Go to your local bookstore, pick up a handful of thrillers, and you will find yourself in some very dark and frightening places—a serial killer’s underground lair, a drug house torture room, or possibly the most frightening of all, your ex-spouse’s lawyer’s office.

Yes, all very scary stuff indeed. This is the very substance from which thrillers are made. Being a cop in my other life—and working in the deplorable squalor of the Downtown East Side—I have seen too many of these visceral scenes to count, and quite often the reality is far more horrifying than any fiction could detail. Horrifying, and sad, because enmeshed in much of the violence and despair are all-too-common forms of mental illness—the bipolar depression, the schizophrenia, the post-traumatic stress disorder, and of course, the various forms of borderline personalities that are the lifeblood of so many thrillers.

Make no mistake about it, mental illness is a dark and terrifying place. Snakes & Ladders details the sad and sometimes unnoticed hardships that many of these people often suffer. The opening scene begins with Mandy—poor, lost Mandy—and her ill-fated run-in with the unbalanced and detached monster known only as The Adder. Here, the terror and helplessness that often comes with mental illness is in full force.

Why? The answer to that is simple: not many things in this world inspire a fear greater than mental illness. Give me the option of facing a hit-man with a sniper rifle versus the possible diagnosis of a mental illness disorder, and I will take the assassin every time. Trust me, it’s the easy way out.

As a cop working in the Downtown East Side, I know this from personal experience. So many people suffering from different diagnoses have a life or death battle on their hands every day. They often lack emotional support from those around them, lacking also understanding from society in general, and sufficient treatment from a failed medical system. Even worse, they are often targeted by dangerous predators because of the very weaknesses inherent to their diagnoses

It is terrifying, and yes, sad.

Although Snakes & Ladders (like all my novels) is a thriller, the story works hard to offer a sense of what any Downtown East Side cop experiences every shift—and what people suffering from mental illness endure every minute. People like Mandy.

She was an important character to me because she was a real–life person I sadly knew a thousand times over. Her life, her squalor, her hopelessness—it was all real. If there is any justice, the novel does not demonize her, but instead shows the blunt harshness of her reality. God knows, that was the intention.

When people ask me as they often do about my job—about being a cop working in the Downtown East Side—they almost always focus on the drug trafficking, the forcible confinements and kidnappings, and the murders. It’s flashy, I guess. In your face, so to speak. The fodder of every newspaper headline. I’ve been dispatched to hundreds of those calls. So many I don’t even know the number. And I’ve arrested a lot of criminals.

Yet none of those arrests are anywhere near as memorable as the apprehensions I’ve made under the Mental Health Act. Apprehensions are always much more difficult emotionally. There’s nothing as uplifting as getting a person the professional help they need—and yet nothing as frustrating and gut-wrenching as seeing the same old cycle start all over again the very next day.

It’s all Snakes & Ladders, I guess. Climb up one day, slide down the next. In the end, you just bite down. Get the job done. And become a little more cynical with each passing day. There’s a reason why cops get jaded.

But jaded or not, here’s a piece of hard-earned advice. When dealing with someone suffering from a mental illness, don’t judge, help. Don’t demonize, understand. The temporary uncomfortableness you experience equals zero compared to what they’re dealing with every single day.

And who could say otherwise? It’s like I said earlier: rather than get that diagnosis, most people would rather face almost anything—the assassin with the sniper rifle; the drug enforcer in the torture room; Hell, even the serial killer in his secret lair.

But the ex-spouse in the lawyer’s office?

Come now, friends. Let’s be sane about this...

Sean Slater is a police officer in Vancouver, British Columbia.