Maritime veteran takes part in The Push-Up Challenge for mental health

A Maritime veteran takes part in the Push Up Challenge to raise awareness and funds for mental health initiatives.

“Two thousand push-ups is the hardest part,” laughed Justin Thomas, and he’s not wrong.

Two thousand push-ups in 23 days is a lot.

That happens to be The Push-up Challenge, which is a nationwide initiative to raise funds and awareness for mental health.

Mike Bebee, along with Thomas and their realtor team at Royal LePage, are participating in the challenge for the second year.

“Trying to raise awareness, we started the mental health challenge, with a team of people that I work with,” explained Bebee.

“A lot of people are affected by mental health. Or at least knows someone that are affected by mental health,” said Thomas. “So this is our second year doing it. I think it’s a great, great place to put money.”

Bebee has had his own struggles, especially after serving in the military overseas. Believing his issues were mostly physical, he went through testing to find out it had more to do with his mental health.

“I learned in a really short amount of time that one of the most important ways to deal with keeping up your mental health, is by staying physically active,” he told CTV News Atlantic.

Which is why The Push-Up challenge really spoke to him, combing physical health and mental health.

“When I was in the military, for instance, if you talked about having mental health issues, that meant you were kind of putting your promotions or any advancement on hold,” he explained. “So for myself, I wasn’t dealing with it for a long time. And, unfortunately, my family and myself were just dealing with it at home.”

He says being a voice in the community is as important as raising funds.

“Mike is sort of like leading in showing that donations that you make to not-for-profit organizations in our community, that are grassroots or at the provincial level and making changes at policy levels is really important,” explained Beverly Cadham, co-branch manager of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Halifax-Dartmouth branch.

Donations go to programming like musical therapy and group sessions. Cadham said it’s important for those suffering to not be alone, and that is a focus of their work.

“We have 1,657 people participating, and they’ve raised $104,000 so far,” added Erin Christie, the provincial lead for communications and community engagement with the CMHA Nova Scotia division. “We serve about 10,000 Nova Scotians a year.”

She added that number is what they can count, but every person who visits a CMHA branch has at least one other person impacted by their progress.

“For me personally, I lost my son Seamus in 2017 to suicide. So talking about Mike speaking out, I also take that approach when it comes to suicide prevention,” she added.

“It is OK to talk about. That’s the most important thing, is mental health always gets kind of sheltered. And you shouldn’t talk about your feelings,” added Thomas. “I think it’s something that should be addressed more.”

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Bebee had completed 1780 push-ups and raised $2,645 of his $5,000 goal.

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