The 61 page report: “Trauma, Turmoil, and Tragedy:
understanding the needs of children and youth at risk of suicide and self-harm”
was just released this week in British Columbia. The report was authored by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and confirmed
what I have been predicting for years in private conversations. I’m hoping that the time is right for
me to take that conversation public.
Our governments, both federal and provincial, are killing
children through neglect.
Turpel-Lafond’s report focused on 89 cases where at-risk
children and youth have either completed suicide or caused themselves physical
harm by attempting it. Of those,
58 were in the direct care of the Ministry of Child and Family Development
[MCFD] at the time of their suicide or attempted suicide. MCFD records show that those 58 youth
had been moved 776 times while in care and five of them were moved more than 30
times each.
What is truly heartbreaking is that we had programs in place
that helped turn these children and youth around and to find them nurturing
foster placements. But the
provincial Liberals have systematically eliminated those programs, leaving
these at-risk children and youth with virtually no supports.
I played an active role in such programs within the Okanagan
valley until the summer of 2010 when MCFD pulled all funding for them, labeling
them as “redundant”. The irony of
the label “redundant” is that when they closed 39 therapeutic beds in the
Okanagan region, nothing existed to take their place. So where was the “redundancy”?
The bottom line is that BC had just spent 10 billion dollars
on the Olympics and had to pay the bill.
And who did they look to in order to pay it? The most vulnerable segment of our society - and not only
are they marginalized, children and youth don’t vote, so they have no worth to
a politician.
The programs that the government chose to close down all had
routinely high success rates. For
many of the youth we served, our programs were their last hope. Society, and sometimes MCFD themselves
classified these children and youth as “behaviour” problems and many came to us
with an alphabet of diagnoses; ADHD, RAD, ODD, MDD, etc - but once we started
working with them, we discovered that under the multiple diagnoses lay past
trauma. The vast majority of those
children and youth had experienced abuse and neglect that the average person
would not believe.
The agency I worked with would take these youth into our
residential programs, work collaboratively with them to help them overcome the
traumatic memories, stabilize their lives, then transition them to foster
families that were chosen and recruited by us to be a good fit for each
individual child or youth. And the
care didn’t end there - their Key Counsellors would work with the youth and the
foster family to make sure the transition was as smooth as possible and offer
ongoing support to ensure it lasted.
We enlisted the aid of school staff, other community resources, and even
the RCMP to help guide these youth toward a better, healthier life.
That MCFD chose to shut down our proven effective
therapeutic residential programs came as a shock to both ourselves and to front
line Social Workers who knew the value of those programs. As one Social Worker put it “You guys
are golden.”
So the children and youth who these programs served were
removed and followed three tracks;
- Some were returned to the family who abused or neglected
them
- Some were placed in temporary foster placements and
bounced from home to home as the foster parents burned out, not having the
supports in place to work with such children and youth
- Some were turned out on the street where they became the
victims of sexual predators who trade meals, a place to sleep, drugs and
alcohol for sexual favours.
There was one pre-teen youth who needed special care to calm
when they became upset, and was doing well in our program when MCFD chose to
shut it down. This youth burned
through a couple of foster placements within weeks and was temporarily placed
in a hospital psychiatric unit.
Because of pressure from Interior Health, MCFD moved this youth to a
juvenile detention facility out of province. This youth’s crime: Traumatic brain damage from a vehicle
accident made it difficult to regulate their emotions.
Just one tragic story out of scores of tragic stories.
I predicted in July of 2010 that no action to support these
children and youth would take place until they began to die and for the press
to take notice. That is now
happening.
Our governments have one priority - to get re-elected. They don’t care about marginalized
people in our society, at least not on a political level. Early in 2012 I met with MP Dan Albas
and had a lengthy conversation about the lack of mental health supports in his
riding. At that meeting I told him
that as a mental health practitioner with a private practice I was willing to
put my money where my mouth is and offer drastically reduced rates to the
families of children and youth who are referred by non-profit agencies such as
S.A.D.I., the BC Schizophrenic Society, and the Martin House initiative. I asked him what he was willing to
do. Albas stated that he was going
to look into alternative funding for these non-profit agencies and get back to
me.
He never did.
Nor did he reply to my emails after that meeting.
But politicians will
respond if their livelihood and future career is threatened. If you care that hundreds of children
and youth are suffering neglect and abuse because of funding cuts in the mental
health field, let your MLAs and MPs know.
We’re coming up on a provincial election - let’s get the dialogue
started before more children and youth reach the point of such hopelessness
that suicide is the only option they can see to make the pain stop.
