DISABILITY MATTERS: Elephants in lab coats
By Hélèna Katz

It's time for the elephant to move over. Last month, the Senate social
affairs, science and technology committee released a report on the mental
health system. After hearing testimony for three years, the committee
concluded the system is underfunded and services are fragmented – something
cash-starved community organizations in the field have known and struggled
with for years.

Chaired by Michael Kirby, Out of the Shadows at Last recommended the federal
government create a Canadian Mental Health Commission to oversee the
development of a national mental health strategy. It also called for a
Mental Health Transition Fund to speed up the process of developing a mental
health system that is community-based.

The Senate committee thinks the emphasis should be on letting people with
mental illness choose the path to recovery that works best for them. That
path generally means living in the community with the proper support in
place to make it happen. But this is where things start to get a bit messy.

The push that began 30 years ago to get people with mental illnesses out of
institutions and recovering in the community never quite happened...

Hospitals opened the doors and closed psychiatric beds, but community
organizations never quite got the funding they needed to support mental
health consumers.

Apparently some institutional "elephants" couldn't quite move over to make
room for the mice.

Instead, they decided to give their own version of "community" services
under their own umbrella. As part of its "hospital without walls" approach,
one hospital's interpretation of offering community services was to send a
nurse to the homes of mental health consumers to administer medication...

Ella Amir is executive director of AMI-Quebec, a Montreal-based grassroots
organization that works with the families of the mentally ill. She says that
sending someone to live at home isn't the same thing as making sure they're
getting integrated into their community. Integration isn't about being in a
physical space – it's about being in a social space where you get to
interact with other people and have access to the services that can help you
ease into the community and find ways to feel fulfilled.

At this point, community organizations could play a vital role – if someone
would let them play in the same sandbox...

The money that hospitals saved when they closed psychiatric beds should be
spent on community resources that will allow the former patients to find a
place of their own in society. Mental health institutions, such as
hospitals, need to recognize that community organizations have expertise and
experience to bring to the table...

It's time the institutional elephants in the mental health system moved over
and recognized the expertise community organizations possess and the
contributions they can make. Amir envisions that hospitals would stabilize
patients who are in crisis. Then community organizations would do what they
do best – give the person the support needed to live in the community.

People who have mental health problems would benefit from a more holistic
and unified approach that offers a continuum of support – and so would the
rest of us... 

Full article from cbc.ca: http://tinyurl.com/m85jr

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