Between 2005 and 2008, my boys and I were in a fight for survival against a severe mental illness I suffered after a head injury. I became suicidal. In a bad moment, or so I thought at the time, I found myself sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by smashed plates and bowls I’d flung from the cupboards in abject, mindless terror and hatred.
I had just been sent home from Victoria’s psychiatric emergency department, the Archie Courtnall Centre, after being told for the third time: “We won’t help you; you don’t meet our criteria for suicidal.” Panicked, I tore apart the kitchen to keep from hurting myself. Sinking to the floor spent, alone, in a place of complete surrender, a “knowing” came to me. I got it. No one is coming.
My government had abandoned my family and me. If I were to survive, to find a way to silence the relentless compulsion in my brain ordering me to kill myself, without killing myself to do it, it would have to come from me. If I were to save my kids from becoming suicidal too, statistically there is a high probability if the parent succumbs. Fortunately for us, the brain injury I suffered, the resulting post-traumatic stress syndrome, my shattered personality — all were starting to knit back together. If that healing hadn’t occurred at the same time, I would not be here today.
Since the election, I feel that pure, terrible clarity again. I’ve seen how it is in B.C., and know the extent of what other families living with mental illness face. No matter who we elected, fundamentally for the mentally ill, nothing would have changed. For the next five years, there will be no enlightened paradigm shifts in health care, housing, working wage or other social imperatives. It was so frustrating voting this time, with the same unfocused, sniping, uninspired choices to pick from, for the first time in 40 years I almost didn’t bother.
If we’re going to save our loved ones, we can’t wait. No one is coming. We must seek creative solutions outside of government.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death in Canadian youth, with our 12-year-olds the most susceptible to suicidal contagion from the death of a peer or parent. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in adults and grandparents, with many seniors’ suicides unreported.
About 400,000 Canadians annually report engaging in self-harm. Do we know why, really? And no, the desire to destroy one’s self is not a moral failure of the individual.
So, what could this government do, if it would? Provide simple things like a bed to wait on, in a private bay in the psychiatric emergency room. I spent three days in a chair the first time I sought help from doctors in the Archie Courtnall Centre.
Give us a self-referral option. Who is anyone to say I was not suicidal? Two women in the emergency area with me once were admitted, where I was not. When I asked how, one told me, shaking with relief: “We’re not suicidal, we pretend, you know, to get off the f---in’ streets for a night.”
In Victoria, there is no separate ward for 17-year-olds; they go in with the adults.
What small thing can you do to insist on care? Chaining myself to one of those cursed, blue chairs in the Archie Courtnall area has crossed my mind. The ombudsperson’s office once told me if just two people file the same complaint, their office is obligated to investigate. And I think mothers like Amanda Telford are on the right track. She’s the one who, in despair, brought her severely autistic 19-year-old son into an Ontario health-ministry office and left him there, not knowing what else to do.
Here is generally where I get asked: “Hey Cinderella, where is all the money coming from?” The money is there. Not treating mental illness is costing the Canadian taxpayers $50 billion a year, according to a federally commissioned study in 2012.
When I sat on that kitchen floor, there was freedom in the total absence of denial. I feel it again as my mind, once hindered by a belief that politics and government held the answers, shifts to possibility thinking. I’ve held rallies, mounted letter-writing campaigns, trotted petition after petition out, made speeches. But our governments, federal and provincial, stand mute.
No one is coming. Time to stop expecting the government to help. Stay sharp, stay creative and stay alive.
Jean Oliver is a Victoria writer.
