Port Hawkesbury police says mental health calls skyrocketed
‘We end up being best equipped to get them into the health system’
An RCMP staff sergeant’s report to council is usually a pretty routine accounting of break and enters, impaired drivers, drug busts and the various other ways some residents of a small town have misbehaved in the past year.
But when Staff Sgt. Greg Redl was pulling out the numbers for his recent report to Port Hawkesbury town council, his attention stuck on one statistic.
“It wasn’t a small number to begin with so it’s not that this is a weird statistical aberration,” said Redl.
“There was a steep increase in mental health files.”
Calls to respond to mental health incidents in Port Hawkesbury had increased nearly 80 per cent between the 2016-17 fiscal year (74 calls) and 201718 (139 calls). In his previous reports to council, Redl hadn’t included mental health calls — because having a mental health crisis isn’t a crime.
“It’s not a law enforcement issue, it’s a health issue,” said Redl. “But due to the way some of the symptoms present themselves, we end up being best equipped to get them into the health system.”
While Redl wasn’t prepared to theorize on the causes of the statistical jump, Todd Vassallo was.
“It’s access to mental health services,” said Vassallo.
A former corrections officer and program director at an addictions treatment centre, Vassallo has been a practising psychotherapist for 12 years in Cape Breton. He, too, has been keeping statistics — that the island saw a 70 per cent increase in the suicide rate between 2014-15 and 2015-16. That number stayed up in 2016-17. He points to a model that insists patients see a psychiatrist and then can’t fill the vacant positions.
“So you get put on a psych medication and then you can’t see your psychiatrist for another 300 days,” said Vassallo.
“You don’t have a family doctor, and walkin clinics and outpatients are very leery about prescribing psych medications. Meanwhile the emergency rooms are often closed due to doctor shortages. So someone in Cleveland or L’Ardoise or Bay St. Lawrence has to travel 2.5 hours to get to a regional emergency room, wait 10 or 12 hours and then only get two weeks medication. So that gives them two weeks until they need to repeat the process.”
In that scenario, the person, who often doesn’t have a vehicle, has to get to an emergency room.
The nearest hospital to Port Hawkesbury is 14 kilometres away in Cleveland — a long walk or an expensive taxi ride away for someone suffering a crisis.
Redl said because there usually isn’t a psychiatrist on staff there, his officers regularly ferry mental health patients to St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish — 60 kilometres away.
“This person goes into crisis because they can’t get to a hospital, so they call 911,” said Vassallo. “So then a police officer arrives at the scene who is a police officer, not a mental health crisis team. The police are being left as the fail-safe for the failures of the mental health system.”
It’s not only hard on patients, it’s expensive.
“The way the system is set up, when you get to the emergency room you have to be seen by a clerk, then a triage nurse, then another nurse when you get in, then a doctor, then a crisis worker and then a psychiatrist, who often tells you, ‘You need counselling,’” said Vassallo.
“How about this scenario — you go to counselling. Eighty per cent of people accessing mental health services do not need medical intervention. They need therapy or a program or a support group. The worst thing you can do to someone suffering a mental health crisis is make them feel hopeless, because often enough it’s hopelessness that is at the root of their illness.”
Port Hawkesbury Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton took Redl’s statistics to heart.
“I think the numbers tell a tale that it is concerning,” said Chisholm-Beaton.
“Not just in the Town of Port Hawkesbury but across the board. It’s not just about services, it’s all of the support systems that you have to have in a community that can connect people to where they need to be.”
Meanwhile, Redl’s officers will still be responding to mental health calls.
“Most of our calls are that someone made a comment that they were thinking about attempting suicide,” said Redl. “What the underlying causes are, I don’t know. All I know is that somebody that day needs help and we help get them into the system.”
How the system treats them from there is beyond his control.