Having lost a son, her focus is kindness

For 17 years, John Gleeson, of Island Park, played everything right. He was an honor student at Long Beach High School, a promising guitarist and a loving family member, as well as kind and talkative with strangers.

The last year of his life, which ended on Feb. 10, with a suspected overdose, he was struggling with mental health issues that had developed during the pandemic. In the months since, partly to help her deal with her pain, his mother, Donna Dempsey, founded J.P.G.’s Angels, which she is incorporating in the coming months, to spread acts of kindness in her son’s name.

Lying awake long after midnight, grieving another family member nine years after her husband died in 2014, Dempsey wondered, “How am I going to get through this?” — specifically looking ahead to John’s birthday in July. Given what a thoughtful person he was, Dempsey said, she decided to continue his legacy of kindness and bring awareness to mental health issues.

At Easter time, after a visit to her son’s grave, she went to Target and made Easter baskets for Lincoln Orens Middle School students. They loved them, and she felt just a little better, realizing that “helping somebody else helps me,” she said.

So, she started distributing cards and guitar picks to friends and neighbors with John’s name and his photo, and encouraged them to give or send the cards to those they’ve helped in some way. In only two months, J.P.G.’s Angels cards have made their way across the country and beyond, and because traveling was something the family always did together, the fact that John could, in a way, continue to travel lightened Dempsey’s burden.

Some who know Dempsey buy gift cards and hand them out with a remembrance card or when giving a waiter or a barista a tip. Anyone interested in getting the cards can receive them free by sending a message to the family’s Instagram, run by her 21-year-old daughter, Erin, @JPGAngels.

The goal for Dempsey is to effect change, and to increase awareness of mental health challenges through small gestures, and later expand into a local foundation focused on young men’s mental health. As a sixth-grade teacher in Queens, Dempsey said she sees the beginning of teen anxiety and depression, but she doesn’t see many services for the male students.

“There’s a mental health crisis in this community and in this country,” Dempsey said, “and it’s kids, it’s everyday kids. It doesn’t discriminate against race, you know, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic background . . . It’s not about being a good parent. It’s anybody’s kid who can suffer from mental health issues.”

Gleeson’s mental health problems surfaced in 2020, when he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. His mother asked Mount Sinai South Nassau for resources. The hospital gave her 50 names of therapists, and she called every one, trying to get her son an appointment. It was all the same — they had waiting lists, and weren’t taking any new patients — until she finally found one.

Gleeson started taking medication, but when it needed to be switched after he turned 18, he needed to advocate for himself, but didn’t have the self-confidence to do so. Dempsey tried to step in and get doctors to give him the new medication, but was caught in endless pharmaceutical phone tag until he died.

Dempsey said that her son’s problems were a perfect storm of mental illness and self-medication. “It’s the age,” she said. “It’s an undeveloped brain, it’s mental health issues, it’s using the drugs.” Gleeson had smoked marijuana since he was young, and, his mother said, he used other drugs to “stop the pain.”

In bereavement workshops with other parents who have lost children, Dempsey has heard all about the stigma surrounding mental health. “The main theme from every one of them is this mental health aspect that seems to be ignored,” she said. “The depression, the anxiety, the feeling of worthlessness, the feeling of being a burden to others, and just being alone, and that young age of adolescence.”

“One day it could happen to you,” she warns parents. There are often no telltale signs of mental health problems other than slight mood changes, she said, which is natural in teens. She attended every school game, concert or event, kept alcohol out of the house, and gave her children the drug and alcohol talk when they were young, warning them.

“If you’ve known someone their entire life, and you know how they’ve been their entire life and then something starts to change about them, Reach out,” Dempsey said. And to those who may be battling an unseen enemy she said, “You can always get the right help. Don’t give up.”