We are Regressing and I was Wrong – The Growth of Hamas Inspired Anti-Semitism

By Marvin Ross

I usually leave writing about society in general to Dr Dawson who pens some very thought provoking views while I mostly stick to mental illness but recent events are very troubling. I sit and fume at the Canadian response to the Hamas terrorist attacks and the aftermath and I’m embarrassed at the naivete of a blog I wrote in 2016 on racism.

In comparing the US to Canada, I said “I have American friends who tell me that a deep seated racism still exists but that it is (or has been till now) kept in check. Trump has let the genie out of the bottle as demonstrated by the reports of racist incidents all over the US since the election.”

Today, the genie of anti-semitism has been let out of the Canadian bottle by Hamas. In 2000, the late Canadian historian, Irving Abella, gave a speech telling of the history of anti-semitism in Canada and how it had changed over the years. It is no longer on-line but he did write about it in the Globe in 2022. Abella also authored the book None is Too Many, the policy that prevented Jews from coming to Canada to flee Hitler.

Much of that changed. As I said in 2016, “Abella’s wife, a refugee who was born in a displaced persons camp post Holocaust, sits on the Supreme Court of Canada. Abella mentions that Bora Laskin could not get a job in law when he returned to Canada from Harvard Law School. His wife, a trained cosmetician, could not get hired at Eatons (the large department store). Laskin eventually became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1961 when Louis Rasminski (who graduated from the high school that I went to) was named Governor of the Bank of Canada, Ottawa ceased being what former British High Commissioner Joe Garner called the most “anti-Jewish capital city” he had ever encountered.”

Other minorities did just as well and Canada became a bastion of multi-racial and ethnic harmony.

No longer!

York University, where Abella taught for many years, has just suspended three staff/faculty because they were part of eleven people arrested for defacing Indigo Books at Bay and Bloor and denouncing the Jewish founder/CEO Heather Reisman. They are charged with mischief over $5000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offense. Hate crime charges are being considered. Because they’ve been suspended, students are planning to walk out as I write this. One of the arrested has a PhD, one is a practicing psychotherapist, one an immigration consultant, a lecturer at Brock University who may also teach in the Toronto School Board, a migrant workers organizer, and an elementary school teacher.

Numerous university groups have come out praising the Hamas action which involved murdering women, children and the elderly and raping and murdering young women. Hamas, of course, is a terrorist group and is defined as that by most western countries. How anyone can support this group defies description although I don’t want to get into the very complex history of the middle east in this blog but everyone seems to have forgotten the thousands of missiles fired at Israeli citizens that has been going on for years and the attack on innocent civilians. Those who support Hamas might want to read their charter which calls for the complete destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews. “In 2019, Hamas official Fathi Hamad made an anti-Semitic exhortation to the Palestinian diaspora to murder Jews everywhere: “You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them”

The former director of the BC Civil Liberties Society was so pleased with the Hamas attack on civilians and young people at a music festival that she said  “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders.” A University of Montreal professor told a student at Concordia University who was getting support for the hostages (many of them very young children) to “go back to Poland you whore”.

Ordinary people are ripping posters of hostages off telephone poles and a student at Durham College in Oshawa made a video saying how proud she is of her Palestinian people for October 7 and wants them to keep repeating it “over and over and over again”.

Jewish buildings in Montreal have been firebombed or shot at and swastikas are appearing in Toronto elementary schools. A friend in Ottawa e-mailed me that his friend, a rabbi, was getting hate calls on his cell phone and he said “this is not the Ottawa that I love”. The situation in Toronto is so bad that when the Jewish community decided to hold a rally in support of Israel and the hostages, it was at Christie Pitts. That was the location of a riot in the 1930’s when a gang of Nazi supporters showed up waving swastika flags at a baseball game involving Jewish youth. Italian immigrants joined the Jews in the battles that followed.

Lest we forget, I have not seen any feminist or #MeToo groups come out to condemn the rape of Israeli girls. Rape is illegal and abhorrent and in an armed conflict, a war crime. Guess Israeli women don’t count.

Renowned progressive physician and member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, Dr Philip Berger of the University of Toronto Medical School, is one of 555 Jewish physicians at the U of T who recently signed a letter proclaiming their Zionism in the face of academic hostility. Dr Berger told the Toronto Star that:

“I don’t know what’s happened to the left. The left has abandoned proper research and adequate knowledge of a very complicated issue, which the Middle East is. The left has failed to see that there’s only one Jewish state, under threat by millions of citizens around it. The left does not have a scintilla of empathy for Jewish victims of terror.”

What is the pinnacle of stupidity are the posters I’ve seen saying “Queers for Hamas” and Gays for Gazans”. I wonder how they would like living under Hamas. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy states that:

“Today, gays remain subject to legal persecution in most parts of the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon (though the region is hardly unique in this regard). Where homosexuality is addressed in modern legal codes, it often appears as a category similar to adultery, for which the prescribed penalty in some Middle Eastern states is death by stoning.”

To be fair, Muslims are also being subjected to increased hate but according to police, not to the same extent as Jews.

To paraphrase my friend in Ottawa, this is not the Canada that I love. Where did we go wrong and how do we reverse this hate? I have no idea but we need to reverse it and fast. What is encouraging is that the vast majority of the comments to the news article in the Globe about York University is support for the university.

Religion, Intolerance and Abuse

By Dr David Laing Dawson

We humans need social organization, ritual, and a degree of certainty. Can we have these without religion? For religion is stupid.

Of course religion forges community, provides ritual and relief for all the difficult passages in life, and in death. But it also creates an “other”, the others who don’t believe and therefore are …what? Pagans, infidels, non-believers, not quite as human and worthy as we believers are?

Because of its hierarchical structure, its need for ancient texts that give it a possible divine authorship (except Scientology, which is based on the credos of one of the last century’s science fiction writers, but then Scientology is really, really stupid), it can also lead to ideologies that are extreme and intolerant.

The Quran and the Bible both offer some good advice in the service of leading a decent, loving, respectful, generous life, but they also, here and there in their texts, recommend, or allow, some outlandish and primitive behaviours, from stoning non-believers and adulterers, to raping and enslaving women captured in battle. And the absolutist quality of each teaching, each precept, combined with the authority given to the alpha male at the top of the heap and each of his underlings, is a recipe for the development of cults and the abuse of power.

In a way, while proposing to be a vehicle for stifling and limiting our worst instincts, the structure of religion actually provides cover for narcissistic despots, sadistic cult leaders, sexual predators and con men around the world…from the catholic priests given control over the lives of children, to jihadist imams, to doomsday cult leaders, and filthy rich evangelical healers.

Through the last half of the 20th century it was pleasing to see a gradual increase in the percentage of people surveyed in Canada who proclaimed no religious affiliation. And if we put aside regimes with communist leadership, we find that a list of those countries of the world with the highest proportion of non-believers, reads also as a list of countries with the best health care, the best educational systems, the least violence, the most tolerance, and who are the most egalitarian in principal and practice.

But then came the 21st century. A great disappointment so far.

But the lessons are clear from the second half of the last century: If secular society and good democracies can improve and continue to improve our general welfare, education, health care, tolerance, opportunity, equality for all, then our need for religion will fade, and along with it, the intolerance and abuse it fosters and excuses.

“Stand Your Butt up Now!”

By Dr. David Laing Dawson

Adulthood and maturity are terms that imply that certain kinds of cognitive function and emotional control have been achieved. A list of these could include:

• Awareness of one’s emotional state.
• Ability to acknowledge emotional state/emotional reactions without acting upon them.
• Awareness of social context and expectations of behaviour within that context.
• Awareness of probable short and long term consequences of one’s actions.
• Sequential planning.
• Ability to stay on task, ignore distractions.
• Perspective, or the ability to ignore the trivial and unimportant, and focus energy and actions on that which is important.
• The ability to distinguish these.
• A somewhat realistic sense of self and position within a social context.

All of this depends on a healthy brain that has developed and matured through both internal biological processes and preparatory input and stimulus through childhood and adolescence.

There is much evidence that social media is disrupting this process, causing anxiety and depression, and lessening the ability to focus, think sequentially, manage emotions, and develop perspective among today’s adolescents.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/smartphone-brain-nov14-1.7029406

I am writing about this, albeit in broad strokes, because I wonder if we are seeing the consequences of this now, in adults. Lauren Boebert is 36, George Santos 35, Congressman Mullins 46.

Social media has been with us and dramatically growing since the 1990’s. Screen time for children between 6 and 12 is reported to be as high as 13 hours per day.

Are we now facing the arrival of adults in positions of leadership whose brains have been altered or stunted by a full childhood and adolescence scrolling through social media, their frontal lobes and serotonin and dopamine systems formed and shaped by the immediate trivial pleasures and disappointments of social media content, by the immediate gratification of ringing bells and bright lights, the loss of focus and sequential planning, and the inability to delay gratification?

And do the childhood and adolescent years of immersion in social media, immersion in the ringing of bells, memes, dramatic words and videos that produce surges of dopamine and pleasure, of rage and superiority, of Pavlovian salivation, and that have quelled the development of critical thinking – can they account for the numbers of young people who, upon being fed parts of Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, immediately parrot his judgement and his hatred on Tik Tok?

Guest Post Loving Mother Wins the Battle Against an Uncaring System

by Dr. Richard O’Reilly

My heartfelt congratulations to Ms. Marlene Bryenton who, against all the odds, forced the provinces of Ontario and Prince Edward Island do the right thing. Just five years ago Marlene’s son Andrew was working as an assistant bank manager and living in his own home with his wife and children. Then, due to the sudden onset of a psychotic illness, he lost everything, wandered off and ended up living on the streets in Toronto. Paranoid delusions prevented Andrew from accepting shelter and other support services so his mother mobilized an expanding group of volunteers to check on his wellbeing and provide him with food, clean water and clothes.

Marlene was less successful, initially, in mobilizing mental health services to provide the care her son needed. But this was not for want of trying. Three times she made the arrangements for her son to be assessed in the emergency rooms of Toronto hospitals. Despite the fact that Andrew Bryenton was severely ill, sleeping on the streets and had walked against traffic on a highway off-ramp, he was discharged back to the streets without treatment or provisions for follow-up care. But Marlene refused to accept the callous absurdity of the system. She relentlessly lobbied doctors, hospitals and the governments in Ontario and PEI, eventually flying from PEI to Ontario to pressure Ontario’s mental health system to provide the care and treatment that her son needed. Only then was Andrew admitted to Humber River Hospital and the necessary treatment for his illness finally started. Last week, at Ms. Bryenton’s request, her son was flown back to a hospital in PEI, on a rarely used ministerial order.

While she was working to get appropriate treatment for her son, Marlene Bryenton also successfully lobbied the government of PEI to develop and introduce legislation to support community treatment orders. Treatment for psychosis sometimes alleviates hallucinations and delusions but the patient fails to develop an understanding that they have a serious illness and need to stay on medication to prevent relapse. This outcome is especially common when the initiation of treatment is delayed, as it was in Andrew’s case. The availability of a community treatment order means that Andrew, and others like him, who lack an awareness of their severe mental illness, can be legally required to continue treatment and follow-up after discharge from hospital. Without Marlene’s determination, persistence and innate political smarts her son would still be profoundly ill and languishing on the streets of Toronto 

While this is an uplifting story of a mother’s success in securing essential care and treatment for her son, is this really what it takes to get standard medical treatment for an individual suffering from a psychotic illness? There are thousands of Andrews out there. Many do not have families. When they do, those families are often exhausted due to the effort needed to look after someone with a severe mental illness: particularly the effort sometimes required to ensure that a loved one stays on treatment. Family caregivers repeatedly tell me that they feel shunned and defeated by the system.

It is in these situations that the state must exercise its parens patriae duty, i.e. the responsibility to look after vulnerable citizens who cannot look after themselves. But note how the institutions in Ontario abysmally failed to provide Andrew the care he needed until they were forced to do so by Ms. Bryenton. 

Our society’s reluctance to provide individuals like Andrew Bryenton essential care is epitomized in comments by Roxie Danielson, identified as a street nurse, in this CP24 article: https://tinyurl.com/2snb7srf . Respectfully I disagree with Roxie Danielson’s conclusion that Ms. Bryenton violated her son’s privacy rights by sharing photographs of him with the volunteers who checked on him and provided him with the essentials of life. Roxie Danielson speculated that these photos of Mr. Bryenton, destitute and disheveled on the streets of Toronto, could adversely affect his future employment opportunities. Again, with due respect, the possibility of future employment was surely the least of Mr. Bryenton’s concerns when he was walking against traffic on a motorway off- ramp or sleeping on the streets of Toronto in the middle of winter.

Here is what I take away from Andrew’s story. Families can make a difference …but to do so they must be both vocal and persistent. They must also be confident about what is right and what is not. Marlene Bryenton knew that her son needed treatment, knew that he deserved treatment, knew that he had a right to receive that treatment. She knew that her son’s lack of understanding about the nature of his condition and the need for treatment did not justify leaving him to languish on the streets to face an inevitable early death. Marlene Bryenton should not have had to work 10 hours every day for almost a year to get her son the treatment he needed. Ontario should have provided that treatment, but it didn’t until forced to do so by Ms. Bryenton. The story of Andrew Bryenton demonstrates what I have always believed – that the mental health system will not meet its duty to provide appropriate care and treatment to people with severe mental illness until family caregivers come together and force it to do so.

Richard O’Reilly Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry Western University, London, Ontario

Yes, the Police Should be Involved in Mental Health Calls

Marvin Ross

For as long as I can remember, there has been a controversy over police handling of mental health calls and demands for change. The impetus for much of this has been because of the times when the police mess up and someone dies. I’ll say more of that later but I do think we should realize that this is a complex issue with no simple solution.

I personally first became aware of the role of the police many years ago when I had friends who had a brother with schizophrenia. He absconded from hospital numerous times and initially from what was then the Clarke Institute for Psychiatry. I lived nearby so he came to see me and insisted that I take him to what had been the Toronto Asylum for the Insane renamed the Queen St Hospital. I did but they refused him as he had escaped from the Clarke and therefore “was not their problem”. Now they are both the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

He eventually got his wish and went to Queen St where he continued his exploit of frequent escapes. When he again showed up at my place, I called the hospital and told them to come and get him. I was probably naive enough to expect a couple of guys in white coats to arrive but, instead, two very large cops appeared and when I opened the door, they were flat against the wall on either side of the door.

Probably very sensible and although he was not violent, he could get very agitated so it made sense. When I told them he had left, they said they knew him and would drive around to find him. I was still a bit perplexed at why cops came but it did make sense. Police are available 24/7, they have cars with radios all over the city so they can get places quickly when they have to and call for extra resources if they need to.

I lived about 10-15 km from the hospital so if they sent someone, they would first have to find a couple of people, get a car and drive over. It was impractical. And that was then when there were fewer mentally ill wandering around because we had more resources. Thanks to deinstitutionalization and mental health budget cuts, fewer beds, few supported housing spaces, we have way more people wandering our streets with untreated mental illness.

That was the point made by retired Mountie, Ryan Chaplin, writing in the Vancouver Sun. He said “If those people had been given the right support in their mental health struggles, or addictions supports, they would likely never make it to police attention. Those supports are at best inadequate in many parts of Canada, if not nonexistent. Thus, it falls to the catch-all police.”

Not only do we have insufficient resources to treat people with a disease which in itself is shameful but it is near impossible to get service for someone who is homeless with untreated mental illness. Just look at what the Bryenton family had to go through to get their son off the streets of Toronto where he might have frozen to death this coming winter.

Andrew’s mom, Marlene, went to court six times to get a form 2 so the police could take him to hospital. Three times, the hospitals spit him back out onto the streets until the fourth one kept him and treated him. Keeping Andrew safe and keeping his mom in Charlottetown informed of his whereabouts took hundreds of kind strangers in Toronto who let her know, gave him food, drinks, clothing and money. Thanks to a petition and the threat of a demonstration at the PEI legislature, Andrew is being medically transferred back to PEI. As his mother said at the end “No parent should have to endure this torture test.  Many will die if the system is not improved.” (search for Bryenton on https://dawsonross.wordpress.com/)

Multiply that by the thousands of untreated mentally ill living on the streets all over Canada. It is despicable and not consistent with the actions of a so called civilized country. But, let’s get back to the role of the police.

Unfortunately, there have been times when the police have messed up and innocent people have died. It should not have happened, but it has. The one case in Toronto that those who complain about the police cite is the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet. Her death was a total tragedy but the police acted with remarkable restraint as I pointed out in an earlier blog. This was not even a mental health call and the police did not push her off a balcony.

Over the years, I’ve had occasion to interact with police over mental illness calls and I’ve met and sat on panels with cops who are involved in this work. Each and every time, they act with tremendous professionalism. If it is believed that there is more violence when police are involved but we need statistics to demonstrate that. There aren’t many but the issue is simply the old man bites dog story well known to journalists. No one reports on the times a dog bites a man because it is not unusual but they will when a man bites a dog. There are countless interactions between police and those with mental illness that end well but all we ever read about are those times when they do not.

A couple of studies reported that fewer than 1% of contacts with police result in the use of force although people do state they have experienced some level of force like being pushed, punched, having a baton used or conducted energy weapon deployed in the process. Those incidents may or may not be appropriate but there are few deaths.

There are good reasons that the police are involved and should be along with some impressive statistics on what they do.

Legislation allows police to apprehend someone and to take them to the nearest psychiatric facility. Nurses and social workers do not have this power granted to them. Police also have the legal authority to “apprehend a person with a mental illness (PMI) who are under a warrant or other authorization ordering them to be apprehended and transported for assessment, examination, and (or) treatment”. No one else has that authority.

As that same article states “Under public safety, we identify three ways in which police interact with PMI: (i) conducting apprehensions under provincial and territorial mental health legislation; (ii) investigating reports of PMI who have been reported missing from home, shelters, or from hospitals or in-patient facilities; and (iii) conducting wellness checks, including responding to reports of individuals who are at risk of suicide.”

Evidence shows that calling the police is initiated by health care providers (29%); family (28%); strangers nearby (27%) or the mentally ill person themselves (16%).

The potential for violence is rarely mentioned but it is a big reason why the police need to be involved. A pilot program in Toronto that hopes to provide an alternative to police stresses how those with mental illness are less violent than the general population and that is likely true if they are treated but not if they are untreated. People with untreated psychosis can be very violent and even kill those they love when sane. For that very reason, cops come with backup to these calls and have the ability to call for even more backup if needed.

Non-police medical professionals can precipitate violence as well as I wrote about a few years ago. My friend Douglas went to the hospital because he was very depressed but then decided he wanted to leave. Staff would not let him and he got into an altercation with a social worker and a nurse so they called the police. Violence erupted, Douglas was subdued, punched and tasered and then charged with a slew of criminal charges.

When the case finally got to court, the judge was appalled, said he did not believe the testimony of the hospital staff or the cops and tossed the charges out. You can read the full details here and here. After his few years of hell with criminal charges hanging over him, Douglas sued both the police and the hospital and told me he was very happy with the settlement.

The Toronto pilot program that may be extended city wide will ensure that the peer workers who respond to a call will look like the caller, share similar cultural backgrounds, speak the same language and be people “who understand the unique traditions, practices, and world views of their own community’s culture”. See Page P5-6.

How do we do that? With all due respect to the work that went into this project, it sounds like a Monty Python skit:

Dispatcher: OK you need help but what colour are you, what is you native language, what pronoun do you go by, religion? Great, let me try to find someone.

Toronto is a multi-cultural city (as is much of Canada) so if you call the cops, you might get a male or a female, a Black, an Asian, a white person, a South Asian, what ever. How do you staff for what the report suggests is needed and how long would it take.

From the report they published, it seems that calls will go to the 911 operator who will decide if police should be dispatched or if the call should go to the civilian 3 digit number. It is hoped that there will be enough teams available 24/7 to have a rapid response and cars will have a radio network tied into the emergency dispatch system. The full report for this proposed service can be found here and I have tried to be as objective as possible but, I am skeptical. Hamilton, where I live, has had a civilian crisis team for a number of years and I don’t know anyone who likes it. Often, they don’t answer the phone but they do return messages if left very quickly. Unfortunately, it usually takes them a few days to respond so people end up calling 911 anyway.

The one thing that twigged in the final report of this civilian proposal was this: “The service should integrate traditional healing practices and social life frameworks of the communities being served” (P 89)

Does this mean that an indigenous person in crisis should be taken to a healing lodge if they want? Or maybe someone will want vitamins or to go to an alternative hospital in Tijuana? .

Me, I call the cops and they are great! In fact, I’ve seen more empathy from the police than I’ve seen from many mental health professionals.

Follow Up – Yes, Police Should be Involved in Mental Health Calls

By Dr David Laing Dawson

Of course the police should and must be involved in any wellness check, mental health crisis or behavioural disturbance call. If the police involved in such calls should have special training and what kind of training is another question. And whether or not such calls should be responded to by a joint group or team or partnership with mental health professionals is yet another.

There are currently hundreds of such programs in operation in the western world. It occurred to me we could study them to determine which work best, that is, which are most successful at resolving the crises without violence, and have good short term and long term outcomes.

Of course a quick Google search finds there are some studies available.

So a small group of researchers could be assigned the task of reviewing all the studies available as well as compiling descriptions of all such services in the western world, and honing this down to determine the best and most effective models for different size populations. AI could speed up this process.

There’s no need to argue about any of this. We should be choosing the models with best proven outcomes (short and long term) and implementing them.

We can let the bureaucrats add all the extra paragraphs about inclusivity, sensitivity, lived-experience, community buy-in, traditional healing practices, alternative medicine, and pronoun and language use after the model has been chosen.

More importantly it is one thing to resolve the crisis without violence, it is another to have the resources to provide the acute and long term care needed to prevent relapse and re-occurrence.

To support what Marvin writes, several times over the years I was there at the scene with the police. They were always good.

Breaking News – Andrew Bryenton Finally in Hospital in Charlottetown, PEI

Below, I’m copying the e-mails and posting from Marlene Bryenton on the latest updates on this Kafkaesque adventure. This is what it takes to get one mentally ill, homeless person into hospital to receive evidence based care. Months and months of focused searching, legal efforts, police help, and the help of hundreds of compassionate people.

It is barbaric and unbecoming a supposedly first world advanced country.

And for those who suggest that being homeless on the streets of Toronto, sleeping outdoors, was a choice, please note that Andrew is beginning to improve on his medication which does work despite the alternative anti-psychiatry crowd.

Here is the e-mail that Marlene Bryenton, his mother, sent out today:

UPDATE NOVEMBER 9, 2023:

Today, I have some very thrilling news for you. Our son, Andrew, will be arriving HOME this afternoon! MAMA BEAR can hardly wait to give him a big MAMA BEAR HUG! PAPA BEAR is also very excited!

I can’t thank my husband, Lloyd, enough for taking over the chores inside and outside our home for the past year. This was to enable me to spend 10 hours per day on the computer advocating for Andrew, joining hundreds of Facebook Community Groups, sending e-mails, letters, doing interviews with the media, writing daily Facebook update reports, and responding to thousands of Facebook messages. I love you Lloyd!

I spoke with the Humber River Hospital Director of Mental Health and Addictions, Daniel Tziatis, last evening. He provided us with all the details that Health P.E.I. had made for Andrew’s medical transfer.

Andrew was picked up at the Humber River Hospital this morning and taken to the Toronto Pearson Airport. He will be coming by plane to P.E.I,. on a stretcher, accompanied by a R.N. and respiratory therapist. Andrew will have sedation for the flight. He will be transported to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, P.E.I. under the care of his psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Jay.

I spoke with Andrew’s nurse last evening. Andrew is looking forward to coming back home to be with family. His medications are starting to give him clarity of thought. He realizes that living on the streets is not where he should be this winter. He appreciates the fact that he is in Humber River Hospital with wonderful staff, hot meals, cozy bed, private room, and showers. Many thanks to Humber River Hospital for the wonderful care Andrew has received.

This is a year long dream, that is finally coming true! We sincerely thank Minister of Health Mark McLane for signing the Ministerial Order to facilitate Andrew’s medical transfer back home to the province he loves.

Andrew has a long road to recovery and he will have the support of his parents, sister, First Baptist Church family, marathon runners, bank colleagues, baseball, bowling, basketball, and curling friends.

Lloyd and I express our sincere thanks to the thousands of people from Ontario and P.E.I. who have followed Andrew’s heartbreaking journey for the past year. Many thanks to the hundreds of people who sent photos of Andrew with date, time, and location. Also to the hundreds of people who recognized Andrew and helped him to survive on the streets of Toronto homeless, by providing food, water, money and clothing.

Special thanks to my team who worked with me daily providing support, sharing their talents, encouragement, and guidance. Also thanks to those that wrote blogs and newsletters.

A very special thank you to, Maureen Trask, Missing Persons Advocate in Ontario and to Kerry McLane, volunteer investigator with the Please Bring Me Home non-profit organization. It was Kerry who suggested that I launch the PLEASE BRING ANDREW BRYENTON HOME TO P.E.I. PETITION. It presently has 11004 signatures from caring Ontario and P.E.I. Residents.

Also many thanks to TEAM who provided me with guidance and support. They are an advocacy group for Mental Health Reform in Ontario. Special thanks to Karen Scott Booth who came to the Humber River Hospital to advocate for Andrew’s admittance.

The participants of this group include lawyers, psychiatrists, social workers, counsellors, police and parents with a vested interest in mental health.

Many thanks to a special couple in Ontario that welcomed us into their home and provided hospitality, pick up and drop off at the airport, transportation to the Toronto Court House, and transportation back and forth to visit Andrew at Humber River Hospital. They also took us for a drive around all the streets where Andrew walked thousands of kilometers. We shall never forget your kindness, generosity and love!

Also special thanks to the visitor that Andrew had throughout his hospital stay. Even though Andrew was a thousand miles away we knew and trusted this friend. He talked to Andrew for hours on his visit and took him special treats including Cadbury eggs, Cheesies, donuts, Tropicana orange juice and pizza.

Special thanks to Suzanne Dennison DCS., RP, (cert)OAMHP, Chief of Staff, Office of the Honourable Michael Tibollo, Associate Minister Mental Health and Addictions, Ministry of Health, Ontario.

Suzanne did research and sought legal opinion on the involuntary inter-provincial Ministerial Order and provided guidance.

Many thanks to Dr. Richard O’Reilly renown psychiatrist, and Dr. John Gray who provided me with a very important document titled Community Treatment Orders Evolution and Comparisons. This document was prepared FREE OF CHARGE to help Andrew, me and the P.E.I. Government initiate their first CTO in November 2023. I have been lobbying the P.E.I. Government for many months with the assistance of MLA Susie Dillon. Thank you!

This document drew attention to the fact that the proposed P.E.I. CTO has restrictions causing patients not to qualify for the CTO. It lacks flexibility and could tie the hands of the clinicians.

The Community Treatment Order is proactive, as it monitors and enforces medication for the mentally ill. It keeps people well and out of expensive hospital beds.

The two doctors highly recommend that the New Brunswick CTO be used. It is considered a modern GOLD STANDARD CTO. It best suits the needs of those that are vulnerable with mental illness and also the clinicians. It is effective and has less restrictions allowing the clinicians to best use the CTO to help those that are mentally ill.

When I was growing up my mother always told me, “Do it right the first time or don’t do it at all.” I hope that the P.E.I. Government will copy and paste the New Brunswick CTO because Islanders need and deserve the GOLD STANDARD CTO!

Special thanks to all the police officers that helped support us over the past 12 months. Many thanks to the Justice of the Peace officials who granted our Form 2 applications to take Andrew to hospital.

I am sorry if I have forgotten to thank someone. I have a very special pillow with Grateful, Thankful and Blessed, which sits on my kitchen chair. It was a gift from a very special friend. It is how I feel today.

I would like to introduce ANDREW’S ANGEL PROJECT. Andrew will need lots of encouragement and support to stay on his medications. He does not realize the love, compassion and care that Ontario and P.E.I. residents gave him. I would like you to let him know by sending letters or cards. Here is the address: Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 60 Riverside Drive, P.O. Box 6600, Charlottetown, P.E.I. C1A 8T5.

There have been hundreds and hundreds of people praying for a MIRACLE for Andrew. God made a way! This song has helped me throughout the past months. It is titled GOD WILL MAKE A WAY! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zo3fJYtS-o

Later, Marlene posted this on her facebook page:

Andrew’s plane arrived at 1:30p.m. Thursday, November 9, 2023. He was met by an E.M.S. ambulance. We asked the driver to stop on the way out of the airport gate, so that we could welcome Andrew home. We told him that we love him.

The paramedic opened the ambulance door and Andrew was seated in the ambulance. He gave us each a wave and said hello. We can tell that he is still very ill. Andrew will be assessed at the Q.E.H. and admitted.

WELCOME HOME ANDREW WE LOVE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK!

Lloyd and I are thrilled to have Andrew home. We look forward to seeing him at the hospital later today. We realize this is the first step of Andrew’s recovery on P.E.I.

We are so thankful that God has granted our miracle!

Guest Post: Why Fuller Torrey’s Writings Continue to be What I Need

Susan Inman

Twenty-five years ago, I was worse than ignorant as I watched my younger daughter’s schizoaffective disorder emerge. My undergraduate (Swarthmore College) and graduate school education (UCLA) had left me dangerously misinformed about brain disorders like this. I had learned that labeling people who are just different was the problem and that insanity was a sane response to an insane world. Because this ignorance led us to look in the wrong places for help, we made choices that delayed the quick access to appropriate treatment that can lead to better outcomes.

When we eventually found our way to Fuller Torrey’s work (via the Menninger Clinic), I finally had a solid base from which to understand both my daughter’s illness and the wider social context in which it has continued to unfold.

This base has been and continues to be crucial in forming my ability to advocate around a variety of issues I think are important including in these two areas:

Need for Public Mental Illness Literacy

Canada, where I live, is like the US in lacking adequate public mental illness literacy campaigns. These campaigns could help families, schools, friends, people developing illnesses and the public in general have a better understanding of mental illnesses. This shared understanding can guide people with psychotic disorders to seek and maintain the treatment they need.

Instead, the focus is on fighting stigma. Unfortunately, these anti-stigma campaigns can actually make the situation worse. They often try to minimize or even normalize severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia if they even acknowledge them at all. Even if they admit that psychosis isn’t just another way of thinking, they never let the public begin to understand the various negative and cognitive symptoms that frequently persist in schizophrenia. These common symptoms are often significantly disabling even when psychotic symptoms are diminished through the use of antipsychotic medications. This lack of understanding of the severe impact of brain disorders like schizophrenia makes it much more difficult for families advocating for improvements to all kinds of services.

In the name of fighting stigma, many journalists and some in the public are too hesitant to acknowledge the undeniable relationship between untreated severe mental illnesses and violence. Fuller Torrey has been the leader in pointing out this relationship. Also, he connects the public’s exposure to this kind of disturbing behavior to the rise in stigma.

The recovery model, which has been widely adopted, is intended to inspire hope. However, it basically assumes that if people really want to get better, they can. This faulty assumption could be addressed through public education and this information might even influence the behavior of service providers who have too often been led to adopt this belief system. It’s easy to just blame people if they haven’t made much progress as they fall through the giants gaps in services that make up the mental health systems in both the US and Canada. And it’s hard for service providers to maintain the needed levels of compassion if they are targets, especially in hospitals, of abusive behavior. When staff are being trained to think that all people are ultimately capable of choice in their behaviors, it’s easy to promote early discharges of difficult patients who aren’t yet stabilized.

As well, the now over reliance on social determinants to explain all mental health problems contributes to a resurgence of family blaming when other common problems aren’t in evidence. This blame, which never disappeared, hurts people with severe mental illnesses; it discourages cooperation with the families that people with severe illnesses often need to rely on. Fuller Torrey’s work was the first place in which I found a researcher who firmly stated that parents don’t cause schizophrenia.

Improved basic mental illness literacy could help people understand their own illnesses. This is very important because there is a shortage of appropriate psycho-education for clients, especially in Canada. Previously existing programs in British Columbia have disappeared. At the same time, the messaging of the psychiatric survivor movement in the delivery of mental health services has dramatically increased. For example, one peer led, taxpayer funded study group linked to the rapidly expanding Hearing Voices Network in Vancouver focused on studying the ideas of people like Will Hall who encourages people to stop taking antipsychotic medications.

Appropriately trained peer workers can provide extremely valuable help in many ways to people with mental illnesses and to the broader efforts to improve services. The Treatment Advocacy Center’s extraordinary work in promoting Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs has been helped by people like Eric Smith.

However, the government funded organizations like SAMHSA in the US and the Mental Health Commission of Canada which have created standards for educating peers don’t require or even recommend any training on mental illnesses like schizophrenia. When these government agencies argue that they are listening to the peer community in creating these standards, they ignore the many people like my daughter and her friends with schizophrenia. People like them aren’t represented in the beliefs guiding powerful peer organizations. Neither are the beliefs and needs of the many high profile people, like Julie Fast, who lives with bipolar disorder and like Bethany Yeiser who lives with schizophrenia. These kinds of people aren’t included in the discourse and the advocacy agenda of the peer groups that fight to establish their own approaches to treatment. These approaches demean and misrepresent what the alternative movement dismisses as the “medical model.” Mainstream contemporary psychiatry, which clearly acknowledges the need for evidence–based psychosocial rehabilitation programs, produces the kind of research TAC helps publicize.

Need for Improved Legislation and

Services

One of the ways that I’ve tried to support my call for improved psychosocial rehabilitation programs and supported housing services has been to point out that 1% of the population has schizophrenia. Suddenly in 2017, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which had been my source for this claim, changed its messaging. The NIMH then promoted the idea that only 0.3% of the population has schizophrenia. One of the many important contributions of Fuller Torrey has been his well-informed and very public attack on NIMH’s drastic reduction in the number of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. I finally had a way to understand and explain to others NIMH’s shocking numbers when Fuller Torrey and Elizabeth Sinclair pointed out that:

Individuals who are hospitalized, in nursing homes, in jail or prison, or homeless are no longer included in the measure of prevalence, which NIMH claims to now be 0.3% (3 in 1,000 adults). This decreases the number of people estimated to have schizophrenia in the US from approximately 2.8 million to 750,000.

Fuller Torrey and TAC have also played a central role in my efforts to protect British Columbia’s Mental Health Act that is under a current legal attack. It was on the TAC website that I first saw the research on anosognosia and this is what I continually reference to educate others. I notice that the alternative movement persists in denying the existence of this condition, since wider understanding of it challenges their interpretation of what protecting human rights means.

It is very troubling to me that social justice/human rights/disability rights organizations are the groups that pose the greatest threat to the safety of people like my daughter. It is the Council for Canadians with Disabilities that are the plaintiffs in the attack on BC.’s mental health act.

In the US, especially in New York and California, there are finally strong, well-informed efforts to acknowledge the existence of people NIMH refused to count and to support them in getting the treatment and services they need. I see the impact of TAC in the success of these efforts. Although there are too many articles undermining these efforts, I also see brave efforts, like in this editorial in the Sacramento Bee, which are confronting the human rights and disability rights groups opposing this much-needed help. Journalists should be encouraged to examine these groups that have unjustifiably claimed the right to represent people whose existence they basically refuse to acknowledge.

It’s tragic in Canada that there are rising numbers of powerful efforts to deny access to the kinds of treatment people with schizophrenia often need. Increasingly, streets in Canadian cities and towns and our prisons are filled with untreated mentally ill people. We don’t have the kind of national voice that TAC provides. I can only hope that Canada can stop importing the most problematic approaches to responding to mental illnesses with which the US has experimented. With the new initiatives we see across the border, we can hopefully look to the US for guidance out of this socially constructed catastrophe.

Diagnosing Schizophrenia with AI

By Dr. David Laing Dawson

Marvin had me listen to a podcast about applying AI to the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

And it is true that AI, in conjunction with brain imaging, may help us shine a light in the black box that exists between human thinking, speech, behaviour and brain activity, between brain and mind.

But our problems helping people who suffer from schizophrenia are not really in the realm of diagnosis. And even if we had a more definitive way of making an early diagnosis of a particular type of schizophrenia those bigger problems remain.

And those problems lie in the realm of treatment, effective treatment without side effects, long term treatment, acceptance of the diagnosis, acceptance of the fact of having an illness, a mental illness, adequate resources, human resources and hospital beds and programs, compliance with treatment, public attitudes, and funding.

I doubt that an AI program, having been fed a recording of a patient’s conversation or speech pattern, and then announcing that this particular patient’s speech pattern shows a 76% likelihood of having schizophrenia, subtype 4, will do very much to alleviate the problems listed in the previous paragraph.

In the late 1970’s I saw a 13 year old girl with her parents. After a couple of meetings I referred this child to a colleague to help me with the diagnosis. He sent me an informal response after seeing her. It read: “David, this girl has schizophrenia. You know she has schizophrenia. You just don’t want to believe she has schizophrenia.”

About 1990 I was asked to intervene when a young male patient insisted on barging onto a different ward in the psychiatric hospital to see his sister. The young man had schizophrenia. The nurses assumed his delusions included having a non-existent sister. I intervened, and found he did have a sister on the ward: the 13 year old girl I had seen years before, now 27 years old and once again psychotic, and mentally and physically showing the ravages of time and chronic illness.

We don’t really need AI to help with diagnosis. But we could be spending money, both research and health care money, in other ways that would provide a better outcome for people who do suffer from schizophrenia.