Comment: Save the games, CAMH: Mental health fundraisers shouldn't be fun

In high school, I took part in a very well-meaning fundraiser called Homeless Awareness Night. Basically, a bunch of teenagers were sponsored to sleep outside of the school, all night. We built forts out of old refrigerator boxes, dressed in pilled trench coats from the local Salvation Army, and indulged in various clichés of Depression-era boxcar hoboism. I cooked a can of beans over an open trash-can fire, snickering, “the can seals in the flavour!”

The ostensible goal of this was to raise money – and, of course, awareness – to support homelessness and disenfranchisement. In effect, we were making a crude mockery of the issues. (In my defence, I was 14.)

Special to The Globe and Mail.