CKNW Editorial
for December 16, 1999

So another man is killed attacking police. They had to shoot we're told. And I wasn't there so have no way of arguing with that proposition. A year or so ago it was a man with a knife in a mall. It happens in similar ways all over the world ... deranged man wields a knife ... police try to warn him ... even shoot rubber bullets at him ... man is shot and killed. He was mentally ill and that fact was well known to the police.

No I don't blame the police - I have no way of knowing how I would react to a crazed person coming at me with a meat cleaver but I suspect I would shoot him ... and shoot to kill.

What these incidents and others like them that never make the news stories demonstrate is that we have to re-open mental institutions. No, we don't have to fill them up. We've learned a lot in the last 20 years but we haven't, evidently, learned that some mentally sick people need constant medical supervision just as many physically sick people do.

Of course we must take care not to extrapolate too much from isolated incidents ... except they are not isolated incidents at all. They're just incidents that got a bit uglier than the routine ones that happen every hour of every day.

As a society we like to think that we've come a long way in dealing with mental health problems. I suppose we have if you compare us to the days not all that long ago when the better folk in London used to go down to Bedlam Hospital for the Insane and watch what the inmates did and die laughing. But when you consider how far we've come in treating physical illness we've really made very few strides over the last 50 years.

I think at long last we're starting to make some headway. In the area of my own personal knowledge, depression, we've taken some positive steps. But not many. Last summer I wrote an article for Elm Street Magazine about depression – my own. The inpouring of mail has been and remains staggering. Every year we do a depression screening day on my program and the volume of calls seeking help is overwhelming. Because mental illness doesn't carry with it spots ... or swelling ... or things that show up on cat scans or MRIs we tend to put it out of sight, out of mind. This is reflected in the hundreds of thousands who need help but don’t know where to go. This in turn reflects on our governments who are responsible for the homeless in the streets and the suicides especially of our young.

Is that too strong a statement?

I think not. No one expects a perfect world but by God we're a hell of a long way from worrying about that. We have psychologists laid off in our school districts. Teachers aides are let go. Mental health outreach moves from being a ray of hope to a bad joke.

Now we have a health care crisis in our acute care hospitals. Emergency cases can't be handled. People die while waiting for surgery. The situation is horrible. But if I were a selfish person I would say, who cares? This is the way it's always been in mental health care. And it's true. Doctors are discouraged by the Medical Services Plan from learning to deal with mental health issues. The number of psychiatrists is so low that it takes a minimum of six months to get an appointment. Can you imagine the furore if Cancer patients had to hope against hope that their doctor knew something about the disease and then had to wait at least six months to have a specialist examine them?

Every year society pours millions, nay billions into the consequences of untreated mental health problems. Year after year Ministers of Finance turns down requests for more money by which to prevent these hugely expensive tragedies.

A man wielding a meat cleaver was killed the other day in a downtown rooming house occupied by mental health patients.

Don't blame the policeman ... we all pulled that trigger..