City Council moving forward with involuntary care facility, but not without pushback

“We need to get a psychiatric hospital built because we currently don’t (have one). We have only hospital beds. There’s a massive difference between a hospital bed and a psychiatric care facility, which is purposely operated to provide psychiatric, long term psychiatric care for patients,” Councillor Trudy Klassen said.

“The system that we have right now with patients being at UHNBC is that the system there is designed only to house people for up to two weeks, but there are people staying there for years. And as Doctor Barbara Kane has said, some people are discharged before they are ready to go out into the public simply because they don’t have room,” she continued.

The psychiatric care facility had 5 motions attached to it, with four of the five focused on advocating for this facility and moving forward with plans to get it built. Those four were passed unanimously by council. However, the second motion focuses on enabling “involuntary admittance to specialized, compassionate care facilities.” This saw all of council except Klassen vote in favour of it, as Klassen believes pushing for involuntary care right now isn’t the right move.

“We already have involuntary care in the province, so I didn’t think that we needed to advocate for it. Plus the concerns around … let’s say that intergovernmental would decide to expand the involuntary care, or to advocate for an expansion of involuntary care at this time, I’m not in favour of it because we haven’t had sufficient voluntary care even in our province. So I would much prefer that we advocate for voluntary care before we expand involuntary care,” Klassen said.

Councillor Kyle Sampson, alongside the rest of City Council, voted in favour of the second motion surrounding involuntary care, and a common sentiment is shared, being the idea of providing care for those who can’t get it themselves. Sampson said he’s heard from many in the community in favour of involuntary care, but one story from a mother resonated with him.

“Her son passed away due to his mental health challenges, and she believes that if it wasn’t for his challenges, he would have had access to some care, but they were so severe that he wasn’t making that decision for himself. And she believes that if involuntary care was in place, he would have been maybe provided that care and would still be here today,” Sampson said.

“That’s the exact kind of situation where we have people who need support, need help, and they’re just not necessarily getting those supports,” he continued.

While Sampson and Klassen found themselves on opposite sides of the debate, that isn’t to say they’re staunchly opposed. In fact, they both agree that the facility needs to be built, and both see the value in each other’s arguments.

“I think there is a degree of voluntary care in British Columbia, and I definitely would agree that it’s not robust enough. And we need to bolster that, and that’s why we’re doing some advocacy in the same breath with, more psychiatric care facilities, long term facilities and resources on that end. But I think that both things need to be true. We need to bolster up those resources that we already have providing voluntary care, and we need much more. But at the same time, there are folks who are dying because they’re not capable of making those decisions, to get the treatment and the care that they need. And we need to support them as well,” Sampson said.

“I’m not opposed to involuntary care. However, I’m opposed to expanding involuntary care at this time when we have such poor voluntary care. People have been desperate to have to put their kids into (treatment). Often, mental health and addictions patients are looking for treatment, and there’s just so little access, so I really think that before we expand something involuntary, we need to actually expand the voluntary care that we actually provide,” Klassen said.

As for what the parameters around involuntary care would look like, Sampson and other Councillors stressed that these decisions would be left in the hands of experts.

“I certainly by no means want to influence the threshold or the parameters of which that involuntary carries met. Not an expert, but I want to encourage the province to engage with those experts, mental health experts, doctors, psychiatrists, and build that program out on what it would look like to have an involuntary care program in British Columbia,” Sampson said.

While council did vote in favour of advocating for a secure standalone psychiatric care facility and the involuntary care aspect that came with it, there are community members who remain strongly opposed to involuntary care. Michelle Miller of the Moms Stop the Harm advocacy group has lived experience surrounding drug addiction and involuntary care, and she believes it causes significantly more harm than good.

“My son had substance use disorder. He had drug induced schizophrenia. I forced him into treatment many times. All it did was introduce him to more people who use substances, and subsequently he was forced from our courts to the Lower Mainland and died by himself without family and friends,” Miller said.

“My son never had a choice to choose sobriety, as dead people don’t recover and neither do their families,” she continued.

Like most, Miller also agrees that something needs to be done to address the need of psychiatric care and addiction treatment, but she, like Klassen, is advocating for more voluntary care before going the involuntary route. She worries that increasing involuntary care would result in more people not accessing care for fear they would be put into treatment against their will.

“70% of the men who have died in B.C. had jobs, and involuntary treatment now is going to cause them not to come to the hospitals, not to talk to their family doctors anymore, not to have supports around them with their families because they are feeling ashamed, and dying behind a locked door,” Miller said.

“We definitely need free voluntary care. There’s lots of people, parents, that I spoke to, their kids wanted voluntary care, didn’t receive it, were put on wait lists, and died subsequently,” she continued.

Given that Klassen was the only Councillor to vote against the second motion surrounding involuntary care, all five motions surrounding the psychiatric care facility passed. This vote was in favour of City Council agreeing to advocate for the facility, so it’s likely this is the first of several steps that will be taken over the coming months as the plan continues to come in place.

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by Tommy Osborne

City Council moving forward with involuntary care facility, but not without pushback

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