Nowhere to turn

Lack of mental health services bring frustration for trauma victim

A Truro woman who moved here several months ago, now wants to leave because of what she views as a lack of mental health and other services available locally.

“I’m not happy in a rural area,” said the 43-year-old woman, who asked her name not be used. “I want to be back in Halifax. There’s more opportunities and resources.”

The woman – referred to here as Shelly – moved to Truro from Yarmouth for more affordable housing. But without a family doctor, her attempts to receive one-on-one outpatient counselling services for mental health issues and referrals for care by specialists for other physical health issues, such as epilepsy, have been in vain. That’s left her frustrated and discouraged.

“It’s a vicious cycle here,” she said. “It’s like feeling like your voice is not being heard, feeling like you are in the dark.”

Shelly said services she seeks are available in Yarmouth and Halifax, where she also lived for a time. But because of the cost of living in those areas, she had hoped to improve her circumstances by moving to a less-ex- pensive community.

She now feels the move has backfired because, without additional help from social services she cannot afford to move away.

Shelly said she has been dealing with trauma and abuse since childhood, including being abandoned by her parents who divorced when she was a baby.

Her early years were spent being shuffling between her mother and a variety of foster homes until age 11 when she was named a ward of the court by community services.

That shuffling continued, she said, from age 11 until 19 when she was transferred between various institutions, including the former Nova Scotia Youth Training Centre in Bible Hill and the former Nova Scotia

School for Girls (later renamed the N.S. Residential Centre) in Truro, until eventually moving on to a regional rehabilitation centre in the Halifax area.

“I came from a very traumatic background,” she said. “I’ve been through mostly every form of abuse you can think of, from sexual abuse to mental trauma back to the time when I was a baby.”

Among physical ailments, Shelly said she has been diagnosed with cognitive delay, borderline personality disorder, depression and anxiety – factors she attributes to her lack of ability to cope with her “emotional baggage.”

“I struggle with coping,” she said. “I don’t cope. I don’t deal with the internal pain and the baggage I carry from my trauma, from my background.”

‘It’s a vicious cycle here. It’s like feeling like your voice is not being heard, feeling like you are in the dark.’