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More money for mental health

VCHA comes up with $200,000 for North Shore/Coast Garibaldi The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority will inject more money into mental health services in Coast Garibaldi after slashing programs and staff earlier this year.

VCHA comes up with $200,000 for North Shore/Coast Garibaldi

The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority will inject more money into mental health services in Coast Garibaldi after slashing programs and staff earlier this year.

Programs in North Shore/Coast Garibaldi will get an additional $200,000 after the initial cuts proved too costly to mental health patients in the area.

"Vancouver contributed the funding to the North Shore/Coast Garibaldi area to address some of the inequalities in funding levels," said Paul Charron, rural regional manager of mental health and addictions for the VCHA.

"Also, I think somebody realized the impact those funding cuts had on some of our services."

He calls the money good news for mental health patients in the area.

Out of the $200,000, Coast Garibaldi will get $120,000.

The money will be going to community-based programs, like vocational, life skills and resocialization programs, to help people with chronic and persistent mental illnesses.

Charron said these programs will teach patients things like budgeting their finances and getting back into the workforce, the kind of things he said most people take for granted.

Patients will be introduced back into the workforce on a volunteer basis first, then move to part-time, with the goal of eventually becoming full-time.

"One of the real serious issues for people with serious and persistent illness is getting back into the workplace," said Dr. Stephen Holliday, manager of mental health services in the Sea to Sky.

"Nothing knocks you out quicker than a real serious mental illness."

Many patients with chronic mental illness are also on social assistance.

"We often ask people who have the fewest resources to do the most complicated things," said Holliday.

"So we want to establish more of a community based psycho-social rehab emphasis on the mental health programs here."

When the VCHA revamped the health system earlier this year, mental health programs were cut and staff was downsized.

Holliday said they tried to protect the core mental health programs in the area from the cuts.

In return, programs like consumer and family activities programs, which had been developed over the years, were sacrificed.

Charron said the rural areas were affected by these cuts to mental health programs more than urban areas. For example, if a program is cut in a rural area, there generally isn’t a replacement program in the vicinity, he said.

"Rural areas don’t have the diversity of programs that urban communities do to supplement it."

The total funding for mental health services in Coast Garibaldi in 2002/2003 is $4.5 million. That budget is roughly equivalent to budgets in the recent past.

That budget will go towards roughly 1,000 mental health clients.

Charron said that number of patients in increasing.

"My sense is certainly from talking to the clinicians that the number is increasing, both in numbers and certainly in complexity and severity of cases," he said.

He said that a lot more people are looking for help dealing with the stresses of everyday life.

Holliday agrees that the number of mental health patients is on the rise. He said if cuts are made in other places in the system, for example taking more people off disability or welfare, this causes a ripple effect throughout the system.

Many end up accessing the mental health programs as a last resort.

"Bad economic times and welfare cuts always translate into more work for mental health," he said.

"We anticipate business is going to be brisk for the next while."

This doesn’t mean that more people are suffering from mental illness, he said.

"It’s not necessarily that mental illness is increasing," he said.

"We’re doing a better job of advertising our services and were doing a much better job of reaching people through our crisis services. So the better we get at early identification... the more referrals we get."

The reorganization earlier in the year was good news for Whistler residents. Holliday was able to add more staff for mental health services at the Whistler Health Care Centre.

"We’ve never had enough people in Whistler and we’ve never had the full range of services," he said.

By shifting money from Squamish he ensured the basic mental health services, from acute, chronic and crisis, are covered in Whistler.

"We tend to have more acute referrals (in Whistler) proportionate to what we have in Squamish," he said, attributing those higher numbers in part to Whistler’s transient population.

In the fall, Holliday said they will be retooling the Adult Short-term Treatment and Assessment Program for new acute clients. This is the program that treats people with stress disorders, anxiety or depression.

He would like the program to introduce new clients to the system faster and give them some basic health management skills to get them through hard times.

In the meantime, the new funding will not be targeted at this increasing group of patients who are accessing the system. Rather, it’s geared towards those with chronic mental illness.

"What we’ve had to do, unfortunately, is begin to prioritize the most severe and the most ill, as opposed to being the kind of eclectic community service that we might have been in years past, just because of the sheer volume," said Charron.

He said patients are often encouraged to seek alternate forms of counselling, perhaps through their workplace, because the numbers accessing the public mental health system are getting too large.