The Editor,
Re. “Riverview: The dream of a complete community,” (TC Opinion, The Tri-City News, March 18).
“Imagine… a community where persons suffering from mental illness or addictions can receive care and support while living in a vibrant, compact neighbourhood… where these people are integrated into the life of the community, rather than isolated from it.”
Sounds great. Who could disagree?
Schizophrenia alone afflicts approximately 1% of people worldwide. In B.C., with a population of about 4.7 million, that translates to about 47,000 people, not including the thousands more suffering from bipolar disorder and severe depression. All these people live in real communities and, ideally, should they ever receive the care they deserve, will want and need to return to these communities, where hopefully governments of their day will see fit to fund the supports they need.
What are these supports to meet real needs on the ground everywhere in B.C.? Many more rooms in emergency intake facilities and psych wards along with more nuanced triage systems and beefed-up psychiatric staff. Many more community care teams providing psychiatric, counselling and social support.
Many, many more supported affordable housing options, offering, according to the spectrum of needs, the kind of practical back-ups needed by those recovering from severe episodes of illness as they try their best to re-integrate into the communities they came from. Programs to educate the public about the true nature of mental illnesses and to eradicate the stigma.
And lastly, a facility where those requiring longer attention than hospital wards can reasonably be expected to provide can be treated in peace and tranquility before most of them, too, are returned to their communities so they do not clutter much-needed spaces in hospitals or wander our streets as the most helpless of the homeless.
Riverview looks ideal for that.
But with all due respect to the author’s familiarity with homelessness, we do not need to build an ideal community. We need to improve the ones we have.
So what is this proposed “ideal community” at Riverview? A major boon to real estate tycoons. A slap in the face to the vast majority of Coquitlam residents who overwhelmingly voted against it. A bone to the thousands upon thousands of mentally ill who will never live in this “perfect” community. Another example of token liberalism by a government that broadcasts “support for families” while pinching pennies on education, health, mental health and social welfare structures. A bald attempt to balance budgets with deceptive bonus density strategies.
A pie-in-the-sky “state-of-the-art” facility, new-built to provide a grand total of 7 new beds over the still-useful existing facilities it will replace. A community of real estate buyers who will care about the mentally ill no more than other buyers in other communities.
Oh,yes, let’s build that dream. All the great supporting structures mentioned in the piece are sorely needed — not in an isolated nature sanctuary, building them while destroying it, but in every community where the vast majority of mental patients actually live. Let’s build them there.
Felix Thijssen, Coquitlam
