Ontario Bullshit

When one public servant has to plead with an Ontario judge to force another public servant to discharge his responsibility, something must be terribly amiss at Queen's Park.

Yet that's what happened Tuesday when crown attorney Michael Leshner asked Judge Walter Gonet to order Dr.Sam Malcolmson, clinical chief of forensic services at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, to find a bed for a woman who has spent three weeks in jail awaiting a psychiatric assessment to determine whether she is fit to stand trial.

Pointing out that the case is one of dozens in which people referred by courts for psychiatric assessment can spend up to seven months in jail waiting their turn, Leshner told court the practice contravenes federal law requiring humane treatment of the mentally ill. Ordering Malcolmson to find a bed immediately, Judge Gonet added his own concern that in the woman's case, the time she already has spent in jail may be longer than the sentnece she would receive if convicted of cocaine possession.

Malcolmson found a bed by bumping someone else. Blaming the shortage of beds on budget restraint imposed on Queen Street by the Ministry of Health, he said that to accommodate the courts, the centre would have to turn away other people who need help.

Since Health Minister Jim Wilson--the only person with the power to solve the bed-shortage problem--was not in court, Leshner encouraged the judge to send "a clear message to the policy makers that we are in crisis here."

Wilson got the message. To avoid being tagged the minister who jails the sick, Wilson opened up 40 beds in the medium-secure unit of the new Whitby Mental Health Centre--a unit that has stood empty ever since the facility opened nine months ago. But that stopgap measure has by no means alleviated everyone's concerns.

With the Health Services Restructuring Commission recommending the closing, downsizing or merging of five of the province's 10 psychiatric hospitals, Dr., James Young, Ontario's chief coroner, warns that "if we squeeze the system further before we put in place the necessary community supports, we'll take what's already a very bad situation and make it many times worse."

Instead of waiting for the next crisis in mental health, Wilson ought to spell out exactly what community supports he's planning to compensate for the anticipated reductions in institutional place.... But I tend to blame that more on work than on him.

Editor:

The woman who "spent three weeks in jail awaiting a psychiatric assessment to determine whether she is fit to stand trial" is another outrageous scandal and human righrs violation created by the Mike-the-knife-Harris government ("Mental health crisis", editorial, June 27/97). I hope this woman sues both the Minister of the Solicitor General (Bob Runciman) and Minister of Health (Jim Wilson) for arbitrary detention or wrongful imprisonment under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I've neither seen nor heard of any compelling evidence showing that the woman needs to be "assessed" or incacerated in any jail or psychiatric hospital such as Queen St. Mental Health Centre which I prefer to call a psychoprison. Sounds like all this woman needed - probably still needs - was a safe, supportive and affordable place to live in the community - not a bed in a psychoprison ("psychiatric hospital") where she'll be immediately drugged and/or electroshocked.

Here are two practical and urgently needed solutions to Ontario's continuing and inexcusable "mental health crisis":

1. Within the next two years, close all nine or ten remaining Ontario psychoprisons because they are inherently degrading, inhumane, and supercostly, and

2. Spend the hundreds of millions of OHIP dollars saved each year on renovating over 300 currently vacant buildings in Toronto, and immediately start a housing crash program building lots of low-cost and decent apartment units (not shelters) for thousands of homeless people - roughly one-third are psychiatric survivors.

If this is too radical, then be prepared to read about a lot more horror stories and deaths in the psychoprisons and on the streets--direct results of psychiatic abuse and incarceration, government neglect-incompetence-callous cutbacks, and citizen indifference.