MENTALLY ILL ADDICTS NEED SOMEWHERE TO GO

Only once have I experienced the helpless misery of serious depression.

I was 19 and so wretched I didn't wash my clothes or my hair. I walked
around in winter without socks or coat and I ate so little my clothes hung
limply from my bony frame. I phoned my family regularly but could hardly
speak a word.

Though it was short-lived, this depression was bad enough for me to dread
ever becoming that helplessly adrift again. It also left me with a small
understanding of how incapacitating a mental health problem can be.

Since then, I've met several people who have a family member with
schizophrenia. Most of them have endured years of heartbreak, anxiety and
hopelessness over the suffering of their loved one. They talk about
repeated admissions and discharges from hospital-often to an unsafe
neighbourhood-the problems and side effects of medications, the poverty
that mental illness usually causes and the enduring ignorance and fear that
surrounds mental illness.

Though there is a common misapprehension that people with schizophrenia or
other severe mental illnesses are prone to violence, they are actually far
more likely to harm themselves or be the victim of aggression or abuse.

Many become so overwhelmed by life that they throw themselves off a bridge,
take a drug overdose or find another way to end their anguish.

The families I've met consistently say that one of the biggest barriers to
improvement or recovery for their family member is a lack of decent, safe
housing combined with improved treatment.

Last week, we saw a media frenzy over the provision of a residential
facility at 39th Avenue and Fraser Street for people with what are called
"dual diagnoses" or "concurrent disorders"-people who struggle with the
double trouble of addiction and mental illness. Individuals in the
neighbourhood railed against the prospect of living beside such people.
While their fears about drugs and the close proximity to local schools of
the project were genuinely expressed, it was disheartening to listen to.

For decades, people in B.C. with a dual diagnosis (estimated to number
around 35,000 or around 50 per cent of people with mental illness) have
been poorly served. They are treated for either one of their problems, but
not both at the same time. Dual diagnosis projects are finally an attempt
to help.

A stone's throw from my house, there is a house for people with dual
diagnoses. When that facility was first proposed, some local people
expressed similar fears to the ones heard last week. I have never noticed
or heard about any problems resulting in the presence of this house or its
occupants-not once.

To gain access to 39th and Fraser, clients must be free of drugs or alcohol
for two months and have been assessed as showing a strong commitment to the
treatment program. No doubt there will be residents who can't keep to these
fairly rigid strictures; they will have to leave.

If none of this is convincing, the opponents of initiatives like 39th and
Fraser might like to know that one in eight Canadians will be hospitalized
for a mental health problem at some point in their lives.

It might be their daughter, brother, sister, partner or parent who becomes
mentally ill. If this is complicated by an addiction-often precipitated or
exacerbated by the affects and stresses of a mental health problem-wouldn't
they want them to be in the safest place possible and benefit from the best
treatment available?

Of course they would.