The horrific car-ramming that killed attendees at the Lapu Lapu Day Festival on April 26 was Vancouver’s baptism by fire into a club into which no city seeks membership. This urban gem of “Beautiful British Columbia,” where one can ski down a mountain, sail in the ocean, cycle along rolling hills and relax on a beach on the same day, now also is home to a mass killing event. Life for Vancouverites will never feel as rosy again – nor should it.
As a Vancouver resident and mental health outreach worker who hails from the United States – where such events have become far too commonplace – I can only hope that this massacre will serve as a wake-up call to the province for the need for more mental health beds in the region. Specifically, I pray that this event will lead to the political will to reopen a reformed Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, which never should have been allowed to close in the first place.
While the exact circumstances of what led the individual charged with committing this murderous act remain under investigation, it is established that he had been a client in the Vancouver mental health system. The current broken state of that system is at least in part the result of the fate of the closing of Riverview, which was the only dedicated psychiatric hospital serving the Greater Vancouver area.
Riverview was understood to be rife with abuses. I experienced something similar while serving as a chaplain resident at Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital from 2012 to 2013, when it was undergoing a years-long settlement agreement with the US government for mistreatment of patients. Instead of following St. Elizabeth’s successful model of investing in the reformation of a century-old institution, elected officials here chose to capitalize financially and politically on Riverview’s deservedly nefarious reputation. They drew upon the understandable outcry over the violations – as well as the contemporary trend toward deinstitutionalization – to justify closing the hospital altogether in 2012. These excuses offered ample cover for what was at the heart of their motivation to close Riverview: saving taxpayer dollars to become endeared with the voting public.
In the 13 years since that decision, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has effectively replaced Riverview as an open-air psychiatric hospital. Rather than living in a protected environment, individuals in the greatest need of mental health support are forced to try to survive amid a fentanyl-laced, drug-laden dystopian metropolis. Members of this extremely vulnerable population succumb every day on the streets and in their homes to fatal overdoses of drugs to which their illnesses make them abundantly susceptible. This is an abomination that cannot stand in a civilized nation the likes of which Canada professes to be. Indeed, British Columbia now is the only Canadian province without an exclusive psychiatric hospital. For a province whose largest city – Vancouver – is a hotbed for the suffering and preventable deaths of human beings living with the dual-diagnosis of mental illness and addiction, this is simply inexcusable.
As Riverview prepared to close, community mental health outreach programs opened, partly in the hope of meeting the needs of clients discharging from that moribund institution. Among those initiatives were new, innovative mental health outreach teams, such as the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams on which I serve as a spiritual health practitioner. Despite the best efforts of dedicated professionals alongside whom I am privileged to work on these teams, Vancouver’s “capital” punishment of its mentally ill persists. As I write these words, I have learned that another young client of ours has perished, the latest victim of a broken system plagued by chronically lacking mental health housing and hospital beds – someone whose life might well have been saved by Riverview.
The rebuilding of Riverview hospital will not guarantee that Vancouver will be spared from another horror the likes of the Lapu Lapu Day attack. It will, however, provide some peace of mind to those of us who work in Vancouver’s mental health system every day that our society is taking every reasonable action to buoy the system intended to help support those who are at heightened risk of endangering themselves or others.
As part of my duties for the ACT teams, I run a weekly spirituality group at the Gathering Place on Seymour and Helmcken streets for clients and staff. Each week, I guide attendees through images, poetry and live music as we explore a universal theme. This week, I was prepared to explore the concept of “springtime,” playing such songs as “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf. Like Vancouver’s rose-coloured veneer in cherry blossom season, that plan, too, was shattered by the Lapu Lapu massacre. Instead, we will be making space for individual and collective mourning for the members of the Filipino community, as well as our fellow client who just passed today, by offering a rendition of “A Tree of Life.” This song by Idina Menzel and Kate Diaz commemorating the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Oct. 27, 2018, will now be used to help make space for the profound need for grief support across Vancouver.
How many more deaths will it take before we break through the mirage of the rosy-coloured hues of British Columbia’s rainforest paradise? Rather, may we grow our own “Tree of Life” here in the form of a new and improved psychiatric hospital on the Riverview grounds. Former Riverview vice -president and assistant administrator Dr. John Higenbottam adroitly mapped out exactly how to achieve this more than a decade ago in his proposal entitled “Into the Future: The Coquitlam Health Campus – A Vision for the Riverview Lands.” (See rhcs.org/media/Into_the_Future_-_the_Coquitlam_Health_Campus.pdf.)
It is high time his advice was heeded.
Cantor Michael Zoosman is a certified spiritual care practitioner with the Canadian Association for Spiritual Care and received his cantorial ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 2008. He sits as an advisory committee member at Death Penalty Action and is co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty. Zoosman is a former Jewish prison chaplain and psychiatric hospital chaplain. Currently, he serves as a spiritual health practitioner (chaplain) for mental health outreach teams, working with individuals in the community living with severe mental health disorders and addiction. He lives with his family in Vancouver. His opinions are his own.