A couple of months ago I found myself spending a long sleepless night on a gurney in the St. Paul’s Hospital emergency room.
To my right was a fellow police found drunk and passed out in an alley. Beyond him and howling was a woman brought in by ambulance after she was retrieved from a McDonald’s where she was writhing about on the floor and refusing to get up. An addict they thought.
To my left was a woman who, according to her husband, suffered from both Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. A few spots further down was a man being held down on his gurney by restraints applied by three security guards.
And round about us, nurses, technicians and doctors calmly ministered to us all with equal care and attention.
In other words it was a typical evening at St. Paul’s ER, which has as its catchment area the West End and the Downtown Eastside.
On this city’s landscape of mental illness and addiction, this was and is ground zero.
This week Vancouver council received a report outlining a strategy on dealing with exploding incidents of these two afflictions. It was called “Caring for All: Priority Action to Address Mental Health and Addiction.”
It is Phase One in what will be a number of phases which will go well beyond this year’s civic election before there are any results.
It was based on the finding of the Mayor’s Task Force on Mental Health, a diverse group of 63 professionals in the field and those who live the life. Another 90 with similar backgrounds joined them in workshops. And it was launched late last year.
The report set the scene by citing two statistics gathered by the Vancouver Police Department.
One: in the past three years the number of visits to St. Paul’s emergency ward by mentally ill or addicted people had jumped by 43 per cent.
And two: over that same period apprehensions by police under the Mental Health Act were up by 18 per cent.
No group is more aware or overwhelmed by what they call a “crisis” than the Vancouver police. They have written and made public three reports on the issue starting in 2008 when they noted that one third of all calls to police in Vancouver involved mental illness.
The report in 2010 was titled “The Disturbing Truth: Lost in Transition” observing “nothing much has changed.”
Last year, 2013, it was it was the “Mental Health Crisis Update” with those disturbing statistics about increased apprehensions and visits to emergency.
The reasons for the jump in numbers are varied. There is a lack of general practitioners causing more people to end up in the ER.
A four year federally funded program “Chez Soi/At Home” for a time housed a cohort of addicts and mentally ill folks in supportive housing. They were compared to a control group who were left on the street. And — surprise, surprise — the people properly housed were a lot healthier.
That is until the program ended and they were back on the street.
Then there is the significant number of homeless people who came through the foster care system and now suffer with addiction and mental illness.
But what concerned the Mayor’s Task force more than the cause was the solution; how to transition people back to health.
And while there is not a one-size-fits-all answer there is an approach that was termed “Collective Impact.” It is a considered a “game changer” by the staff who wrote the council report and the people on the task force.
It involves a group of people aided by a facilitator working on a specific problem with each person working on a certain piece of that problem.
The province has put some dough into it and there is lots of brain power.
Yet as sketchy as it may sound, even on the eve of what is bound to be a scrappy civic election, the “crisis” does more to unite than divide political parties which are usually at each other’s throats.
When it was suggested to the usually partisan NPA Coun. George Affleck that the initiative kicked off by Vision Mayor Gregor Robertson was more talk than action, he said: “You’ve got to start somewhere.”
Indeed.
bygarr@telus.net
twitter.com/allengarr
