Thank you to Cyndie Richards for opening her heart with courage and adding her voice to the injustices being done to our mentally ill.
Her letter (“Mark my words: This will end badly,” The Leader, March 28) accurately exposes the inadequacies and lack of facilities for our mentally ill and addicted loved ones. Her experience with the current system in trying to get help for her son is the norm in our communities. My husband Gordon and myself were featured in an earlier article with the same concerns for our son Brian (“Life behind an inch of glass,” The Leader, March 14).
Cyndie is entirely correct that her son’s “ability to choose his own health care or lack thereof” makes our current system sicker than either of our sons. How on Earth is a psychotic individual, perhaps also using drugs, possibly able to make good decisions for him or herself?
Addiction is a mental illness. As a prominent B.C. psychiatrist has suggested, no one in their right mind would do to themselves what addicts do. Where are the institutions of days gone by that held individuals until they were stable enough to make clear healthy choices? Where are the awareness and compassion of our federal government, building more prisons and not state-of-the-art facilities, for our most vulnerable citizens? Why must a person be totally out of their mind to be admitted through the ER? Why are the mentally ill discharged into the streets of our community before proper extended treatment?
Most parents such as Cyndie Richards, Gordon, and myself have spent years and countless thousands of dollars, educating, advocating and caring for our beloved relations. She rightly states that we have become “the government’s dumping ground for the mentally ill.”
Can you imagine rushing your loved one, in the midst of a heart attack, to the hospital only to be told there are no beds or his attack is not severe enough to warrant bothering with? How about a woman with breast cancer being told that no chemo is available for her because her cancer in only in the early stages and must wait until it is more advanced to treat?
We are constantly being told that our son needs to recover from his addiction before treatment to his mental health is available. Using this logic, we might consider having treatment denied to the obese individual with diabetes or the chronic smoker with lung disease. Concurrent disorders (the existence of two illnesses) such, as addiction and a mental illness, need to be treated simultaneously to be successful.
Although our son Brian is a danger primarily to himself, I totally appreciate Cyndie Richards’ frustration and despair that our complacency as a community will be responsible for the fates of both our sons as well as many others. We as individual families have had the life sucked out of us trying single-handedly to deal with this travesty.
It is not okay to stand by and do nothing. We are all responsible.
Virginia Bylo
Delta