Editor’s note: This article contains content that may be distressing to some readers.
Chad Kennedy, Founder of Sea to Sea for PTSD, stopped by the Royal Canadian Legion, Dunsdon Branch #461, during his trek across eastern Canada on Saturday, August 23, 2025.
After his experiences as a former soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), having served as an RCMP auxiliary member for eight years, and working as an Alberta sheriff highway patrol officer since 2008, Kennedy found himself having to take leave from his roll back in 2021 to take care of himself and his mental health.
Kennedy was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) back in 2018 after his father, a retired RCMP officer who also deals with complex post-traumatic stress, pointed out that his son had changed and encouraged him to seek help.
“In 2017 I was camping with my dad and he called me on it,” said Kennedy. “I had turned toxic. I didn’t understand why my friends and family didn’t want to be around me. …I couldn’t get what he was saying because I thought I was happy, and he said ‘I don’t like camping with you anymore, you always find something to rage about, you’re an angry individual, and you are toxic.”
While he would eventually take his father’s advice and try to get help through therapy, Kennedy said that his psychologist just didn’t know enough about the type of trauma he’d been through.
“I was introduced to a psychologist but it lasted three visits,” he recalled. “The guy just did not know how to deal with trauma, not the trauma that our veterans and our first responders go through.”
Kennedy said that while he didn’t go back to therapy, he was prescribed medication and continued to work for several years, unaware that his condition would worsen after being one of the first on the scene of the Columbia Icefields bus crash in Jasper National Park on July 18, 2020.
“We walked around the back of the bus and I broke down; I started bawling,” he recalled. “I’m looking at all these people, and thinking, ‘my God, we’re the helpers. We don’t have any firefighters or paramedics… we are the helpers and these people need strength, and if that’s the uniform is giving them the strength, we’ve got to do something.’”
Two weeks later, after returning from a brief vacation on August 2, Kennedy said that things took a turn for the worse.
After going to the liquor store to pick up alcohol and starting a fire in his backyard, he began contemplating taking his own life.
“It was the loneliest I had felt in my life and I never stopped to think I could call my dad because he understands PTSD; I just didn’t think that way,” said Kennedy. “ I kept drinking and drinking, and crying, and at some point in the night, …I had crossed into the alley where the truck parked and was about to follow through with my mission.”
He said he had blocked everybody he cared about from his mind when all of a sudden his dad’s face popped into his head.
“He had been dealing with his PTSD for 20 years at the time, and he and my mom survived together,” said Kennedy. “…That is the second time he has saved my life and he saved me without knowing it.”
Kennedy said that night was the first time his plan to walk across the country raising awareness about post-traumatic stress amongst veterans and first responders came to him.
He would return to work again, eventually asking that he be moved to another patrol area where he could avoid major highways and any accidents along the route, but on February 3, 2021, Kennedy found himself frozen in his tracks.
“I was gearing up for a night shift, I threw my duty bag into my patrol car, closed the door, looked out the window, and I broke down. I started bawling,” he recalled. “Every spidey sense in my body had gone off like, ‘something bad is going to happen to me tonight.’ I was too afraid to go to work and that’s huge.”
After talking to his sergeant, the two decided that he needed to get help and he booked an appointment with his doctor, ultimately leaving work indefinitely and securing a psychologist who was trauma-informed and could help him.
Having always struggled with whether he was a veteran or not because he was never deployed during his time with the CAF, he eventually began to understand that his post-traumatic stress first started all those years ago during his training.
Continuing his pursuit of healing, Kennedy eventually put together a group of people to help him with his campaign and officially launched Sea to Sea for PTSD in 2022 when he walked across the country to raise awareness, often joined by different first responders along the way.
After completing his mission over two legs, the first from Canbrook, British Columbia, to Montreal, Quebec, and the second from Quebec City, Quebec, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Kennedy decided to take a year off to focus on self-care before announcing a second walk in support of First Responder Families First and the Can Praxis program in Alberta..
The first leg of his second Sea to Sea campaign officially kicked off on April 28, 2025 in St. John’s Newfoundland and will end in Windsor on September 7.
“That’s our final day for the 2025 campaign and we are doing a walk with Canadian Mental Health Association in Windsor for Suicide Prevention Month,” said Kennedy. “They invited us and they’ve actually altered their date for this walk to coincide with us.”
While he and his team will break for the winter, they’ll pick up the next leg of the journey in 2026.
Reflecting on the last several years, Kennedy said he’s been blessed to meet so many people, collecting resources for others along the way and that he’s ultimately found his purpose in talking about his struggles.
“In 2022, I realized my purpose,” he said. “It was never about a uniform, it was me just wanting to help another person that can’t help themselves.”
During Kennedy’s Brantford visit, Larry Brock, MP for Brantford-Brant South-Six Nations, awarded him with a certificate of recognition, and the Ron Butcher, president of Legion #461, on behalf of its members, donated $500 to Sea to Sea for PTSD.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
