Cassie’s Cause: A family’s courageous story

After reading the column published right after this story, please take a few  minutes to check this story out to learn more about Cassie’s Cause, the foundation started by the Chee family of North Attleboro to honor their youngest daughter Cassie, who took her own life in January of 2020.

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This story, which was published in the Saturday-Sunday, Aug. 14-15, 2021, Weekend edition of The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, MA, speaks for itself. It tells the courageous story of a North Attleboro family’s reaction to the loss of their younger daughter and sister to suicide.
The family in June of 2021 began a non-profit foundation, Cassie’s Cause, in loving memory of their daughter with the aim of raising awareness about mental health issues and to end the stigma that surrounds mental health.
My thoughts and prayers are with the Chee family.

Link to Cassie's Cause main story, which includes Roseanne Chee's sidebar in her own words and helpline information.

https://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/local_news/after-daughters-death-by-suicide-north-attleboro-family-honors-her-memory-through-nonprofit-awareness/article_d8504ea0-8615-564b-9536-7d8e26d1e0df.html

Here's the story, as it appeared last August in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA:

“I began this cause in honor of my beautiful daughter, Cassie Chee, who fought a lifelong battle with mental illness. My hope is to keep Cassie’s memory alive and utilize this platform to spread her story so she can continue to touch people’s hearts and minds.”
--- Roseanne Chee, about Cassie’s Cause (cassiescause.com)

NORTH ATTLEBORO --- The death of a child is the most anguishing and painful loss that a parent can suffer --- and it’s particularly devastating when the reason for that grief is suicide.
That’s what the Chee family of North Attleboro --- mother Roseanne, father David and older sister Lindsay --- have been dealing with since Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020, when, as Roseanne put it, “my life forever changed.”
Roseanne wrote those words on “Cassie’s Cause,” a non-profit foundation devoted to ending the stigma of mental illness and to opening up a dialogue on the difficult topic of teen suicides. It’s an effort that the Chee family launched in June to honor Cassie.
“Cassie had taken her life … and this life … as we knew it, was forever changed … never to be the same again. Our lives were completely shattered,” Roseanne writes on Cassie’s Cause (cassiescause.com).
Cassie was just 17 and a North Attleboro High School senior when she died after struggling with mental health issues since she was 11, when she started getting counseling. She would have turned 19 today (Aug. 14).
Cassie was a brilliant student, so her mental health issues didn’t impede her schoolwork, Roseanne said, but she fought an ongoing battle.
“Cassie struggled with depression and anxiety very early on,” Roseanne writes on Cassie’s Cause. “At just 11 years old, I brought her to see a counselor, and she was in therapy from then until her passing. For years, Cassie wanted me to come into her sessions with her. We were able to get a lot accomplished. These were not easy for her. Most of the time she left in tears, as did I. She worked hard, and she never wanted to feel like she was ‘different.’ ”
But Cassie’s struggles were eating at her.
“She lacked self-esteem. She did not love herself and thought how others could possibly love her. She always felt awkward. It was hard for her to make friends … to fit in … to just be a regular teenage girl,” Roseanne writes.
Roseanne’s description of Cassie’s battles with mental illness and her account of the day her daughter took her own life on Cassie’s Cause are poignant, chilling, moving and courageous. It’s must reading for parents, teachers and anyone interested in stemming the tide of teen suicides, which is growing, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
A CDC report released Sept. 11, 2020, by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System said “the rate of death by suicide in people from 10 to 24 years old increased by 57.4% in the United States over the 10-year period from 2007 to 2018. That was a dramatic jump from where the numbers stood in the early 2000s, remaining relatively stable until 2007.”
Since then, the report stated, suicide rates have been on a gradual rise almost everywhere nationwide, with 42 of the 50 states reporting significant percentage increases in youth suicide death rates from 2007 to 2018.
Massachusetts’ rates varied from 2000 to 2018, according to the report, with spikes in the years 2007-09, when 157 suicides were reported, and from 2016-18, when 258 suicides were reported.
Those daunting statistics make Cassie’s Cause, a non-profit 501(c)(3) foundation, especially relevant. It’s “dedicated to increasing the education and awareness around mental health, as well as eradicating the stigmas associated with mental illness, and is also dedicated to the prevention of suicide in young adults,” according to its mission statement.
Continuing Cassie’s story
But Roseanne said Cassie’s Cause is even more than that: It’s the continuation of her daughter’s story.
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“At some point early on, I knew in my soul, and deep within my heart, that Cassie’s story did not end with her physical death,” she writes on the website. “The phrase ‘Cassie’s Cause’ came to me early on. It had such a great ring to it, even though I had no idea what that would ever look like. Periodically those words ‘Cassie’s Cause’ would pop in my head.”
The family wants Cassie’s Cause to honor her memory and be a way to ease the pain and challenges associated with mental illness. To get their message out, the family --- Roseanne, David and Lindsay --- sat down with The Sun Chronicle on a recent afternoon at their North Attleboro home. Seated in the living room surrounded by cherished family pictures on the walls, they had a lot to share.
Trying to help others
Roseanne, who like her husband will be 60 in late summer, started the nonprofit to help others.
“My daughter suffered from mental illness. I didn’t realize how bad it was until she took her life,” she said. She hopes Cassie’s Cause will help “break the stigma because I want more people to think about mental illness. … I want to bring it out into the light. I also want to keep her spirit alive. I want my daughter’s legacy to be known.”
David --- who served the town as a selectman, member of the school and finance committees and the RTM until the town council took over in 2019 --- said that in keeping with the family’s desire to keep her spirit alive, two scholarships in Cassie’s memory were given out to the Class of 2020. They awarded $1,000 scholarships to Jocelyn Jackson and Ethan Brayall-Brown to continue their education in the arts, which were important to Cassie, whose passion for the arts had made her interested in studying film in college.
Starting with the Class of 2022, their goal is to give a scholarship “to someone going into mental health, art therapy or spiritual psychology,” Roseanne said.
Lindsay, 21, a senior at Kent State University in Ohio majoring in fashion merchandising and minoring in international business and entrepreneurship, embraced Cassie’s Cause. Lindsay, like Cassie, was adopted by the family from China, Lindsay in 2001 and Cassie in 2003.
“I thought it was great. It was proactive. I believe there was a need for it,” she said, noting her sister’s death touched many.
“So many people remembered her. When Cassie passed, all kinds of people” showed their support, she said. She recalled one teen who went to church with her who decided to get a tattoo in her memory.
Ending the stigma
The biggest goal for Cassie’s Cause is to end the stigma surrounding mental illness.
“It’s a challenge for counselors (and mental health professionals) to know” when it’s time to treat the illness, Roseanne said. “A lot of time, all they do is to treat it with medications” that don’t always work.
That happened to Cassie, Roseanne said. She writes Cassie “was prescribed an antidepressant medication, and it did help with the depression, but not so much for the anxiety. At one point her medication had to be increased because the depression got worse.”
Another factor making it hard to treat mental illnesses is how many people hide the depth of the disease, Roseanne said.
“Cassie wore many masks,” she writes. “I believe that she was embarrassed by her mental illness. That she just wanted to be ‘normal.’ That she did not realize mental illness was a disease just like any other physical disease, and that there were possible treatments available to her. She lacked the education around mental health, and actually, so did I. I am sure she was scared.”
Education the key
Going forward, educating the public will be a priority for Cassie’s Cause.
“The parents and teachers have to be educated about how tough it is to spot mental health issues,” Roseanne said. Cassie, for example, got straight-A’s, and she took four AP classes in her senior year. “She was a perfectionist,” she said, and hid the full extent of her pain.
Roseanne said in a letter that Cassie left behind she talked about having a borderline personality disorder --- something that no one ever suspected. “There was obviously a clinical issue going on, and it went undetected,” she said.
Roseanne plans to work on her education initiative with other non-profits --- including KyleCares of North Attleboro (kylecaresinc.org/ ), which was started by the Johnson family in memory of their son Kyle, who took his life in April 2018 at age 19 --- and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
In addition, she said it’s “my hope to help our community and get the funding necessary to offer educational programs, like the mental health curriculum that Mental Health Collaborative of Hopkinton offers, in our middle or high school.”
To achieve that goal, the Chees are raising money by selling Cassie’s artwork as blank greeting cards on the website, with all proceeds going to the foundation. “It is also my hope to offer her artwork on other types of merchandise as the foundation grows,” Roseanne said.
Hard to talk about
Lindsay offered a different perspective on mental health education, suggesting that older people are less willing to talk about it than people her age. “The reason why I think it’s so vital for teachers and parents to be educated (about mental illness) is because they grew up with (the) stigma,” she said.
In contrast, she said younger people are more apt to talk about it, because “so many kids can relate to anxiety and depression,” which she said are “more openly discussed” by them on social media sites.
No one knows more than Roseanne that getting people suffering from a mental illness to openly talk about it poses an immense challenge.
Writing on Cassie’s Cause, Roseanne said it wasn’t until after Cassie’s death that she discovered there were other times that Cassie had thought about taking her own life:
“Since Cassie’s transition to the other side, I have come to realize just how deep the darkness that haunted her really was.
“Journal entries I found after her death stated that her first attempt at taking her life was at just 11 years old. There were other times after that as well. She kept all of that to herself, never discussing these suicidal thoughts with me, her dad, her sister, her friends, and even her counselor.
“As a mom, I sit here now and say to myself ‘how could I have missed this?’ ”
Larry Kessler is a retired Sun Chronicle local news editor and can be reached at larrythek65@gmail.com.