MENTAL ILLNESS IS NOT A CRIME
Woman died in remand centre a day after doctor deemed her unfit to stand trial
Carol Lee Bivand, 29, had a short, tragic life. She was beautiful. She loved music. She had friends who cared about her. She was also a drug addict who struggled with paranoia, anxiety and other symptoms of mental illness, and was in and out of trouble with the law.
On April 21, Bivand, who was homeless, was charged by police with making a false alarm of fire.
On April 23, she was charged with breaking and entering the property of a downtown demolition company.
On April 27, she was charged with arson and obstructing a police officer. After that third arrest, she was taken to the Edmonton Remand Centre and ordered to undergo a mental health exam.
On May 4, after a psychiatric assessment, she was deemed unfit to stand trial.
Still, she wasn’t released from remand. She wasn’t sent to a hospital for treatment.
Instead, the next day, she was found dead in her remand cell.
Bivand’s troubling death is just the latest demonstration of what happens when our mental healthcare system is fatally broken.
Her friends say they tried repeatedly to have her admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment. The hospitals turned her away. They tried to get her into detox treatment. They weren’t successful.
That’s no surprise. We simply don’t have enough psychiatric beds — or at least, enough open
and staffed psychiatric beds — in the Edmonton health region. We don’t have enough addiction treatment beds, either.
So rather than give sick people the medical care that they need, we warehouse them in remand centres and jails. We treat them as criminals who need to be punished, rather than as patients who desperately need treatment.
While Alberta Hospital Edmonton, our aging psychiatric hospital, sits largely mothballed and empty, we’ve turned our remand centres and prisons into latter-day madhouses.
But we wouldn’t know about Bivand’s fate at all, without the investigative reporting of my Edmonton Journal colleague. Paige Parsons.
On May 11, Parsons was at the courthouse in Edmonton when she received a tip.
Another woman had appeared in mental health court that day with a long list of complaints about her own treatment in the remand centre’s mental health unit.
The woman complained that she’d been disturbed by another inmate in the mental health unit. The woman told the judge that this other inmate had been screaming and banging her head against the wall for hours. That inmate, the woman told the court, had subsequently died.
So Parsons started asking questions. Who had died? And under what circumstances?
Alberta Justice confirmed to Parsons that a woman had died in the remand centre on May 5.
But the department would not release the woman’s name. It said her cause of death was still under review.
However, Parsons discovered that the Crown had withdrawn some minor charges against a woman named Carol Lee Bivand on May 11 because she was
deceased. Then, she was able to piece together, from court records, that Bivand had been at the Edmonton Remand Centre when she died.
So Parsons requested Bivand’s file at the courthouse. When she received it, the documents in the folder included that May 4 psychiatric assessment, the one that had found Bivand mentally unfit to stand trial. The report also said she needed more assessment and care.
But as Parsons was making her notes, court staff came and took the document away, insisting it had been placed in the folder in error.
Often, such medical reports are filed as court exhibits. That means the public, and the media, can request access to them. But because Bivand died and her case never went to trial the report never became an exhibit. Instead, it was removed from the public record.
Alberta Justice still won’t confirm Bivand is the inmate who died in remand. But the department says it’s conducting an internal review of the death of a nameless female inmate who died in custody on May 5. In due course, says Alberta Justice, there will be a public fatality inquiry, too.
But the fatality inquiry queue is long and slow. According to the schedule on the justice ministry’s website, the province is just now holding inquiries into deaths that happened in 2013 and 2014. That’s a long time to wait for answers and explanations.
For now, we’re left with this. Just hours after a doctor declared her too ill to stand trial, Bivand died in remand, where she was supposed to be supervised and secure.
Our justice system is keen to protect her privacy now. It’s sad we couldn’t do more to protect her while she was still alive to appreciate it.