Mental health issues costing Canadian economy $51 billion annually

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – February marks Psychology Month in British Columbia and new numbers show mental illness is costing the Canadian economy $51 billion every year.

Just over two years ago former VPD Chief Jim Chu and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson declared it a crisis and following their plea for help five recommendations were made, but not all of them have been fulfilled. One of those solutions was securing 300 beds for those with mental health and addictions issues.

“That’s something that we haven’t seen yet. It’s something we think is really important, something we’d like to see and we think would make a big difference in the number of apprehensions and the number of calls our officers are dealing with. And the number of people our officers have to deal with that are in crisis on the street — we think those numbers would decrease significantly with those beds,” explains VPD Constable Brian Montague.

It’s a growing problem and he admits officers are feeling frustrated because they’re not front-line mental health workers. Montague says they get thousands of calls every year that are linked to the illness and they don’t have the resources to deal with it.

“About 20 to 25 per cent of the couple hundred thousand reported calls we get have a mental health component. We have a mental health team — 17 people that are designated to deal with the Assertive Outreach Team (AOT) and Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams, mental health issues, looking at the reports that are coming in every day to see if there are individuals we’re dealing with on a regular basis that need more mental health support. Our goal is to reduce the amount of negative contacts we have with people.”

The police department works in conjunction with the local health authorities, and it continues to call on both the provincial and federal governments for help.

“Investing more money in the system to ensure people get the care they need. We’ve seen the numbers of mental health apprehensions increase steadily over the last five years and they’ve finally started to plateau a bit. I really hope they continue to either plateau or actually decrease, but only time will tell. It’s putting money and resources into prevention so our officers don’t have to deal with them on the street. We want to see the numbers go down and there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

One of the key issues of dealing with mental health is the stigma that surrounds the illness.

“It doesn’t surprise me the numbers are that high and it’s unfortunate. We had 3,000-plus Mental Health Act apprehensions in 2015 for a city the size of Vancouver. Again, that’s just Vancouver. We’re not talking about apprehensions made by police departments in Surrey, Coquitlam, Burnaby, Richmond and the North Shore — just imagine if you added all those numbers together.”

He explains the kind of calls officers are called out to vary from people wanting to harm themselves or others to those who are suffering from hallucinations.

“We also go to a lot of calls of suspicious activity or strange behaviour. I just read a call the other day of a woman who walked up to a random person, took his glasses off his face, smashed them on the ground and then ran away. We ended up catching up with this person and she was clearly suffering from mental health issues. These are the types of day-to-day calls that we go to all the time.”

Montague says officers are constantly undergoing de-escalation training to ensure members are able to handle mental health calls.

Currently, there are two separate teams helping officers deal with the influx of these calls.

One is the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) unit that includes officers and mental health professionals that deal with those with severe mental illnesses who have regular contact with police.

The other is the Assertive Outreach Team (AOT), which is a first of its kind in BC. It follows up with people that have been flagged as potentially being problematic.

The Public Health Agency of Canada estimates one in five Canadians are living with mental illness while health authorities in BC figure that figure is one in three.