Urban Innovations
October 27th, 2004
Enlightening a dark corner
Leaders show way on mental health
Toronto
Star, Oct. 28, by JIM COYLE
Think about it. What two questions do people commonly ask each
other during that feeling-out waltz in the moments after introduction?
What do you do? Where do you live?
The answers - jobs and addresses - say loads about
us. They suggest income level, education, certainly our social
status. They give clues to tastes, our self-image, whether we're
seekers of security or adventure.
Work and housing. It doesn't get more fundamental.
As the folks organizing the 6th annual World Mental Health Day
forum yesterday at George Brown College know better than most.
In separate sessions, panellists got to the heart of the matter,
stressing mental health in the workplace, and the housing needs
of the chronically mentally ill. It was in those sessions that
many of the same things that have been said for years now were
said again about the prevalence of mental illness.
Suicide kills more people each year in Canada than traffic accidents
and AIDS combined. Teachers are significantly more prone to depression
than the rest of the workforce, and children, as a result, are
surrounded by adult job stress. Perhaps not coincidentally, depression
rates are rising markedly among adolescents and only car accidents
top suicide as an adolescent cause of death.
The beauty of this day, however, may have been less in what was
being said than in who was saying it - a clear measure of
how much nearer mental health is to the mainstream than it was
even 20 years ago.
On the panel on mental health in the workplace sat a psychiatric
survivor, who said she was still nervous around ``big shots,''
and a bank vice-president. On the panel dealing with housing sat,
in addition to someone from the social-service sector, an architect
and a developer.
These events are no longer just the sound of advocates talking
to each other. They include the voices and ears of an ever growing
community of people - bankers, lieutenant-governors, retired
generals, business leaders - recognizing the importance of
mental health, the threats to it in modern society, the costs to
business of not being part of the solution.
Of those who talked yesterday, probably none spoke more powerfully
than retired Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire.
He said he was wounded during his military service. But not the
way most people picture such things. He held up the little plastic
case that holds the medication he takes for post-traumatic stress
disorder. He told of how, almost five years ago now, after a suicide
attempt, he decided that his life was of value, that he had work
left to do in the cause of human rights, that his condition was
treatable.
In his story, he took delegates from the taverns of east-end Montreal
to the killing fields of Rwanda, telling of the genocide there,
of how he cannot visit the produce section of grocery stores now
because the smell of fruit takes him back to the blood-soaked marketplaces
of slaughter.
Dallaire said that for too long there have been honourable and
dishonourable war wounds, just as there have been honourable and
dishonourable illnesses.
He recalled standing at a bar, seeing a vet drop his pants to
show off the bullet mark on his backside and "we all sort
of toasted him. However, we never used to notice the six or seven
or eight others sitting in the corner, grumpy, never talking. You
can't have a conversation with these people. And they're sitting
there getting loaded.... And there'd always be one of them sort
of crying.''
Dallaire talked about the extreme risks of emotional trauma inherent
in his former line of work. But he spoke also of the stresses of
modern society.
He talked of the stresses of the information age, how it's being
foisted on generations ill-equipped to handle it. Like his 85-year-old
mother, who had the virtues of banking machines urged on her by
a teller recently because they are so much faster.
"I don't care if it's faster," she said. "I have
time to talk.''
He talked of the revolution in management, the just-in-time production
systems, the doing-more-with-less ethos, the demand for ever greater
efficiency.
"We lost that human side. The '90s were catastrophic in destroying
so many human beings.... We lost tolerance. We lost tolerance for
damaged goods.... More pressure and more work and more demands
started to create casualties.''
He talked of the upheaval during the 1990s in social structures
such as government, religion, the military. He talked of a world
that has transformed from a Cold War order to an era of disorder,
where risk is everywhere and round-the-clock and there are no rules.
All of these things have created stresses on all human beings,
whether they are conscious of it or not, he said.
What is needed in coping with the casualties, Dallaire said, is
humanity, sensitivity, respect, accommodation.
Which is pretty much what the psychiatric survivor said.
And the bank vice-president.
And the lieutenant-governor.
And the businessman.
For it's not good enough any more, Dallaire said, putting his
plastic container back in his briefcase, to let the wounded "go
off and die alone of a broken heart."
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Revised:
February 14, 2011
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