who are kind and care and want the best. I think maybe in the past, Hockey Canada [fell victim to] the win-at-all-costs mentality, but I think now we’ve shifted to a role of really caring about the athlete and really what’s best for the kids out there.”
An example: Earlier this year, the NHL Players Association (NHLPA) launched an education and leadership program it calls the First Line initiative. Developed jointly with the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the health and wellness program aims to strengthen mental health knowledge for current and former professional hockey players and their families. While Hirsch isn’t involved on a day-to-day basis, he was happy to consult on and lend his story to the project, and he supports it. “It’s good the NHLPA has finally started to recognize players needed help beyond what was available to them,” he says, explaining that many players are reluctant to report to their teams/employers directly, fearful of career ramifications.
While Hirsch’s current work often keeps him away from the hockey world, he will be returning to a familiar context for his Essex County appearance. I wonder, after everything, how he might characterize his current relationship with the game of hockey. As a sort of civilian, can he still connect with the sport as a fan?
“Hockey seems like part of my past,” he admits, “but it is a significant part of my past. It’s allowed me to do what I do today. I do keep up with it, but I cheer more for friends now than I do for teams in general. For example, Jeff Jackson, the Oilers president, is a friend of mine. So, last season I was cheering for the Oilers.”
Well, you can’t win them all. But all things considered, it’s a good time to be Corey Hirsch.
Corey Hirsch will be speaking in Windsor on October 9th at the Serbian Centre. This event promises to create a profound impact across the community by inviting open dialogue, reducing stigma, and raising funds to support mental health initiatives. This event is made possible by Private Financial Group (PFG) partnered with Canadian Mental Health Association and co-hosted with Landscape Effects Group. To get more information, and to purchase tickets to hear Corey speak, please visit windsoressex.cmha.ca
