Riverview: you mean it's for mental health?

Riverview Lands revisioning to include new mental health buildings

Three programs will be relocated to two new buildings under a revisioning plan for the lands

CBC News Posted: Dec 17, 2015 2:26 PM PT Last Updated: Dec 17, 2015 2:26 PM PT

Fraser Health currently operates three mental health facilities on the Riverview Lands. (CBC)

Related Stories

Riverview Hospital: Dr. Gulzar Cheema applauds new program
Riverview Hospital to get 40 new beds for addiction rehabilitation
Riverview Hospital: a brief history
Future of Riverview Hospital determined in open houses


The B.C. government says it plans to build two new buildings on the Riverview Lands in Coquitlam and relocate three mental health programs to the site, as part of its redevelopment.

The new facilities are part of a master plan released Thursday morning by B.C. Housing that will eventually include new market and social housing on the site.

Entitled A Vision for Renewing Riverview Lands, the report is the first step in developing a master development plan that will include a healthcare district as well as market and supportive housing.

The overall aim of the project is to redevelop the site on a break-even model, meaning that the construction or renovation of new healthcare facilities would be funded by commercial development of the land, mostly for housing.

The commitment includes spending approximately $175 million to build a 105-bed mental health facility to replace the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction, and a second new building to house the 28-bed Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre and the 10-bed Provincial Assessment Centre.

The Kwikwetlen First Nation has maintained its aboriginal right and title to the land. In a statement, the band said it expects to see significant market development of the land, including for market housing and it objected to any continued use or expansion of healthcare facilities without its prior consent.
100 years of mental health care

The Riverview Lands have been the site of B.C.'s primary mental health facilities for about 100 years when the Colony Farm was established.

But in the 1980s, the Social Credit government came up with a plan to close Riverview and attempt to integrate mental health patients back into communities.





Riverview Hospital was downsized over the course of a decade in favour of locating mental health services in the community, a strategy that met with mixed success. (coqutlam.ca)

While that plan met with mixed success, over the next few decades the hospital wards were shutdown and now the site has been sitting mostly empty — except for three small mental health facilitiesoperated by Fraser Health.

About 75 buildings remain on the site, but many are not longer in use and would require extensive renovations to put back into use.
Riverview Hospital: a brief history

Riverview is listed in the top ten of Canada's most endangered heritage sites by the Heritage Canada Foundation.

As a result in 2013 the government, in order to involve the stakeholders in developing a long-term plan, launched the revisioning process for the 100-hectare site, which includes extensive forests and 1,800 mature trees.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. This is just the most bizarre thing. Riverview originally began as an old-fashioned mental hospital, the type with shackles and shock and cold water, then when psychiatry became more "enlightened" it basically dumped everyone out on the street and said, "Go!" These patients were supposed to be sustained by "resources in the community" which turned out to be non-existent. The result was an epidemic of homelessness and drug dependency.

On the plus side, the Riverview grounds became a lucrative site for the filming of horror movies and made quite a name for itself, no doubt reinforcing a few stereotypes along the way. These plans to turn Riverview BACK into a mental health facility make me either want to laugh, or cry, or both. Nor is there any admission of wrongdoing - in fact, the tone of this article is quite self-congratulatory. The most they will admit to is "mixed success" with their patient-dumping scheme, when everyone in the health care field (who has the guts to be honest) calls it an unmitigated disaster. But no: the article has the tone of "look at this wonderful thing we're doing for the mental health care community!" But I'm afraid the new buildings won't be quite creepy enough to film another Stephen King movie.

I do remember the sign that was posted outside the gloomy old grounds, Riverview's "Mission Statement": "Transforming mental illness into mental wellness." Crap. I say crap because this is the kind of assumption that actually hurts psychiatric patients. It's an assumption that everyone can be "normalized", that everyone is fully employable and capable of a productive, happy life on society's restrictive, narrow, judgemental terms. Not many schizophrenics ever reach that goal, and for a person with  bipolar disorder it's hit-or-miss.

So is this a step forward? Step in the right direction? It was not long ago there was talk that the historic Riverview grounds which everyone babbles so proudly about was going to be sold to developers for yet another mass of condos. But it didn't happen, maybe because of all those Stephen King movies, or the thought that (shudder) "mental patients" had once walked these grounds in the dead of the night.

In case you doubt me, I've written more than once about mental patient Halloween costumes complete with straitjackets, giant syringes and Hannibal Lector-style face masks. "Danger! Escaped mental patient!" is a common front-yard sign to celebrate this festive occasion. Pretty funny stuff, so long as people only have to play at it.

I watched my brother disappear into a twilight world in the 1970s, and we never really saw him again, or saw him whole. Bouts in the Clarke Institute in Toronto seemed to do more harm than good. Finally, my brilliant, charming, charismatic brother died in a fire, the result of having to squat  in an old building because he wasn't able to support himself, though he was a very gifted musician who played in professional orchestras when he was well enough.

But he wasn't well enough, most of the time. He wasn't fully employable, and he lived hand-to-mouth, sheltered in Buddhist and Sikh temples by the only people who ever showed him any compassion. He wasn't well enough because schizophrenia is a chronic illness that can be managed but not cured, and he had little or no resources to manage it.

I lost him in  1980, the year John Lennon died. I now see that the psychiatric "community", as it is euphemistically known, did him far more harm than good. They labelled him "a schizophrenic", and because identity was a difficult thing for him, he took the label on and lived within it while we all helplessly watched.

So for this, and countless other reasons, I continue to write about this subject. If you think mental illness isn't stigmatized, try having it for ONE day.  You'll either feel it from the outside, or the inside. You'll wince at straitjacket costumes and horror movies filmed on grounds that once tried to do some good, with actors in mental patient costumes running around with bloody axes.

I wonder, sometimes, if it's ever going to be any different. If I hear about this subject at all, four words are always blasted at me: REACH OUT FOR HELP.  What help - where? Do people think you can just walk into the hospital and say, "Help me"? You can't check yourself in, folks. Even your doctor can't check you in. No one can, because there are never any beds. After a four or five-hour wait, they'll likely send you home with a prescription. Kind of a waste of energy, don't you think?

The "reach out for help" mantra dumps responsibility for illness and recovery back in the patient's lap at a time when he or she can barely function. Friends and family members get burned out and often don't want yet another (complaining?) phone call in the middle of the night. Nobody thinks about that, do they? So where IS the help, if there is any?

But never mind, there is a certain agency that takes care of the overflow. I don't think I need to tell you what that is.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Where have all the survivors gone?

I

seem to be in some sort of book-excavation phase. Books from my past, books which had a strong effect on me one way or another, will pop back into my mind, and because this is the age of the Internet, I can easily buy them used on Amazon for maybe one cent. The rest is shipping and handling.

These include Pathfinders, Gone With the Wind, A Brilliant Madness, Bitter Fame, and others, except I can't remember them 'coz I haven't had my coffee yet.

It's surprising how much these books have changed. Formerly brilliant and impressive works have turned to dust, while others, mysteriously, hold up. My perception of Pathfinders by Gail Sheehy was colored by the fact that, after selling a gazillion copies of her books, she was touched by scandal: she was caught distorting facts, making the data fit the thesis, mainly through creating composites (a little of this person, a little of that person, all shaken and stirred together to create the perfect "character": except that this was supposed to be non-fiction!).

The one I just received from Amazon seems to have turned into a foreign body in the 25 years or so since I took it out of the library. It's a prolonged anti-psychiatric rant called Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears: A Personal Triumph over Psychiatry by Janet and Paul Gotkin.

Janet Gotkin was an unfortunate young woman whose chronic misery and instability dragged her into the labyrinth of the American psychiatric system in the 1970s, where she was institutionalized in a state hospital dredged from Ken Kesey's worst nightmare. She was given dozens and dozens of rounds of shock treatment, numerous mind-slugging drugs, and subjected to useless psychoanalysis by patronizing/patriarchal psychiatrists.

Yes, I believe all this. I can even tolerate, sort-of, the melodramatic and novelesque treatment. Opening the book at random, I find this little bit of conversation:

"Dr. Sternfeld was very busy; the trip from his office took over an hour. He called almost every day, though, the nurses told me.

"You're very lucky to have a doctor who cares so much about you," they said.

I nodded, as the lurching of anger and abandonment ballooned inside me."

This book ends in the most unlikely way: after yet another suicide attempt through swallowing pills, Janet wakes up from a coma, and her mental illness has vanished: "When I woke up from the coma, I was truly happy to find myself still alive. I felt like a person who was rising from her death bed. You can't imagine how beautiful everything looks to me. The smallest, simplest things, Even the noise and dirt of this city."

So, is a near-fatal overdose "the answer", or was Janet Gotkin truly a phoenix mysteriously rising from her own ashes and transcending the horror of years of mistreatment? It puzzles me. No one beats schizophrenia overnight, if she was schizophrenic to begin with. The book went beyond fiction: it was a movie script, with the fragile, pain-ridden heroine sitting up on her death-bed and triumphing at the end while the music swells.

OK, this is a very long and roundabout way to get to my thesis. There was an epilogue added to this "new" edition, and I was jolted, but not surprised, to find that it was an update by Janet Gotkin.

Apparently, she had never had another episode of mental illness: but, in the interim, she had made the gruesome discovery that she was an incest survivor.

In her typical purple prose, she describes the torrential return of long-repressed memory: "The memories come, and continue to come, curtains of secrecy ripped aside, decades of blindness swept away. With each new memory, with each moment in time brought an agonizing consciousness, I find myself nodding in appalled recognition. "Yes, that is how it was," I say, as tears stream across my cheeks."

I'm not saying Janet Gotkin is lying about all this. She seems to believe she has found the Rosetta stone for decoding her decades of pain through the miracle of recovered memory.

There's only one fly in the ointment. All this was written in 1991.

Ah, the early '90s, when incest memories were front-page news, when Ellen Bass and Laura Davis made millions with their incest Bible, The Courage to Heal, when scatty-looking women went on Phil Donahue to talk about "alters" and demonic cults.

From women's magazines plastered with sensational articles about sadistic Dads, Satanic ritual and multiple personality disorder, which supposedly ran rife, we now have exactly nothing. No one is writing a thing about it. Maybe that's because there were lawsuits, and a formidable juggernaut called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (suspiciously, headed up by a couple whose daughter had "falsely" accused her father of incest. The daughter, a psychologist by trade, wrote a scathing book debunking the entire false memory movement.)

Personally, I think the false memory brigade with its complete refutation of the incest canon did a lot to push this issue back into the closet. Sexual abuse, when we refer to it at all, is something that happened to altar boys 40 years ago in the Catholic church. The sanctity of the nuclear family has more or less been restored.

It's called "recanting", and an awful lot of women must have done it. As with Janet Gotkin, the whole thing looks mighty murky to me.

I've been reviewing books for 25 years, and I think I know when facts are being manipulated (see Sheehy, above). The Gotkins don't just create sympathy for poor Janet, they paint her as a sort of latter-day Joan of Arc, sacrificed on the altar of heartless and dehumanizing psychiatry. To muddy the waters even further, she sometimes begs for a form of treatment which she frankly believes is barbaric:

"I want shock treatments," she said.

"Shock treatments?"

"I've been thinking about it. I don't want to go through all those years of torture and agony again. If shock treatments can lift me out of this episode of anxiety, then. . . "

Oh brother.

But in spite of her bizarre complicity in all this torture, the author seems to need to come up with an explanation, however delayed, as to why she got so sick in the first place. In 1991, the most prevalent explanation for everything that went wrong with women was incest. From a murmuring, it gradually escalated into a monumental scream: j'accuse!

Predictably, this didn't go down so well with families. It was civil war in most cases, with lawsuits ripping the fabric apart, and survivors mostly losing. This was because it was nearly impossible to verify memories, and in most cases there was no evidence that would hold up in court. Many survivors had their victories overturned, and Daddy was let out, grinning and glad-handing, proving to the world that he "would never" do such a thing to his daughter or anyone else.

But it happened, this toxic flood. I was there, I saw it. Women with vivid imaginations, Gotkin types, were most susceptible. In her case, she already saw herself as a sacrificial lamb, nearly losing her life that others might live. So the same thing must have happened to her that nearly destroyed millions of others.

OK, then: explain this to me. Where have all the survivors gone? Why are there no more memoirs of abuse, no more articles about dark memories flooding back, or multiple personality, or Satanic ritual abuse? What the hell happened?

Maybe everyone got sick of it, sick of the impossibility of proving it in court, and decided to just pick up their lives again. I don't know. But it's interesting to me that Gotkin was one of the incest crowd. I know I sound cynical; I know I sound like I don't believe all these women (and shouldn't we always believe women, especially women wounded by the system?).

But the truth is infinitely more complicated than that. It isn't a matter of a clean polarity, of either "yes to all memories" or "no to all memories". The truth is, when it comes to the veracity of what we call recovered memory, nobody really knows.

How did I arrive at this huge and perhaps unresolvable psychological question mark? I too was one of the incest crowd, utterly convinced that I had been horribly abused by my father. I had all sorts of therapeutic support and sympathy as I moved through the excruciating ordeal of recovering traumatic memories. The main result was that my family of origin never spoke to me again.

I was never hypnotized or coerced, as some women were (some of whom sued their therapists after the fact). But like most writers, I have exceptionally long emotional antennae, and I will pick up whatever vibe is dominant at the time. This will inevitably set me vibrating like a tuning fork.

So what happened to me? I don't know. It must've been something, something awfully big. But I am convinced a lot of those specific memories were either distorted or unintentionally/unconsciously constructed by a mind desperate to make sense of a baffling, unbearable pain. Add to that the powerful template of what looked like a giant social movement, gruesome women's stories coming at me from every direction, and, well. . .

It took a long time, but eventually I got past it all and took up my life again. It hadn't been a particularly enlightening experience. I could have done without it. And the cost had been astronomical, like losing an arm. Being completely ostracized from one's family, forever, is not a pleasant experience. There is no going back. Even if I threw myself on the ground before them, which I will never do, I would always be seen as the "bad guy", the one who did irreparable damage to the family by accusing a completely innocent man of a heinous crime.

It was ugly. So ugly it nearly did me in.

"I still hurt a lot, but I know that I am healing, from the inside out, slowly but cleanly, wounds open to the light instead of festering in darkness," Gotkin writes in a style that is both eloquent and distressingly purple. What played well in the early '90s is wince-inducing 20 years on. But I remember that myth, promulgated in nearly every incest book I ever read: all this horror and pain would inevitably lead us to "healing", "wholeness", and a renewed joy in life. This would be great if it ever really happened, but I never once saw an example. Most of the survivors I knew were obsessed with their "issues" and never resolved them. They retreated into a sort of emotional twilight before disappearing altogether. The "healing" we had all sought with such desperation was as theoretical and as impossible to prove as the dusty, woman-hating theories of Sigmund Freud.

I wonder where Gotkin is now. Sometimes I wonder if she has had a relapse. When she speaks of the agony of recovering her memories, it makes your scalp crawl:

"I wanted to be crazy, to be sick, to be dead. I wanted to cut my wrists, take pills, jump off a dam, lie down on the railroad tracks as the train pulled out of Grand Central Station. Anything to blot out this knowledge. 'How could this be?' I asked myself, over and over, an incantation against evil."

Gotkin is a little vague about who in her family actually abused her, but one wonders what the fallout was. Published in a memoir as "fact", these are immensely powerful allegations, and they aren't backed up by anything solid. Back then, memories were enough: for a while. Then the whole thing went haywire. It sputtered, spun around a few times, and disappeared.

The anti-psychiatry movement has been around for a long time, and it would have us believe that there are no good psychiatrists, no good drugs, no good therapy at all. In truth, I believe that human beings grope around, sometimes (though not always) with good intention, to try to help people whose brains have sprung like a tightly-wound coil. I can't believe all psychiatrists are sadists or patriarchal misogynists. Some of them are women, for God's sake (though my own experience tells me that female psychiatrists can be the worst oppressors of all).

The truth is, we don't understand mental illness very well because the brain is an exceedingly complex organ, an organ which must try to understand itself. We use our brain to understand our brain. Luckily our spleens don't have to do that. Genetics, environment, personality, family history, and (yes!) abuse all play vital roles in how a person's brain develops.

OK, here's the theory of the day. (It's my blog, and I'll theorize if I want to.) I think some people are born with a vulnerability for mental illness entwisted into their DNA, but if they are nurtured in a home which is loving and supportive, they may just escape the horror and turn into artists or opera singers or Steven Spielberg. But here's the problem. If you're born with a genetic predisposition, it's likely that those around you (especially your parents) also have this predisposition, which may be manifested in its full-blown form. So how do they know how to love and nurture an unusually sensitive, emotionally vulnerable child? Will they have the psychological supplies, when their illness already takes up so much space that it's more like a space-and-a-half?

Mental illness is so hated, dreaded, and abhorred in this culture that it spawns considerable self-hatred in those who endure it. This doesn't help in treatment, because it leads to some pretty powerful self-defeating behaviour. Often, addictions and other compulsive behaviours get tangled into the mix, making recovery difficult, if not impossible. I'm not blaming the victim here, just stating something that somehow never gets stated. Like Janet begging for shock treatments, a person with mental illness can be her own worst enemy. To get better, significantly better, you simply have to get on your own side.

I am tired now. This post is probably not very well-organized, but it's not an essay, just some thoughts, thoughts deeply distilled over many, many years. This is a monster topic for me, because it affected me so dramatically 20 years ago. Where are all the women who told their hair-raising stories in The Courage to Heal? Whither the survivors? What are their lives like today?

I can't say. I can only put one foot in front of the other.