PAULA SIMONS: POLICE IDEA IS DANGEROUS, DEMEANING
Ask anybody who has a friend or family member with serious psychiatric problems. They’ll tell you that one of the hardest decisions they ever have to make is to call 911 or the Mental Health Crisis Team to ask for help. There is so much stigma around mental health in our culture, that it can seem frightening or embarrassing or humiliating to call the police to assist a loved one in crisis.
But sometimes, when someone is experiencing a psychotic break, when someone is seriously suicidal, when someone is manic and irrational, when someone has serious dementia, you need that kind of emergency support.
Now imagine how much harder it would be to pick up the phone, if you thought your loved one might end up in the Remand Centre, not an emergency room. There’s already so much shame around mental illness. Taking people who are truly sick to a jail instead of a hospital would make it worse.
And yet, that’s exactly the radical solution the Edmonton Police Service is proposing, to cope with Edmonton’s mental health care crisis.
In a budget report to Edmonton city council, released this Monday, police are asking for Edmonton’s new Remand Centre to be designated by the province as an official mental health facility, so patients can be transported there for emergency treatment.
Under Alberta’s Mental Health Act, police have the authority to apprehend — not arrest — people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. They can do so without a warrant, by filling out what’s called a Form 10 report. Then they must transport that person to a designated mental health facility.
But Edmonton’s hospitals don’t have enough psychiatric acute care beds. And they don’t have enough emergency room capacity. The result? Police can spend hours in triage waiting rooms, waiting for “their” patients to be seen.
According data included in Monday’s report, EPS officers make an average of 70 hospital visits per month because of mental health related calls. On average, they spend 3.3 hours per visit in hospital. In one month, between Sept. 22, 2015 and Oct. 19, 2015, that meant 202 hours.
That’s a waste of police resources and time — and it burdens officers, who don’t have medical training, with the responsibility to care for those who are acutely ill.
Now, EPS wants permission to take some of those psychiatric patients to the Edmonton Remand Centre instead. The Remand Centre, they argue, has the doctors and the capacity to deal with patients in crisis, at least in the short term. (Long term, they also want to see the old Remand Centre turned into a community wellness centre, to cope with the chronically mentally ill and those with addictions.)
But criminalizing people, whose only “crime” is to be sick, is a truly terrible idea. Yes, the Remand Centre has doctors and psychiatrists and nurses. It’s still no replacement for a full-service emergency room. People who need psychiatric care aren’t criminals. Treating them like felons, housing them with actual remanded prisoners, is as dangerous as it is demeaning. Are you really going to call 911 for help with your hallucinating and agitated grandmother with Alzheimer’s, or your teenager with schizophrenia, if you think they might be taken to a jail? If you’re acutely suicidal, are you going to call for help, if you could be treated like a criminal?
None of this seems to have been thought through. Mark Snaterse, executive director of addiction and mental health for AHS’s Edmonton Zone, says he was never told about the recommendation. Even the police service media staff seemed unaware of the proposal, apparently confusing it with the separate idea to retrofit the old remand centre as a health clinic.
Yet there the plan sits, ugly and shocking, in the midst of a city budget report.
Perhaps EPS isn’t serious about this ghastly idea. Perhaps they’re only presenting this trial balloon to council for its shock value, to underline just how dire our ER crisis is. Maybe they just wanted to ignite this very debate.
I’d like to hope so. Because otherwise, this says something disturbing indeed about the way some leaders in our police service think about the mentally ill.
Yet I can’t blame front-line officers for their frustration.
Our health care system is broken, and they’re the ones who have to pick up the pieces, as best they can. Instead of being outraged with the police proposal, perhaps we should be outraged that this bad idea is the best solution anyone has found to a problem that should shock the conscience of the community.