Thanks to mainly the Nelson Police Department (NPD) and the Nelson Star - the city got itself into such a tizzy over our mental-health crisis - that for many basic Nelsonites the term "mental health" now automatically conjures up out-of-control criminal doper-wackos, dressed funny and dirty and loud and just not nice.
Their multitudes on Baker directly determining the Nelson Business Association's (NBA) profit margin.
City manager Kevin Cormack said the city is doing what it can to create a more welcoming downtown.
Volume of mental health calls on the rise in Nelson
Nelson Star, Jun. 11, 2013 - Sam Van Schie
Changing the Baker amenities was to eliminate their gathering places - and with that these then hippies or catch-all homeless. How many are here now is not clear - it is winter - only very few are to be seen. Yet very few are still too many - so raising the volume by declaring one-and-all mentally ill, mental patients, emotionally disturbed (soon urban terrorists?) is supposed to create momentum to drive them who-knows-where. How about a Wackotown, based on the Chinatown model. For the exact same reasons!
NIMBY!
Anybody who has spent any amount of time on Baker Street can attest to routinely seeing marginalized people in distress, some residents and others obviously homeless.
COLUMN: This is what a mental health crisis looks like
Star, Oct. 15, 2014 - Will Johnson
Marginalized by you, Will? Obviously smarmy, patronizing, non-factual twaddle - whether yours or Chief Holland's not clear here!
In the same article (Police Chief) Holland told me the police department has not added a new officer since the 90s.
Is that so!
While Nelson police officers respond to approximately 1000 mental illness calls per year. Some individuals get picked-up multiple times a week.
Always the same - how boring! About 3 times a day, every day of the year! Following a mental-illness-call(!!!) - made-or-not by connect-the-dots.
But relax! The NPD could have the solution to all our mental-health problems: The Car 87 program would team a police constable with a registered nurse or registered psychiatric nurse to provide on-site assessments and intervention for people with psychiatric problems.
In Nelson the proposal is to use an unmarked police car, staffed with two full-time personnel in plain clothes; a police officer and mental health worker who would immediately respond to emotionally disturbed people.
These mentally ill people could be triaged on the street and in the vast majority of cases have their needs met without being arrested or taken to Kootenay Lake Hospital.
COLUMN: Car 87 program makes plenty of sense
Star, Feb. 17, 2014 - Councillor Cherbo
Reasons for and advantages of establishing the program are thinnish. No matter how many times this superhero-team would drive a block or two to assess, soothe and then-what: in reality - adding to its already considerable comfort-zone - the insatiable NPD would have itself one more car and one more cop wink-wink - during times when not giving stamps-of-approval to mental-illness cases in the madmobile.
This addition of equipment and personnel further justified with: it works well in Vancouver. While - according to two researchers from Simon Fraser's Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS), in Nelson to look at our mental-health situation: There needs to be a localized response. What works in Vancouver or Kelowna may not be effective here.
Star, Jun. 11, 2014 - Sam Van Schie
Interior Health (IHA) agrees, and regardless of their planned participation in local mental-health management: structured first-response conflict-intervention/resolution here must become a basic given in police-training or upgrading - NOW!
The NPD requesting an increase of $311.000 in its budget for 2015 - tied to its usual comparisons to other places plus mental illness, drugs and street disorder - is an affront to the Nelson taxpayer!
Particularly as thus far - for the NPD - the concept of conflict-resolution has not systematically progressed beyond the acquisition of very costly, totally inappropriate Tasers. Work of the NPD may be less of an out-of-breath effort with (more) training specific to higher-volume incidents.
Sooo - what mental health anyway! Whose mental health? That of the inconvenient or inconvenienced? After all - everybody has varying degrees of at least emotional rumblings - clinically spelled mental-health issues. Usually not copped-to as such within ourselves - while readily judged and felt superior to as social inadequacies of others within the status quo.
Multilevel uncertainties in our daily lives - feeling underappreciated, used and abused - are articulated and dealt with according to the grasp individuals have on the sometimes seemingly overwhelming malaise we perceive to be faced with.
And those who cannot articulate and deal with this are helplessly-hopelessly sucked into it. Often going mental in various forms - shutting-down or acting-up.
The madmobile would present no improvement over currently used all-over-the-place methods of dealing with the few being publicly vocal.
What City Hall, the NBA and NPD have to realize is that this so-called crisis is of the City's making. For years it took great pride in - and Baker merchants hugely profited from! - presenting itself as particularly progressive, artistic and spiritual - all fueled by good plentiful dope. It still does and is. And still does attract young wanderers in search of their bliss, as well as a bit more pragmatic family-groups who want to be able to live safely while on a similar search. Often outside the status quo.
But with spirituality largely an attitude if not a commodity here, no jobs and unaffordable housing: reality soon knocks loudly - at great emotional cost. Drugs - including lots of alcohol - often a temporary escape for the already fragile.
Transients eventually move along - this not so easily done for a family. And they keep on coming: hoping it will be better here than where they came from.
Of course - like any other place - we have homegrown mentals: categorized as such and taken care of or not to whatever degree by the system. But the obsessively big-city-ambitious NPD and the very advertising-dollar-conscious Star - not one mental-health expert among them! - categorically referring to those not conforming as the mentally ill is unconscionable! On Baker they are mentally ill - at Vernon & Hall just hockey-drunk! Eh!
Unsurprisingly - Nelson has no comprehensive vision of its own for addressing mental-health issues as a result of. Allowing the NPD to fill that vacuum with hyping a mental-health crisis. Which we simply do not have!
All in all - we are doing okay with sometimes a few unruly downtown, in a city of 10.000.
So get real already! This is not Brigadoon!
In the pre-election candidates-forum of the Social Planning Action Network (SPAN) - groups discuss individual topics from a list of local concerns - like affordable housing, poverty, mental health and employment. To me a very simplistic approach - and I tell my group that I cannot take-on one item separate from all others: they all are parts of the same gestalt.
I illustrate with the example of Nelson selling itself as especially wonderful - this attracting a certain demographic who might otherwise not have been interested in coming. But once here - with promises unfulfilled - soon adding significantly to above-mentioned problems.
This pushes a button in a mental-health facilitator: getting annoyed with my attention to arriving mentals - we have our own!!! Even though I have not mentioned mental states. Hers is a territorial tunnel-vision within local mental-healthcare.
After the meeting I ask her how many permanent mental Nelsonites we have. She says between 40 and 60. When I ask how many transient mentals are here on the average - she does not know. And - abruptly telling me she has to go - flees! Literally!
So I wonder how well-or-not she actually is informed of the general state of mental-health in Nelson. Leading to how well-or-not anyone here is. And how well-or-not groups of the mental-healthcare concerned connect with each other. Currently a (the?) common denominator being fragmented funding.
Not a mental-health expert myself - I do have common sense and curiosity. These telling me there has to be an organized pool of any and all local mental-health information and experience - including that of funding, the big bugaboo. This pool then determining smaller, achievable, step-by-step game-plans on the local level - all willingly collective. A study and plan by/for all providers - the local response suggested by Simon Fraser's ICURS.
Without this we probably will remain stuck in fanciful distortion and gimme-gimme self-interests. And the public - unproductively misinformed by news-media - complaining, while not clear on complaining of what exactly.
Protect us from the protectors! And their flag-bearers!
Images:
Patrick Caulfield
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