I would throw the number 60% out, and much like the chap you're talking about in Halifax, I would say it's much higher.
We see the results of the children who didn't get the mental health help, and who perhaps have never been diagnosed or who have multiple mental illnesses at the same time and then addictions on top. We see the mixture of all that, but we have also seen directly some of the younger people. When I say younger, I mean as young as 16. We'll take 16-year-olds into our shelters. I'm very unhappy when someone who's 16 shows up at either of our shelters, and I get directly involved before they can come in. We do everything to keep them out, but we have them at 16 to 18 years old. Everybody's given up on them.
Some of it starts in the school system. There are opportunities, I believe, to identify and provide those services through the school system, through the medical system, to start to diagnose and work with the children at that young age. I'll give you one example.
We had a young man who was 20 years old. He was with us a few months last year. His mother had taken him out of the school in the Fredericton area when he was eight years old. He was in grade three. The school found him unmanageable, so she took him home to home-school him, and she home-schooled him up to 16.
There were no medical interventions. Her husband refused to admit that there was any real problem and had challenges there. Nobody followed up. I had many conversations with the mother and father in this case. He's back home at the moment, getting some help, but once she took him out of the school, I was told, there were no other approaches. She said, “I'm going to home-school him because that makes it easier for everyone.” They weren't getting the calls from the school to have to try to deal with the problems, all the difficulties he was in, and he was just abandoned.
I think an awful lot of children, one way or another, who aren't receiving the treatment, are effectively abandoned, either to go home like that, or, if they stay within the system, they're just manoeuvred and shoved through, and given a little assistance here and there, as teachers say “let's move them and get them out of my classroom” to the next one to the next one.
It's a sad commentary, but it's an observation based on the experience that we've seen.