MOTHER FEARS FOR MENTALLY ILL, ADDICTED DAUGHTER ON THE STREETS

New Westminster Woman Wonders Why Hospital Staff Released Her Daughter
Without Supervision

All Carol Davies knows for sure is that her daughter has been
wandering around downtown Vancouver the last two days in yellow
pyjamas and a pair of men's moccasin slippers.

She's terrified for her, afraid some predatory person will harm her
drug-addicted and mentally ill daughter.

More than anything else, she can't understand why the staff at Royal
Columbian Hospital released 25-year old Kirstine Fuhrman at 4 a.m.
Thursday, when she was wearing pyjamas and talking about space aliens,
as she has been for the last week.

"How can they put her on the street and not call us?" said
Davies.

"I just want her safe," Davies said Friday night. "I'm very worried.
She's not able to take care of herself."

Hospital Representative Helen Carkner said the hospital had no choice
but to release Fuhrman, who is 25 and is not committed to psychiatric
care. Fuhrman said she wanted to leave and she didn't want staff to
call her mother.

Davies is caught in the same dilemma facing many parents in B.C. with
an adult child who is both drug-addicted and showing signs of mental
illness - "dual-diagnosis" patients, as they're called.

Psychiatric facilities don't want to deal with patients on drugs.
Treatment centres for drug addicts don't want to deal with young
people who also have mental-illness problems. Hospitals can't hold
adult children with psychiatric problems for more than 72 hours
without their consent.

"There are so many cases of dual-diagnosis these days, but no
dual-diagnosis facilitiy," said Sue Ruttan, a Kerrisdale mother who
helped form a group called From Grief to Action for parents of
drug-addicted children.

Ruttan said she's experienced similar problems with her own
son.

"If you're a drug case, you're at the bottom of the pile" in a
hospital, she said. Overworked hospital staff often feel as though
they can't deal with drug problems or the psychiatric problems of
young people unless they're clearly suicidal. And legally, they have
no power to hold an adult who doesn't want to stay.

This is all a new problem for Davies. Her daughter has been troubled
for years, living on the street and in foster homes since her teens.
Although Kirstine had been clean for awhile, Davies said her daughter
says her main drug now is crystal meth.

But she hadn't seen the signs of mental illness until she picked her
up last Saturday to take her out for a birthday lunch.

Then she noticed immediately that Kirstine was talking strangely,
saying she had to help the space aliens or talking about how they had
implanted a device in her thumb and she needed to cut her thumb off to
get rid of it.

She stayed at her mother's overnight and on Sunday, says Davies, "she
really freaked out and went quite hysterical and she insisted I call
911 because there was going to be an earthquake in five hours and she
had to save everyone in Vancouver."

Davies did call 911 to get an ambulance for her daughter, who was
admitted to Royal Columbian Sunday night and held in the psychiatric
ward for three days in an isolation cell that Davies was allowed to
visit only with two security guards accompanying her.

The hospital released her Wednesday, saying she couldn't be held any
longer.

"They told me to take her home but do not let her at all be alone with
her daughter [a three-year-old who lives with Davies]. So I don't
know how I was supposed to achieve that. They said don't hesitate to
call 911."

By midnight, Davies was calling for help again after Kirstine tried to
walk through a door and continued to talk incoherently. Her
ex-husband called the hospital to alert them Kirstine was coming and
was told she would be taken in to be re-assessed.

This time, Kirstine was taken to hospital but was released almost
immediately.

Since then, Davies said, she's had a few phone messages from her
daughter asking her to pick her up, but always incoherent, from
different locations around Granville and Davie, and impossible to get
to when she is trapped in New Westminster taking care of her
daughter's three-year-old.