Lions Bay mother says system failed son in his time of need
Ryan Norris spent years trying to find help for his mental illness and addiction before dying of suspected fentanyl overdose
Ryan Norris, described as a kind-hearted person and oncepromising athlete, spent his last days trying to get help for his addiction.
His spirits lifted, his mother Christine says, when he heard a space had become available at the Sage Health Centre in Kamloops, one of several treatment centres where he was waitlisted.
His bags were packed when, about a week before he died, he received a call that the space was no longer available. He became despondent, and left the house in what his mother believes was a search for heroin to ease his pain.
Norris was among hundreds of mental health patients in B.C. waiting to get long-term treatment.
In the Vancouver health region alone, there are around 400 mental health patients on waiting lists for long-term housing, according to the latest figures from last year from the B.C. Schizophrenia Society.
A spokesman for the B.C. Health Ministry, Stephen May, could not confirm that number, but says the government “absolutely” agrees there is a need for more mental health and substance-use beds in the province.
Norris, 35, was found dead in an east Vancouver apartment on Dec. 22, one of several suspected fentanyl overdoses in December.
At the time, Vancouver police had just issued another warning about the dangers of fentanyl being mixed in narcotics. The potentially fatal drug is showing up in a variety of recreational drugs, including cocaine, crystal meth, ecstasy and Fake 80s, a pill designed to mimic the strong painkiller OxyContin.
Norris didn’t live at the East Van apartment on Triumph Street where his body was found. He had been living with his parents in Lions Bay, a quiet retreat from his struggles with addiction and depression, a home that he, a professional contractor, had helped to build.
As a boy, Norris was quiet and kept to himself most days. If he struggled then with mental health illness, he didn’t talk about it, according to his cousin Megan Baker, 36, and his mother.
But after he lost his lucrative construction firm, house and wife during the recession of 2008, everything changed. He had a psychotic break.
Over the next seven years, he would struggle with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and suicidal tendencies. He also suffered from concussions — one sustained while trying to kill himself by driving into a stone wall, and the other after he fell off a ladder while painting the family house.
When pharmaceuticals failed to help with what his mother believes was an enormous amount of pain, he self-medicated with street drugs.
On the dining room table, Christine Norris displays photographs of her son. In several, he’s with his five-year-old son Max, whom family say he adored. Next to the photos, a large silver platter of white candles burn in memorial.
“I just like to feel the warmth from the flame,” she says, tears filling her eyes. It has been only a few days since they held his celebration of life. “I am still so very sad, but I am also angry.”
She’s resentful of a health care system that failed her son, one lacking in long-term recovery beds for those suffering from addiction and mental illness.
Beside Christine sits a banker’s box stuffed to the brim with papers, files — Ryan’s court documents, recovery reports and release forms. The box details the last five years of her life as she tried in vain to get her son committed to long-term psychiatric care.
She booked him into several short-term centres, including a 60-day Christian retreat, but after each one he’d have a relapse. Family strife mounted as they racked up bills in the thousands.
“I just feel like, why isn’t there a place where they can get better first, then go to a treatment centre when their brain is thinking clearly?” Christine asks. “These guys need long-term help.”
The Health Ministry has pledged to create an additional 500 beds in B.C. by 2017, spokesman May said, including the new Riverview project. The B.C. government announced plans in mid-December to invest $175 million to revamp Coquitlam’s Riverview lands into a mixed-use community hub for mental health care, including a 105-bed mental health facility.
“It’s important to remember that tertiary mental health facilities, like the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction soon (to) be relocated to the Riverview lands, are not intended to provide lifelong care to patients, but rather to stabilize them to a point where they can be transitioned to rehabilitation and recovery services,” May says.
Still, mental health care advocates say it’s not enough.
“It is basically a relocation of current services,” Deborah Conner, executive director of the B.C. Schizophrenia Society, says about the Riverview plan. “It does not impact those people who are on wait lists, living on the streets, or in those broken down buildings on the Downtown Eastside with no heat or hot water.”
While he was on several waiting lists, Ryan was turned away from several local hospitals over the past couple of years, Christine says, including St. Paul’s Hospital just a week before his death.
“He just said, ‘ Mom, they just gave me a bunch of Ativan and kicked me out,’ ” Christine says. “His eyes were rolling in the back of his head. Now I don’t know if what he said was true, but they should not have released him in that state.”
When a few days later, Ryan was picked up by the police, she says she begged them to hold him because of his medical record of drug abuse and depression. She was scared that he had become a danger to himself.
Brian Montague, a Vancouver police spokesman, would not comment on the Norris case, citing privacy laws, but says police cannot lawfully apprehend someone for psychiatric assessment unless they meet certain criteria under Section 28 of the Mental Health Act. “Police cannot arbitrarily detain, arrest, or apprehend someone without a reason that is supported by law,” he says.
Baker, Ryan’s cousin and friend, wants people to know he was a deeply caring person who got sick. And like anyone who falls ill, she says, he needed ongoing help.
“Addicts are not a thing. They are not human waste. They are a human soul that is in turmoil,” Baker says. “You may think they chose this life, but we can’t know what they have endured.”