Mental health: First Nations youth face long waits for help
B.C.’s fractured and chaotic mental-health system for aboriginal youth failed a 16-year-old First Nations boy who took his own life in 2013, a report from the province’s child watchdog says.
The boy, who lived on a reserve near a major B.C. city, exhibited signs of serious mental illness in the months before his death and should have had easy access to treatment, writes Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the province’s representative for children and youth.
Instead, the “bright and creative teenager” from a close-knit family faced waits of up to a year or more for help from the region’s understaffed Aboriginal Child and Youth Mental Health office, states the report, A Tragedy in Waiting.
The report did not identify the youth or the region in which he lived in order to protect his family’s privacy.
Turpel-Lafond said the boy was hearing voices and talked of suicide, yet he was often left to manage his own issues by wandering around his school.
“Is this a mental-health system that we let kids wander the halls, wander the forest and ultimately commit suicide when in plain sight we know they’re not eating, they’re hearing voices, they’re distressed … and we’re offering them nothing?” she said. “This has to change.” The report notes that suicide intervention is successful when proper supports are put in place. “But expecting children and youth to wait 200-plus days for those supports is tantamount to the system abandoning children in crisis.”
Turpel-Lafond said there is little evidence that the system has improved in the three years since the boy’s death.
“Lengthy wait-lists remain the norm” in the region where the boy died, she said. The average wait at the same Aboriginal Child and Youth Mental Health office was nine months as of March 1, 2016, the report said.
“This is a known cohort of children and youth who require support and seek a therapeutic system that understands and supports them, yet instead, they get a brick wall.”
The report calls for the Ministry of Children and Family Development to immediately cut wait times by properly funding mental-health services for aboriginal youth.
In the long term, Turpel-Lafond recommends the provincial government create a lead agency to deliver aboriginal mental-health services.
Stephanie Cadieux, the minister of children and family development, said in a statement that there are no wait times if a mental-health professional considers a youth to be at risk of committing suicide.
“Unfortunately, in [this case], that’s where the system — as it existed in 2013 — failed,” she said.
“He was not flagged as suicidal, nobody involved in his case had a clear picture of the state of his mental health, and he was simply — and tragically — underserved.”
Cadieux said the ministry has moved to improve the system by expanding the use of telemental health services so that families can get access to psychiatrists at B.C. Children’s Hospital without leaving their home communities. She also said there are 78 “walk-in mental-health clinics” where children and youth can receive an initial assessment.
She acknowledged, however, that many youth still end up on wait-lists after receiving an initial assessment.
The ministry said half the cases are seen within 84 days, but others wait longer. “We need to do better,” Cadieux said. “That’s part of what the cabinet working group is looking at: How can we do that? How can we reduce these wait times for service for kids?”
Melanie Mark, the B.C. NDP’s spokeswoman on children’s issues, said the government could start by acting on the recommendations of the select standing committee on children and youth.
In a report released this year, the all-party committee recommended establishing a new minister of mental health and a “one child, one file” system in which children are assessed within 30 days and receive treatment within the following 30 days.