MANITOBA
Melissa Winter clutches a letter from her 17-year-old daughter, Jaedra. She found the handwritten note, along with three others, on Jaedra’s bed the night she took her own life. Jaedra addressed the letter to her doctors. It criticizes the quality of Manitoba’s youth mental-health care.
"Recently, I said to a psychiatrist that I need meds and that they should try to discover what’s wrong," Jaedra wrote. "He said, ‘No, I don’t think you need them.’ Didn’t even try to check to see how my brain was feeling or working. So here is to prove a point. Get better doctors and people who are actually willing to help."
"There were no signs Jaedra was suicidal," Winter says. "She wore the mask: she was bubbly and happy all the time. She loved everyone but herself."
Jaedra tried to end her life four times in two-and-a-half years. The first time she attempted suicide, Winter took her to Health Sciences Centre emergency room at 8 p.m. on a Friday. They waited seven hours to be admitted to the adolescent psychiatric unit, only to find there were no psychiatrists available on weekends.
Jaedra was never diagnosed with a mental disorder, and received little therapy. Winter says the family could not afford private care, and long-term in-patient treatment does not exist for youth. After being released from the hospital, it took a month and a half for Jaedra to see her psychiatrist again. Winter says she slept in the same bed as her daughter and watched her like a hawk.
After Jaedra’s second and third attempts, Winter demanded better services from Health Sciences Centre. They did family counselling, and Jaedra attended outpatient therapy sessions. But it was not enough.
"By June 2015, she had killed herself," Winter says. "They tell you there’s help out there, but where is it? They kept saying to me, ‘Once you’re out of the hospital, we’re going to set you up with all these supports,’ but nothing ever happened."
According to a report published in July – titled Toward Quality Mental Health Services in Canada – Manitoba has the highest youth suicide rate in the country, with about 18 attempts per 1,000 teens.
Dr. James Bolton, medical director of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority crisis response centre, assisted with the study that compared services in five Canadian provinces: Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. The report used health data, including documented suicide attempts, hospital discharges and physician followup rates, to analyze the state of Canada’s mental-health system.
"The overall message is youth with mental illness and addiction in Manitoba are not doing well," Dr. Bolton says. "The report encourages not just the health system, but also policy makers and politicians, to say, ‘This is a real problem we need to focus on.’"
By Kelsey James
19 November 2017
