This province needs to emerge from the Dark Ages when it comes to psychiatric care.
The fact that the Waterford Hospital, which was built in 1854, continues to be used at all is proof that it hasn’t.
The fact that government installed air conditioning only in the parts of the Waterford Hospital that house dialysis and blood collection services while the in-patients live in six-person wards with no privacy and windows that are sealed shut for safety reasons, further illustrates the abandonment of those with mental health issues.
Further, Eastern Health’s move to centralize in-patient and mental health services at the archaic, Dickensian Waterford site while phasing out the much more patient-friendly unit at the Health Sciences Centre, which has in-patient occupational therapy and modern air-conditioned rooms (albeit in the basement), proves just how low psychiatric patients are on the health care list of priorities.
More proof
Monday, Minister of Justice Felix Collins rejected the report by citizens’ representative Barry Fleming on the abysmal care received by psychiatric patients at the penitentiary. The minister — a lawyer and not a psychiatrist — objected that there was insufficient professional psychiatric input.
Any intelligent person should know after a very quick Internet search that the purpose of psychiatric drugs is to change the chemical balance in the brain of the patient.
Patients are eased up to their optimal dose and it sometimes takes some experimentation to find a combination of prescription drugs that works for the patient.
Similarly, if a psychiatric medication is going to be changed, the patient has to be weaned off it very slowly because there are serious withdrawal problems as the chemical balance in the brain is readjusted.
The problems inmates at the penitentiary have faced with respect to changing their psychiatric medications, apparently arbitrarily and without regard to the serious effect withdrawal from them can cause, has been well-publicized and reported on for the last number of years.
Add over-crowding and lack of any decent programming for offender rehabilitation, psychiatric or otherwise, and you have a recipe for disaster. How the minister can instantaneously reject the report of the citizens’ representative is beyond me.
No surprise
However, in a province where the psychiatric hospital is older than the penitentiary, which itself was partially built in the mid-1800s, treating psychiatric patients worse than dogs should come as no great surprise.
The SPCA and all other animal welfare organizations are justifiably outraged when an animal is mistreated or is in need of medical attention. People even get charged with offences for treating animals the way psychiatric patients are treated in this province.
Wake up, Newfoundland and Labrador.
People with mental health issues, properly treated, are as unlikely to be a problem in our society as the rest
of you. Treating psychiatric patients worse than animals, whether criminally inclined or not, is not going to improve their health or our society. Neither will it improve the working and living conditions at The Pen.
This province’s treatment of psychiatric patients is a disgrace that needs
to be rectified right now. Lives depend upon it.
Janet M. Henley writes from St. John’s.
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