Dr. Barbara Kane is a psychiatrist who has spent much of her career in BC’s north treating people with severe mental illness and addictions. During that time, she’s witnessed and cared for people in such deep distress, they are harming themselves in ways the rest of us can only imagine.

She’s calling on the province to green light a secured psychiatric facility in Prince George to care for the people with intractable mental illness and addictions, whose most essential needs are not being met in our current healthcare system.

To the naysayers who worry that mandatory residential care is an infringement of people’s rights, Kane is empathetic but firm – some people need it. For their own sake and the safety of those around them.

Right now, those individuals bounce back and forth from the street, to the hospital, to supportive housing, to the street, to the hospital, round and round they go, getting worse instead of better.

In hospitals, they’re scaring other patients and injuring staff not trained or resourced to adequately care for them. The streets are dangerous, violent and chaotic. Supportive housing is unequipped to deal with the acute needs of a person in psychosis or trapped in deep addiction and mental illness.

Kane argues that a properly resourced pschiatric facility would be safer for the community and more humane for the individuals. They patients would be safe, medically cared for, have freedom of movement not possible in a general hospital and they would have much greater hope of improving their quality of life.

The former department head of psychiatry at the University Hospital of Northern BC, Kane has been the medical lead for Northern Health’s mental health program since 2018. She says she understands the deficiencies of the institutionalization of mental health patients in facilities like BC’s old Riverview Hospital, but has come to believe that having a psychiatric hospital, based on today’s ethical standards, is foundational to a strong health care system and the safety of the public.

The whole system is breaking down without this essential backstop, she says. Previously, hospital staff could send patients requiring longer and more intense care to Riverview. Now, they must be held in hospital or released into the community where their needs can’t be met. They need 24/7 attention.

Right now, these patients are disrupting hospital systems not designed to care for them, endangering staff and contributing to capacity and staffing issues. We can see the consequences of not having dedicated psychiatric facilities on our downtown streets.

Dr. Kane sat down with me to share some professional insights and explain why she’s convinced we need secured psychiatric care, not just in Prince George, but in communities across BC.

Enjoy the podcast!

Fran

Podcast producer: Rob Shaw

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