A Burnaby mother who lost a son to suicide is taking action to help adult students suffering from learning disabilities. She hopes to prevent her family’s tragic story from repeating.
In 2016, Cindy Lapointe’s son, Jeremy Wohl, was 27, in his third year of carpentry school at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Cloverdale and struggling to get the help he needed to accommodate his dyslexia.
He needed access to a quiet room to study, more time for assignments and could have benefitted from audio software to read his textbooks, Lapoint says, but the school’s disability accommodations office was overworked, under-resourced and failed to get him everything he needed.
In December of that year, one week before his final exams, Wohl took his own life.
Lapointe believes Wohl’s frustration and heightened anxiety from school led to his death. She believes he would still be alive today if he had received the help he needed.
“I think he would have struggled through it, I think he would have passed and I think he would be working back at his job, where he was very effective,” she said.
Last week, Lapointe hosted a pub night and raised more than $10,000 to help others like Wohl, who are still struggling.
She’s unsure exactly how the money will be spent but hopes it has a direct effect as soon as possible. Lapointe said there’s a need for a centralized resource tracking what accomodations are and aren’t available at post-secondary institutions, advocacy for more resources and assessments for people with learning disabilities who do not yet have official designations.
“We just see a need here for these students that suffer from learning disabilities – and they suffer from it. It's not an easy life to have a learning disability,” Lapointe said.
Lapointe said she and her husband are looking into setting up an official society to further these goals. While there are existing organizations helping and advocating for people with learning disabilities, they mostly concentrate on the needs of children, she said.
Lapointe said people assume students with learning disabilities can navigate challenges on their own once they move into post-secondary studies, but that’s often not the case.
Since her son’s death, Lapointe said she’s met more students like him, struggling to get the help they need.
“I don't want [anyone else] to feel so dismissed and to feel so alone and to feel that nobody's really listening,” she said.
