Addiction & Mental Health
This blog will have a “companion” one dealing a little more directly with homelessness very soon. As always, I would genuinely love feedback and ideas from the community. This is an area that I have limited first-hand knowledge of. I’ve been fortunate in my life in the sense that I’ve never had treatment for an addiction or mental health disorder, although like everyone, I’ve had close friends and family who have. I have much more to learn in this space, and I look forward to hearing from folks who work in or have been clients of support organizations..
I caught up recently with an old friend who currently works in the recovery space. We had a thorough and wide-ranging conversation, but we kept coming back to a few central issues: addiction, mental health, homelessness, and the intersection of support agencies in the city trying to help. As a disclaimer, I’m in no way an expert on any of these matters. We have a wealth of wonderful professionals who work in these spaces. While I have some strong opinions, I would always defer to professionals in a discussion that is often personal, heavy, and deals with people’s lives and well-being.
Anecdotally from our conversation, my friend did tell me that service & resource entities in Medicine Hat work together more collaboratively than other centres. He mentioned that when attending conferences or interacting with folks from other cities, they were always impressed by how our organizations technically compete for a limited amount of funding and resources but still manage to work together for the common good.
This is one of those issues that the City is extremely limited in their capacity to influence, and I am cognizant of that. I do think, however, that we have the ability to advocate for more funding support through AHS (especially because our Premier is one of our MLAs) and to remove bureaucratic barriers, fees, forms, and regulations that inhibit the good work that organizations like Safe Link, Medicine Hat Community Housing, and the various shelter and recovery organizations do. We can also, as a community, work to educate ourselves about the stigma, misconceptions, and exaggerations that permeate this conversation. There are links below to some great, quick info packs put together by Medicine Hat Community Housing that I found insightful.
https://mhchs.ca/disrupting-misconceptions-addiction/
https://mhchs.ca/disrupting-misconceptions-criminality/
https://mhchs.ca/disrupting-misconceptions-mental-health/
I am a huge proponent of the housing first initiative, and of the various support networks that support people while they are transitioning through recovery. I firmly believe the work being done by McMan, Our Collective Journey, and some of the more “tangential” organizations like the Community Foundation, Sanare Center - and the shelters - is important, needed, and should be both protected and expanded. It takes funding of course, but it also takes a philosophical buy-in from the community.
It’s the latter that I always worry about. We tend to be sympathetic to more “mainstream” or “common” addictions and mental health issues like alcohol & cigarettes, gambling, depression, anxiety, etc. But the tone of the conversation suddenly changes when it’s meth, heroin, schizophrenia, BPD, etc. If we’re willing to be sympathetic and supportive for the former, why not the latter? I don’t claim to have any answers, but I will always support the organizations working toward the paths to recovery. I genuinely view this as an investment in our community’s future. Here’s more helpful links for those who don’t know about the great work being done by some community organizations:
https://www.ourcollectivejourney.ca/
It’s impossible to discuss this subject without inevitably getting to criminality. Again, I am in no way an expert. But I do know that there is a pervasive stigma in our community that everyone who is living rough is also experiencing addiction or mental health issues, and that they are committing criminal behaviour. It’s literally impossible for that to be true. We don’t know the housing status of people just because they’re hanging out in a park or behind a store, nor do we know whether or not they’re suffering from addiction and/or mental health issues. Those things are diagnosed by professionals. Making these kinds of assumptions is unhelpful and damaging. Similarly, not everyone experiencing any of the above is also committing crimes. And many crimes are committed by people who are housed, are of sound mental health, and who do not have addiction issues. I firmly believe we can’t move forward and take meaningful steps to address these issues until we’re all discussing them in good faith and using facts. The stigma, exaggeration, and assumptions that detract from the discussion are holding us back. I have a couple of links below addressing misconceptions, but they’re by no means exhaustive.
https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/resource/fact-sheet-common-mental-health-myths-and-misconceptions/
https://canadiancentreforaddictions.org/addicts-addiction-misconceptions/
Talk soon,
— Adam
