You've hit me right where I was hoping you might.
There's something that many of you may be familiar with—the physician at the end probably is—and that's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow was a social worker who identified what people need to live and to be happy and healthy. He set it up as a pyramid. The things we need the most are on the bottom. They're the basic foundation. The things we need the least are on the top. At the bottom two or three—I'm trying to picture it in my mind right now—are safety and security. If you don't feel safe and secure, you cannot be mentally well.
So you're right about the poverty. Unless we address poverty, people are just going to get sicker and sicker. As long as we live in poverty, that fights against mental health: it makes us ill. You're right that we need to address poverty and that we need to address housing issues.
One of the problems in housing issues for people with mental health issues, though, is that sometimes our symptoms are not very pleasant. Sometimes people are having a lot of symptoms, either of their illness or of their medications, and they might not be really good neighbours. We struggle with those issues all the time.
We need to address poverty to begin with, and you can't address poverty if you're...especially with the episodic things. I heard mention of episodic disabilities earlier. We call it “episodic employment”, because that's all you get. I just finished a contract. I worked 18 hours over 14 weeks. That was a contract I got—a paying contract. How can you live on that?
As well, you're constantly having to fight with your income security program, because if you made 3¢, they want to know about it. I don't know what it is in other programs in other provinces, but in Ontario, with ODSP, at any given time they reserve the right to call you up and say, “Be here tomorrow, and bring your paperwork. We want to look at it.”
That would put me in the hospital.
