What is being done about Vancouver’s mental health crisis?

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – More than a year after a mental health crisis was declared in Vancouver by the city’s mayor and police chief, has anything changed?

Securing 300 beds for those suffering from severe mental health and severe addiction issues was one of five recommendations made to help curb the problem, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The ongoing crisis has tapped police resources.

This year, Vancouver Police say officers will make about 3,000 apprehensions under the Mental Health Act. That’s not technically an arrest — it’s when a person poses a danger to either themselves or others and is taken into custody to get the treatment they need.

Constable Brian Montague says officers also get called out to several thousand additional mental health calls and he explains why an arrest is not made in those cases.
“It’s probably about 30,000 to 40,000 of those calls a year where mental health is a factor in the reason why police have been called which is about 20 to 30 per cent of all the calls we go to. But they’re not apprehendable under the Mental Health Act because they’re not necessarily posing a danger to themselves or others or are in a deteriorating state.”

“I’ll give you an example of that. Say, we go to a theft call and the person committing the theft is suffering from a mental illness and it has played a part in the reason they’ve committed that theft. There’s not enough for our officers to apprehend them under the Mental Health Act, but their mental health has played a role in why we’re there and why we’re dealing with the situation.”

He adds the force understands there is no simple solution and that progress is being made, albeit slowly. “It’s very frustrating for us as a department, for our officers and for police officers across the province. Many years ago there was a move to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill; for many people that worked really well, but for a small group of severely mentally ill individuals it’s become problematic. The option, other than institutionalization in a hospital is jail and jail is worse than a hospital. We deal with individuals that need the medical system, not the justice system,” explains Montague.

He says they are working with the provincial government, the city, those within the medical system and housing agencies for help to fix this problem. “There are a number of factors that come into play here. Housing is the foundation of making sure someone can keep their life on track. If someone is not in housing it becomes very difficult for them to keep their lives organized.”

There are two separate teams helping officers handle the number of mental health cases they’re dealing with right now.

One is the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams that include 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 individuals that have been flagged as potentially being problematic.
“And one of the things we found is the repetitiveness of encounters with police drop significantly. We’ve seen some individuals that are clients of the ACT or AOT teams that have a 35 or 40 per cent reduction in the number of times they encounter the police and the number of times we’re called to deal with a negative situation,” says Montague.

One of the most recent cases highlighting mental illness in Vancouver was the police-involved shooting of a man at the intersection of 41st Avenue and Knight Street in late November. Officers were called following reports of a distraught man shouting and waving a 2×4. Police asked him to put it down but he didn’t listen and after using less lethal bean bag rounds, he was shot and died of his injuries.
Full VPD report on Mental Health