Thank you.
I'm the manager for Community Mental Health and Addictions for Yellowknife Health and Social Services. Community Mental Health and Addictions is made up of family counselling. Family counselling provides individual work to men and women as well as couples therapy. We do the mental health work for children for Yellowknife Health and Social Services, so 30% of our referrals are from child and family services for work with children. And the children they're referring to us are the children who, for the most part, have been victims of family violence.
The other issues that might show up could be grief, sexual abuse, at-risk behaviours, or not attending school. Those might be the primary factors that are identified, but family violence is most often behind them.
Reasons adults are referred include depression, stress, individual partners in relationships seeking support, grief, separation and divorce, and addictions. If we look behind those, most often there is the issue of family violence.
In the last three months alone, according to our intake person, who does same-day appointments--we've provided two same-day appointments daily, so someone can call in the morning if they're in crisis and get an appointment--she's seen 19 aboriginal women living with family violence, and another ten aboriginal women have made it on to our wait list. That's just in the last three months.
I've been here only a year, so Yellowknife is very new to me, and I can speak only about Yellowknife. We have two communities, Lutsel K'e and Fort Res, which I've become familiar with. But when I have looked at our caseload for the year I've been here, at any point I could have pulled five or six men out of that caseload. If we had a group to support these men who have had issues of violence, that would be great. I know we're working with the justice people. I know there's a partnership to get this kind of a group going, but to me it's one of the significant missing links. So we really need to be supporting the men who have the issues of violence if we're going to make a difference to the family.
The second piece I have noticed missing—I've worked on task forces concerned with family violence since 1989—is the education groups. I know they were spoken about, but we don't have one in Yellowknife. If we don't have one in Yellowknife, we probably don't have one in the rest of the Northwest Territories. They're called survivor groups, and they're usually run by transition houses. So the women would maybe do some individual work with a counsellor, and then we'd refer them to this group program through transition services. They'd go through this education program, and then maybe they'd come back and do individual work. We don't have that kind of a group, and our shelters don't have the funding support or the staff support to run that kind of a program. We do individual work with these women, but I'd love to see a group program started. That doesn't mean that family counselling can't do it--we're looking at it--but it's tough to do everything.
We have a family violence protocol group, and we're working on a common tool, the ODARA tool, Ontario domestic assault risk assessment tool, which is wonderful. We are training across the Northwest Territories on how to use the tool. Having a common screening tool is very important, and I think we're doing great work on that.
Family counselling uses a screening tool for couples, so we have many. For one thing, we're still funded to do couple work, and there isn't that kind of funding anywhere else in the country. So that is a real blessing. We certainly need it here because of the family issues that we address. So we are still funded to do couple work, and we have a screening tool. With that screening tool, most of the couples are initially screened out for violence. It would be really nice to be able to do the education with the male partner around the violence issues, but so far we haven't been able to put that group together. And we need the training to put that group together. For me, those are big pieces that are missing.
Primary care is another project that Community Mental Health and Addictions is involved in. We've moved into this primary care clinic downtown, and we've moved family counselling in. That means that our physicians can refer clients coming in to see them to family counselling quite easily. We build the connections.
We did this exercise yesterday as a team where we were clients, and we all had of these case situations. We had to go around to housing, in one part of the YPCC, and income support somewhere else, and mental health somewhere else. I had 22 steps I had to take as a client to try to get what I needed, and in the end my children were taken away from me.
You know, we're trying to do primary care, and we're really trying to help, but if we look at the client.... It's so cold out there, and there's no transportation. Housing in Yellowknife is very expensive. Employment is really tough to come by. I felt dizzy, absolutely dizzy, with those 22 steps, trying to get to all of the places I had to get to. In the end, I'd done everything I should have done--I'd gone for addiction help, I'd gone to mental health and income support, I'd talked to child and family, the whole deal--and still my kids were taken away.
So we've got lots to do.