PPAO in the Media
Fall, 2003
Inside Health - Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care
PPAO celebrates 20 years of protecting rights
Ontario was the first province to provide advocacy and rights protection
services for people with a mental illness, but more needs to be done,
especially for our Aboriginal population in remote, Northern Ontario
communities.
This was the central message that dominated speeches and discussions at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office (PPAO), the first such agency in Canada. Speakers at the event, which attracted an overflowing room of community service providers, survivors, advocacy groups, former PPAO Directors, PPAO staff and clients, were Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman; Deputy Minister Phil Hassen; Ted Ball, former Chief of Staff to Larry Grossman; Clare Lewis, Ontario Ombudsman; and Theresa Claxton, Chair of the Ontario Association of Patients' Councils.
"I salute you and your team," said Deputy Minister Hassen to PPAO Director Vahe Kehyayan, in his opening remarks. "You have empowered your clients. You add a qualified voice to helping raise public consciousness about mental illness."
To celebrate the anniversary, the PPAO released a special report entitled Mental Health and Patients' Rights in Ontario: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. The report, with a forward from Lieutenant-Governor Bartleman, includes 56 articles on issues related to mental health and patients' rights from the perspectives of consumers, families, service providers, police, justice and advocacy organizations.
The Deputy has directed ministry staff to establish a task force to lead discussions on a model for advocacy and rights protection for Ontario. He said the PPAO and other stakeholders, including consumer/survivor groups, will play a key role in this process.
PPAO Patient Advocates work with clients to address concerns about their care, treatment, civil or legal rights. Rights Advisers inform persons of their rights and options when their legal status under the Mental Health Act (MHA) has changed. For example, they are entitled to rights advice when their status changes from a voluntary to an involuntary patient.
In a graphic, moving address, the Lieutenant-Governor recounted his own personal experience with post-traumatic depression after being violently attacked and left for dead in South Africa in the late 1990s. The incident brought to the surface many bad memories from his past when he experienced racism first-hand in the Muskoka area, as the son of an Aboriginal woman and a white man.
His mother suffered from deep depression and only received help with the advent of antidepressant drugs about 20 years ago. She went through "a living hell" every day before the introduction of these new drugs, he said. The Lieutenant-Governor himself recovered through the help of an antidepressant and the therapy of writing a memoir of his boyhood and youth, Out of Muskoka. Proceeds from the book, which describe his own descent into depression and the steps he took to pull himself out of it, will benefit the Aboriginal Achievement Foundation.
The Lieutenant-Governor has made it a priority to try and remove or reduce the stigma of mental illness in Ontario. Aboriginal suicide rates are proportionately much higher than those experienced in the rest of our society, especially among the young, he said.
This situation must be addressed, stated the Lieutenant-Governor.
Vahe agreed, "Although there has been significant progress with respect to patients' rights in Ontario over the past two decades, there is still a long way to go until the mental health system becomes truly client-centred and society fully accepts persons living with mental illness as responsible and contributing citizens."
