Jessica Stephens loved to dance, had an eye for fashion, embraced new languages and cultures, and had a zest for adventure.
She also struggled with severe mental health issues, which ultimately led to her loved ones to have to write those words in a recent obituary to remember the 32-year-old, who took her own life March 11 while incarcerated in a Norwegian jail after being detained for allegedly smuggling cannabis into the country. Cannabis is illegal in Norway, with the exception of medicinal use.
Attempts to contact Oslo police as well as the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security were not successful.
Jessica was born in 1991, the eldest of three children, to Lori and Robert Stephens.
She was a “great kid” who excelled at many pursuits, Lori said. Jessica grew up with a thirst for knowledge and even decided to leave her elementary school to attend an extended French program before studying it further in high school, she added.
Everything seemed “normal” until Jessica turned 13 years old, which is when Lori said she began to see some drastic changes in her normally easy-going daughter.
Jessica started getting anxious and began to experience “recurring negative thoughts in her head,” her mother said. She was eventually diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but unlike what most people thought, it was much more than simply repetitive hand washing.
“It was like a record player,” her mother said of what was on her daughter’s mind. “She would get stuck on a thought and it would just go over and over again and just drive her nuts. To get rid of these thoughts, she’d start scratching herself. She got violent and out of control … It was just terrible.”
Jessica’s behaviour became so severe on occasion that it would affect the entire family and she would sometimes lash out, Lori said.
“Nobody could understand it. We didn’t know about mental health,” she said, adding when her daughter was a teenager, Jessica saw a child psychiatrist and a psychologist, and was prescribed medication to try to help. She also spent a month at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
“She loved life, she loved to travel … and she was good in so many ways, but then she’d kind of flip and this mental health (issue) would take over,” Lori said. “She’d spin out of control and she’d be so angry. She just couldn’t regulate her emotions.”
That being said, over time, Jessica managed to gain insight into her own mental health issues and pursued a variety of therapies to try to help her keep them under control.
“I think at times it was helpful. She was doing her best, but brains are always changing, so what works for a while may not work later on — same with the medication,” said Lori.
Despite all of her struggles, Jessica was able to pursue several of her lifelong goals, including attending Fanshawe College in London, Ont., where she studied fashion design, before obtaining her nursing diploma at Georgian College.
She worked as a registered practical nurse for a few years before meeting a man from South Africa, whom she ultimately married and had a child with.
For a while, life was good for Jessica, said her mom.
Fast forward a few years to 2020 and the couple’s marriage was coming to an end. Jessica’s mental health was not in a good place, Lori said.
“It was just sad. They’d seemed so happy and everything was so good, but they decided to separate,” she added.
From there, Lori said, the situation went from bad to worse to tragic. In May 2021, Jessica suffered a severe mental breakdown and disappeared.
“The next thing I know, she’s been detained in Oslo, Norway … and she spent the last 10 months of her life in a high-security prison over there. Then she took her life,” said her mother.
Jessica never told anyone she was leaving the country, Lori acknowledged, adding she had called local police when she couldn’t locate her daughter but was told there was nothing they could do because she was an adult.
At first, Lori said, her daughter was “angry, nasty and upset” at her situation, but as the months went on, she began to return to the Jessica her family knew and loved.
“We talked to her twice a week. We did video chats with (Jessica’s daughter). She was doing so well. It was a great relationship,” Lori said.
As it turned out, Jessica was not doing as well as everyone believed. The young mother took her own life while behind bars at Bredtveit Prison in Oslo, Norway’s capital city.
Lori had just returned home from her grandson’s birthday party when there was a knock on the front door. She opened it to find a police officer standing on her porch and she was told her daughter, who she’d just spoken with on March 10, was dead.
“None of this made sense to me. Why would she do this, because things had been getting so much better? She’d been held in custody and she’d gotten her sentencing and it was going to be just over another year. We’d talked about that and it wasn’t the end of the world … and she was OK with it,” Lori said.
“We were shocked. We thought she was safe and well looked after.”
Despite Jessica’s love for life, when the negative thoughts took over, she simply became overwhelmed, her mom added.
“When she’d get into this different state, she was not the Jessica that I knew. She just changed, (but) she was coming back (to us) … She tried everything. She had all of the tools,” she said.
“It’s just so sad. She just couldn’t live with herself anymore. These thoughts were just so bad. I never thought OCD would kill my daughter, but it did.”
Although Lori said she’s choosing to keep the details private about how and why Jessica ended up on the other side of the ocean, she believes it was her daughter’s struggle with mental health that ultimately led her to make the decisions that took her to Norway.
She does hope, however, sharing her daughter’s story will help others.
“If it can save even one life ... One suicide is one too many. People need to know that there are a lot of people out there struggling with mental health issues and it can end very tragically and very fast,” she said.
Despite authorities at the prison having nearly 600 pages of Jessica’s health records, Lori said her daughter was not given any treatment or medication for the first 10 months of being incarcerated.
Five days before she died, Jessica was finally put on medication, Lori said, adding her daughter was not monitored by medical professionals upon starting the new prescription.
“I feel the medication, perhaps, may have set her off. From what I have read with a lot of these medications is that (the person) needs to be monitored for the first 28 days because they do have a higher incidence of suicide,” she said. “We have a lot of reservations about that … and it just doesn’t seem right.”
Shortly after her death, Lori, Robert, and Jessica’s two younger siblings flew to Norway to collect Jessica’s ashes and bring her back home.
“I wanted to see where she was and meet with her lawyer,” Lori said, adding she was able to collect her daughter’s journals, where she wrote about how much she was struggling. “She would write all of her feelings and her emotions. The last ones were so beautiful where she said she wanted to come home and be a good mom to (her daughter).”
In one of those journal entries, Jessica wrote about her attempts to get help, including getting access to dialectical behaviour therapy after her separation, but as a single, working mother was unable to afford time off work to take the courses, especially during the pandemic.
“My stress levels/chaos in my life affected my ability to make wise choices as well (and) affected my understanding impaired cognition,” Jessica wrote. “I couldn’t keep myself safe and was suffering from some paranoia before I came, my brain didn’t seem to be working.
“I had gone to the hospital a month or so before landing in Norway after a scary situation and did not receive much help, just an anxiety medication for that moment. Then I went to my doctor for treatment, he would have had the hospital report, no counselling, nothing.”
Lori said she’s still struggling to come to terms with the reality she will never again hold her oldest child.
“It’s very, very hard. I go through my emotions and have my ups and downs,” she said. “Every day, she is in my head, and I keep asking for a signal and (hope she) is OK up there.”
