Provincial funding will help Caper Base with expansion
Wheels have been set in motion to expand the Caper Base services, both in school and in the community, thanks to $463,000 in funding from the province.
“I think it will reach more youth on an individual and group basis, so I think it will help in that way,” said Dr. Julie MacDonald, director of child and adolescent mental health and addictions for the Nova
Scotia Health Authority (NSHA) Eastern Zone.
The funding announcement, made on Oct. 10, was directly related to recommendations made by Dr. Stan Kutcher, a specialist in youth mental health and suicide.
Kutcher made these recommendations after the provincial government sent him to Cape Breton in June. They sent him in response to the deaths by suicide of three middle school students. All three died within six months of each other during the 2016–2017 school year.
Caper Base is an outreach service made up of a team of health professionals including social workers and recreational therapists. The staff works in the schools and in the community to help youth ages 11–19.
Another part of Caper Base is Access 808, a resource for youth between the ages of 18 – 24 who aren’t in school.
MacDonald said with the funding they plan to hire more staff.
“(We want more staff) so that we can insure that they are as accessible as they need to be in the schools that may have more students with risks or concerns,” she explained.
There are also plans to increase programming of current programs and through the creation of new ones.
MacDonald said some new programing they want to create will aim to help youth who are showing early signs of mental health issues or disorders.
“We can’t prevent all mental illness, we know that. But we do know for some people we can make a difference in the severity or in the impact it has in their lives,” she said.
“So by trying to catch some of these things early … we are going to try to intervene and catch some of those before they become more serious problems.”
One problem many parents in Cape Breton feel is serious a serious one is bullying, or one student mistreating another student regularly.
MacDonald said the programs they have at Caper Base will help both the student who is being the aggressor, or bully, and the student who is the victim of the aggression.
“Those who are more likely to mistreat each other are at as much risk as those who are being regularly mistreated for mental health problems, drug problems, dropping out of school, all the same kind of things,” she said.
“So the programming doesn’t look specifically at the kids who may have been a target of bullying or mistreatment or any of those things. It is available across the board.”
Chris Royal’s daughter, Madison Wilson, died by suicide in June at the age of 13. He thinks any expansion to services dealing with youth mental health is a good. However, he worries the expansion is not directly addressing the problem of bullying in schools.
“I’ll be honest, the only thing that is going to teach
the younger generation to smarten up is the justice system,” Royal, who believes bullying drove his daughter to
suicide, said.
“The bullying is unreal.”