A letter to the editor published in the March 17th edition of the Whig-Standard:
Re: "Patients fear loss of program," March 2, 2010, Whig-Standard.Bravo to Ken Mitchell and Gary Mustard for getting their voices heard. The purported philosophy of care at Providence Care Mental Health Services is the recovery model, a client-centred, client-directed treatment model. One of the central tenets of the model is "nothing about me without me," yet one doesn't get the sense that Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Mustard were consulted or involved in the decision to cut the recreation staff from the outpatient teams at Providence Care's Montreal Street Clinic.
If outpatient teams needed restructuring, one would have hoped that clients affected by the changes would have been involved in the decision-making process to determine which aspects of care were most important to them.
Instead, as Mr. Mitchell stated, he and other Montreal Street clients are being faced with the removal of services they deem to be "essential to their well being." This isn't the recovery model and indeed it is not consistent with any good model of mental health care.
The availability of services for people with mental-health problems is a huge issue, not only locally, but nationally. It is tragic that at the same time that the Mental Health Commission of Canada is working to address systems issues, stigma issues, issues of homelessness and issues of insufficient resources, there are hospitals like Providence Care eliminating jobs and reducing services.
While the hospital administration may arbitrarily distinguish between losing jobs and eliminating positions, the fact is that there will be fewer people to provide services.
In the mental-health arena, we are long past the days of doing more with less. We have passed through doing the same with less and now we are doing less with less. People with mental illnesses are getting less care, are more prone to being criminalized and are increasingly living on the streets.
Without access to the necessary range of services, people with mental illnesses do not recover well. Providence Care is no doubt caught in a bind. To be sure, they have to balance their budget. But the striking lack of public interest in the cutbacks, the elimination of front-line positions rather than management positions and the lack of consultation with the people who use and need the services all speak to the general disregard that society has for people with mental illnesses. And those people are us.
One in five Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. All of us have family and friends with mental illnesses. Providence Care needs to think again about the cutbacks. The funding agencies of the government need to think again. We, as a society, need to think again about how we provide care for people with mental illnesses. After all, they are us.
Dorothy Cotton [pictured], Psychologist
Dorothy Cotton is a member of the Mental Health and the Law Advisory Committee of the Mental Health Commission of Canada
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