Just for information to immigrants !!


Published in Metro newspaper on 11th Nov. 2005


Mentally ill sent to jail
Ontario hospitals lack free beds to treat patients
Justice Richard Schneider at the mental health court at Old City Hall is concerned over mentally ill people being sent to jail because there are no free beds for psychiatric assessment or treatment.

Sometimes patients wait in detention for three or four weeks or longer — a violation of a mentally ill person’s Charter and constitutional rights, according to rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ontario Superior Court.

“I think it’s clear enough this lack of beds, the shortage of beds, is not a new thing,” Schneider said in an interview this week. “I’ve been sitting on the bench for five years and it’s been there all five years, uninterrupted.”

Now, Schneider is calling on the provincial government to either stop pumping mentally ill people into the criminal justice system or inject more money for beds into hospitals like Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), which has 28 beds.

CAMH last week announced that the hospital had no room for any more patients from the criminal justice system and was shutting its doors — albeit temporarily. It was the fourth time in the past two months administrators have had to take such action.

There were 450 people in Ontario’s forensic mental health system in 1997; that has grown by about 10 per cent per year since then, Dr. Howard Barbaree, CAMH’s clinical director of the law and mental health program, said last week. There are now more than 1,000 people in the system, he said.

The lack of beds for psychiatric assessment and treatment of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system is not just a problem at CAMH. There are nine hospitals across Ontario that accept patients for assessment and treatment.

Last week, the Royal Ottawa Hospital, one of the nine, also had a waiting list, leaving six patients in jail as they waited for beds.

In fact, the only hospitals that had room last week for assessment patients were in Hamilton and Thunder Bay.

Torstar News Service