'Thank God I failed'

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Orlando da Silva’s desire to become a judge on Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice was a longstanding dream.

It was dashed when the selection committee declined to recommend his 2017 application. Through the grapevine, he heard whispers that it was because he was too fragile. Three years earlier, as the new president of the Ontario Bar Association, the then-Toronto lawyer had publicly revealed that he suffers from severe depression.

“There are always multiple factors, some of them unknowable, but word filtered back that, considering the stress of the role, the committee “would not be doing me any favours” by recommending me,” he writes in his new book, Thank God I Failed: A Lawyer’s Suicide Attempt and the Case Against Trying.

“The man who had cross-examined organized crime figures and a serial killer in packed courtrooms, who had stood on stages across the country talking about his greatest weakness, was apparently too fragile to sit behind a bench.”

Da Silva was furious, not because he felt entitled to the robe, but because the very advocacy that had helped others seemed to have been counted against him. 

“The stigma I was trying to dismantle had walked into the room undercover, wearing the language of ‘concern,’” he writes. 

Shortly after, he left his job as a senior lawyer with the Ministry of the Attorney General.

A vocal advocate for mental-health support in the legal profession, Da Silva describes his ultimate departure from practicing law after more than two decades in his book. It is a raw, heart-wrenching, but hopeful memoir about years of persistent suicide ideation while highly functioning as a courtroom lawyer, trying but failing to take his life, and then finding the courage to speak out at a time when it was still taboo.

In an interview, he says his book is meant to make “a more lasting offer” for people who want to talk, want to relate to one another, and need to hear a message of hope. 

“Life can be very messy, but not obviously so to the outside world. And you're not alone in that, if yours is,” Da Silva says. 

“I hope that if you see yourself in the book, there's a community of others available out there who can help and support you, if you feel comfortable enough to speak up to somebody.” 

Progress within the profession

Although he experienced firsthand the cost of speaking out, he says the profession has made significant advancements in the last decade or so. At that time, legal convention booths with mental health materials were still tucked around corners, sessions with lawyers talking about their struggles were sparsely attended, and discussing your depression at work was a quick route to losing clients, if not your job. 

Today, the Law Society of Ontario, for example, holds an annual mental health summit that draws thousands. The Canadian Bar Association organizes mental health sessions that pack rooms, individual law firms provide supports, and law schools incorporate wellness in their programs. There have been several studies and surveys within the profession, and the number of lawyers speaking out about their own problems has grown. 

“The dial has moved in a meaningful way,” Da Silva says. 

A relentless stigma remains, however. So much so that when aspiring young lawyers ask him whether they should reveal mental health problems in interviews, he advises them to remain silent because he’s heard of too many situations where an offer has been withdrawn as a result.

The stigma “is still there and will always be there to some extent, which is a shame because it denies opportunities to some of the most talented, strong, resilient people I have ever met,” he says.

The stigma is a shame

It’s why he continues to speak out. Da Silva has told his personal story to packed rooms of up to 200 people across the country and contributed a chapter to the groundbreaking 2024 Canadian book, The Right Not to Remain Silent. 

His own book chronicles his upbringing in an abusive household in Kitchener, Ont., starting with an early memory of being thrown off a second-floor balcony when he was two. By the time he was 9, he was experiencing severe anxiety and depression, which eventually culminated in a suicide attempt in 2008. It failed after he called his ex-wife with regret that he had swallowed 180 sleeping pills and drank two litres of alcohol.

For years, he hid the truth from everybody, including his work colleagues and family. But just before he became president of the Canadian Bar Association in 2014, he decided with crystal clarity that he would use his platform to share his experiences so that struggling lawyers and judges would know they were not alone. It was a decision that proved cathartic and changed his life in positive ways. 

Leaving law

Da Silva says his career as a lawyer, from law school to the courtroom and beyond, was an exacerbating factor in his enduring mental health battle. The legal profession has acknowledged significant mental-health challenges and is an industry plagued with high levels of stress and burnout.  

In addition to detailing his struggles, his book is also a plea for federal lawmakers to reject the expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAID) to include people with mental illness alone. He stresses his views on the issue are his own and not of the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada, where he has been chief administrator since 2019.

Da Silva devotes a chapter to the current debate, which is returning to Parliament in the coming months for a final decision in the wake of a report from a joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate that recommended an indefinite pause on expanding MAID eligibility for people with mental illness alone. 

“If MAID for mental illness had been available to me in my worst moments, I might have reached for it. Not because I truly wanted to die but because my depressed mind was not a reliable narrator of my own worth or the permanence of my condition,” he says in his book. 

“I am not arguing that there is no such thing as unbearable psychiatric suffering. What I am arguing is that a society that has not yet done the hard work of providing real, sustained, accessible mental health care has no right to offer death as a medical service to the people it failed. We do not need medical assistance in dying for people like me. We need medical assistance in living.”