Major homelessness initiative will be launched next week JIM DAY The Guardian

Dr. David Goldbloom, vice-chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, was in Charlottetown Wednesday to talk about the upcoming release of a national mental health strategy. Guardian photo by Jim Day

Shelters and food banks are Band-Aid solutions that can take on a life of their own to the detriment of the people they are meant to help, says a leading mental health expert.
“In the case of the shelters and the food banks, once you’ve turned on the tap, it seems heartless to shut it off,” said Dr. David Goldbloom, vice-chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
“That being said, we know that isn’t the best possible model for helping people in a journey of recovery because part of that journey is about recovering human dignity. And recovering human dignity when you have to get boxes of donated food (or) when you have to sleep in a room with 20 other people, that’s a pretty tall order.”
The commission, incorporated in 2007 to focus national attention on mental health issues and to work to improve the health and social outcomes of people living with mental illness, will launch next week in five Canadian cities a major homelessness initiative.
Goldbloom notes the initiative was developed with the help of $110 million in federal funding to conduct “the largest public health experiment in Canadian history and certainly the largest action research project around homelessness in the world among people with mental illness.”
This undertaking was an add-on — albeit a rather seismic one — to the commission’s initial three-fold mandate of creating a national mental health strategy for Canada, developing and implementing a wide-reaching anti-stigma initiative, and developing a national knowledge exchange network that would be virtual.
He says it is not a matter of Canada having a broken system, but rather no system at all, when it comes to wholly addressing mental health.
“Canada is alone among the G8 nations in not having a national mental health strategy,” said Goldbloom, who was in Charlottetown Wednesday to speak at the Canadian Mental Health Association/P.E.I. Division’s annual meeting.
“Why that is important is really a reflection of why mental health is such an important issue for the country through a variety of lenses: the economic lens, the personal lens, the workplace, the school. There’s really no domain or dimension that you can consider where it (mental health) doesn’t manifest itself.”
Goldbloom, a senior medical adviser at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, describes attitudes and approaches towards people with mental illness as the last great prejudice in an otherwise politically correct society. He says one needs only to turn on the television or go to the movies to see people with mental illnesses lampooned and ridiculed in ways that would no longer be acceptable for any other group in society.
“And that is felt very painfully and acutely by people who experience mental illness,” he said.
He says the work of the commission is ultimately about gaining “full citizenship” for people with mental illness. He notes that in Nova Scotia, if a person has a major mental illness, he or she will experience a lower level of access to both mental and physical health care.
Goldbloom says P.E.I. benefits from what he calls an intimacy of connection where people experience more stable extended family support and communal assistance.
He is also impressed by the work of the Island’s division of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
“I was knocked out by the extent of community engagement and support that they reflect,” he said.