Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for York West.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this important subject. I want to acknowledge the work of my leader, the member for Toronto Centre, who literally has changed the channel here today. I would say that he has changed the channel for the better.
Interestingly, since the motion was introduced this morning, I have had three very intense conversations with random people about this very subject. One occurred at lunch today with a pastor friend of mine who has officiated at the funeral services for 13 people who committed suicide over the course of his pastoral career. He was first on the scene for two people as he cut them down from their hanging. He said that he cleaned up blood on the floor and counselled people two hours prior to their committing suicide. He lives with that each and every day. It affects his ministry. Of course it affects all of the families that are touched by suicide. In some respects, it just never goes away.
Today I am going to take the opportunity to talk about the mental illness aspect of suicide. I do not think there is a person in the chamber who has not been affected either directly or indirectly by someone in their family or close to their family who has a mental illness. My family is no exception.
We have walked alongside our son for the last 12 years as he has battled schizophrenia. He has battled suicide attempts. He has battled addictions. We have pretty well visited every mental health facility in the eastern region of the greater Toronto area. We have been to emergency facilities. We have been to flophouses. We have been to hospitals. We have been to emergency rooms. Dozens of incidents have resulted in heartache for our family, anger, frustration, embarrassment, all resulting from Nathan's illness.
This is personal for us. We are a well-resourced middle-class family. We have access to some pretty good resources. In fact, Nathan's stepmother is a physician. But our family experience in some respects is no different from literally thousands of other Canadian families who are left to cope with this illness. Frankly, were it not for the tireless efforts of my wife in particular but clearly other members of the family, Nathan would be dead. He would be under some bridge or in some flophouse.
Mental illness is like no other illness. It literally robs an individual of his or her life while the individual is still breathing. It is an alienating and isolating illness. It removes the individual from family support. The individual cannot sustain work. The individual simply cannot sustain relationships.
Part of our incomplete response, and it is a very incomplete response, to those who have mental illness had to do with the deinstitutionalization that went on in the 1980s or 1990s. When this occurred a lot of people were put on the street and many of them were simply not capable of handling the street. Not all people on the street have a mental illness, but it is a difficult place to be when the person is fighting mental illness. Life is a lot more complicated than simply being on the street and having a mental illness and thinking about suicide. If it were that simple we could understand it.
I walk to work every day along Metcalfe Street and there are my regulars whom I talk to from time to time. They all at one point had lives. There is a guy outside the Starbucks at Metcalfe and Slater and I wonder what his life was like prior to begging for money.
Our experience has been with psychotic breaks. Nathan was enrolled in a post-secondary institution when he had his first psychotic break, although he may well have had previous ones that we simply did not recognize. When he was 19 he started to hear voices. Sometimes the voices told him to do things that obviously were not things that could be done. Sometimes it involved harm to himself. We have gone through the experience of arriving home and finding him unconscious, but so far, touch wood, those voices have not told him to do harm to others.
Nevertheless, he freaks out some people, particularly his female siblings. and causes all kinds of consternation for those who care for him the most. Probably he is more dangerous to himself than he is to others, but he causes a lot of turmoil for his caregivers. As I say, we are a well-resourced family and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for single mothers or other people who are not as well resourced.
I will try to avoid wearing my partisan hat, but I must admit that I have a tough time with the tough on crime agenda while l am standing for three hours in an emergency line trying to get help. It does not work for me. Yet that is the point at which Nathan is most likely to commit some criminal act. Talking about minimum mandatories to him at that stage does not mean a thing. We deal with the social services that are available to us in our community. These are the secular saints of our community, but all the time they are just scraping for resources. It is just really difficult.
Again, we live in the largest city in Canada. It is not as if there is no money, but the resources are very difficult to access. His mother acts like his advocate because he cannot or will not, and harasses people, intimidates people, yells and screams at people, reasons with people and just continually gnaws at all of the resources that need to be made available, whether it is housing, psychiatric visits, or whatever. If his mother did not do that, I dare say that we might be dealing with a suicide in our family.
This is an extraordinarily difficult issue for us, but as one of the previous speakers said, if we do not start talking about it, nothing will change. I do not think we can carry on in a civilized society like Canada and expect that if we do not get hold of this issue, things will change. Things will not change unless there is a will.
We have heard a lot of statistics in this chamber. I hope Nathan will not become a statistic. He will never be a statistic to us, but there is that possibility.
