Kamloops mental health expert raises concerns about expansion of involuntary services | iNFOnews

September 27, 2024 – 07:00

Since BC NDP Leader David Eby announced the expansion of BC’s involuntary mental health system, many experts have raised concerns.

Alfred Achoba is executive director of the Kamloops branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association, and he said coercion is an ineffective long-term solution to the province’s mental health and addiction problems.

“In general, we’ve seen that when you put people with power in a situation, we’ve always known that it’s reciprocated,” he said. “We know that when people choose to seek help, that they are more willing, we see better results.”

The province plans to add more than 400 mental health beds by modernizing 280 existing beds and adding more than 140 new mental health beds, according to a news release.

“People with addiction, brain injury and mental health challenges need compassion and direct and reliable intervention to help them stabilize and rebuild meaningful lives,” Eby said in the release. “We are taking action to provide them with the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe as well.”

The BC Mental Health Act allows people to be detained by the police and taken to a mental health facility if they pose a danger to themselves or others. Achoba said people are usually kept at a clinic for anywhere from a few hours to two weeks, but a doctor can decide to keep people longer. People can be temporarily placed in drug detention.

“You temporarily lose that right to be able to decide for yourself,” he said. “When we are forcing people into treatment or into a nursing home, we are also violating their rights. All these coercive measures lead to ineffective results.”

Achoba said there is no meaningful follow-up after a doctor diagnoses a patient and deems him fit for discharge.

“That’s where the ball falls. Often these solutions or options that customers receive are temporary. It’s just to keep them safe at that time,” he said.

READ MORE: Involuntary mental health services must be “respectful and humane,” BC premier says

A more effective long-term solution would be investments in voluntary work to facilitate access and improve access, he said.

“Part of the reason there’s so much pushback around this idea of ​​forced help is that the end goal is still going to lead to that cycle of addiction, which is what we’ve been trying to break.” And that’s when people come out of detention, where do they go? Back to the streets where drugs are rampant,” Achoba said.

In BC there are already about 30,000 mental health cases per year out of about 20,000 individuals.

Kim Mackenzie, director of policy for the Mental Health Association, said involuntary treatment was a last resort rather than a reliable treatment option that would solve the universal problem.

“You can imagine there are repeat hospitalizations in that 30,000 number as well.” And so I think it’s a misconception that we’re not involuntarily detaining people who are a danger to themselves or others right now,” she said.

“We actually have the highest numbers of provinces in Canada for involuntary placement under the Mental Health Act,” she said. “The fact that there are repeated hospitalizations can lead us to wonder what’s going on with these people.” We have to recognize that involuntary care is not really a cure.”

Mackenzie said forced labor is an expensive way to help people who are struggling compared to voluntary work.

“Police costs and emergency room costs. These are two very expensive items on the public coffers. So we would like to see a lot more investment in early intervention and prevention,” she said.

She has many concerns about assisted living in BC, especially the lack of oversight.

“The biggest challenge we have in BC is that there is no one overseeing the implementation of the Mental Health Act or involuntary care in general. And we don’t have good data on its effectiveness,” Mackenzie said.

The organization is calling for an independent office to improve the use of the Mental Health Act.

“We would like to see an independent office of the mental health commissioner, kind of like the office of the human rights commissioner.” It’s really tasked with overseeing the system and really understanding what those gaps are,” she said.

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Health Justice is a BC non-profit organization that has released several reports on the problems with the involuntary care system, from gender-based violence to the fact that most patients who request a hearing never get one.

People detained under the Mental Health Act must request a review. Of the 2,569 requests for hearings, only 937 hearings were actually conducted, according to the Health Justice report.

Health Justice’s report on gender-based violence includes numerous personal accounts of how people, particularly women and queer people, are mistreated when they enter forced custody.

“And then when they got to me, all these cops, like six or seven cops, got out of the van. And they didn’t just stop me. They just beat me. They beat me, they beat me, they beat me, they … they put me on the ground, they put their feet on my feet, they were crushing my chest with their weight. I couldn’t breathe… it continued until the paramedics arrived,” a person with first-hand experience said in the report.

Health Justice said this issue does not have a simple solution.

“Complex problems are not solved by quick fixes. There is no doubt that people and communities are harmed when people’s mental health, substance abuse and other basic needs are not met. But the answer is not to create more harm by using these serious issues, and the lives of real people, as a political football,” Health Justice said on its site.

Although the Canadian Mental Health Association is a non-partisan organization, Mackenzie said mental health and addiction will continue to be a political issue.

“We would just encourage any political party to dig into the issue to better understand what we know and what we don’t know, especially when it comes to forced aid, what we don’t know.” And think about long-term solutions that aren’t silver bullet solutions. Because my experience working in this sector is that there are no silver bullet solutions,” she said.

Achoba in Kamloops said crime, addiction, homelessness and mental health have all been lumped into one issue when in fact they are separate problems that require different solutions.

“Obviously, when you put all of that together, they enhance each other.” What we would like to see is definitely a clear distinction where a person who is going through a psychosis because of their mental health is not arrested under the pretext that they are suffering from an addiction problem,” he said.

Click here to see the Canadian Mental Health Association’s BC Policy Plan.

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