Tyler Hooper's List: Canada and Mental Health System

• Prisoners with the most acute mental illness are being locked up in prolonged isolation and unkempt, chaotic and "grossly inadequate" conditions, two years after the United Nations called on Canada to end solitary confinement for inmates with mental disorders.
• Documents released under Access to Information reveal that the correctional investigator of Canada raised concerns about the isolation, lack of programming and "gross neglect" of maintenance and hygiene at Ontario's Millhaven Institution.
• Records also refer to the "chilling" image of a mentally ill offender in leg shackle restraints at the unit that holds prisoners with schizophrenia, major depression and other mental disorders transferred there after the closure of the Regional Treatment Centre in Kingston last fall.
• After the closure of Kingston Penitentiary and the Regional Treatment Centre, offenders with the most acute mental illness were transferred to the maximum-security Millhaven Institution. Others were taken to the medium-security facility at Collins Bay before being transferred to a new unit at Bath Institution.
• Heavily drugged and suffering from paranoia, her son now spends 23 to 24 hours a day lying in his cell. During her last visit she was told he couldn't come see her because he was "comatose."

3 more annotations...

• Canada’s first-ever national mental-health strategy is calling for an overhaul of a system it calls so fractured and underfunded that it’s turning prisons and jails into the “asylums of the 21st century” and leading many community service groups to drop waiting lists to avoid giving people false hope that “eventually their turn will come.”
• Mental illness costs the economy at least $50 billion annually, according to the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
• The strategy calls for spending on mental health to increase from seven to nine per cent of total health spending over 10 years, an increase of $3-4 billion.
• Overall, 20 per cent of Canadians will experience a mental illness during their lifetime. Yet public health spending on mental health is far lower in Canada than in most developed nations, with only just over seven cents out of every public health care dollar going to mental health, far below the 10 to 11 per cent in countries such as New Zealand and the U.K.
• The need for reform is equally desperate in workplace mental health, Kirby said. Mental illness is the fastest-growing cause of short and long-term disability, he said, while drugs used to treat mood disorders, stress, anxiety and depression are the fastest growing part of any employer’s drug plan.
• Out of the Shadows at Last

4 more annotations...

• OUT OF THE SHADOWS AT LAST 

   

   Transforming Mental Health, Mental  Illness and Addiction Services in Canada

   

  The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology

• Pressure builds on B.C. to update and reopen Riverview mental hospital

• “We’re not talking about the old model of Riverview from the 1950s and ’60s — I think everyone would agree that is not appropriate,” said Maple Ridge Mayor Ernie Daykin. “This would be an institution of excellence for North America, using the best mental health care providers and the latest research.”

  “There are so many people who have fallen through the cracks and they are not getting the support they need. They are suffering and that impacts all of our communities.”

• Future of Riverview Hospital determined in open houses

• New Alberta study finds substantial unmet need for mental health services
• The province’s mental health and addiction system is failing to provide sufficient care to thousands of Alberta adults, many of whom believe they can’t afford services or are better off managing on their own, a new government report has found.
• The groundbreaking study, believed to be the first comprehensive analysis of its kind in Alberta, suggests some of the $750 million in public money spent on the system may not be going to the most effective areas.
• It reports that the bulk of the available resources are eaten up by hospital and crisis services for patients with serious disorders, while there is significant unsatisfied need for lower-level counselling, information and screening.

2 more annotations...

• Mother’s Facebook post calls attention to lack of mental health resources in Sask
• Last week, Kate’s mother, Cathy, described on Facebook how her daughter suffers from a series of mental illnesses and is falling through the cracks in the province’s health and social services systems. Nearly 2,000 people have shared the post.

• Mentally ill inmates increasingly held in solitary confinement at Canadian prisons
• This article is the second in a three-part series.
  Part one: Deaths in solitary confinement prompt B.C. coroner’s inquest
  Part three: Correctional Service Canada ignores repeated calls for reform

• There Are 10 Times More Mentally Ill People Behind Bars Than in State Hospitals
• Severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are brain diseases—biological conditions like heart disease or epilepsy. Yet in this country, the institutions most likely to be treating people with these illnesses are not hospitals, but rather jails and prisons.

• Chalk up two more victims of deinstitutionalization.
• <form onsubmit="return post_form(this, 'editusertext')" class="usertext" action="#" id="form-t1_ch158gljh5">

  Deinstitutionalisation (or deinstitutionalization) is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability.

   

    

  You could just as easily say the problem is the lack of adequate "community mental health services" which are intended to replace long-stay psychiatric hospitals.

   

   

  </form>

• Investigation: Canada’s psychiatric prisons have highest death, assault rates
• Offenders are more likely to die or be violently attacked in a psychiatric prison than any other federal institution – by a long shot.
• The people in these specialized facilities – in B.C., Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec – are the most vulnerable and problematic in a prison system already overflowing with mental illness
• And numbers obtained by Global News through an access to information request indicate they’re disproportionately subject to violence and death in the institutions supposedly designed to care for them best.

2 more annotations...