A painful reminder
Posted Nov 15, 2010 03:56:06 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Kitchener mother is reliving her own nightmare as an inquest into the death of Ashley Smith is expanded.
Ontario’s coroner’s office said Friday the inquest would be broadened to include any factors that may have affected Smith’s mind on the day she died, with no restrictions on age, geography or date.
Smith’s death at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women was recently ruled accidental, contrary to earlier reports she had committed suicide.
The 19-year old’s death has brought back a flood of painful memories for Karyn Graham, whose son Trevor was shot by police during a robbery at a Kitchener drug store in the fall of 2007. The 26-year old also had a history of mental illness.
“We keep piling out report after report after report, but I don’t see any movement forward,” says Graham, who is now an advocate for better mental health services in Canada. “The federal government gave $50-million to the Canadian prison system to deal with mentally ill offenders without a comprehensive plan. There’s nothing there.”
Graham cautions that the current federal plan to spend billions building prisons is the wrong approach to corrections and will actually reverse any gains, however minimal, made since her son’s death.
Graham maintains Canada’s correctional system is already ill-equipped to deal with mental illness.
“What happened to my son was the worst case scenario for any parent, so I’m involved with parents of young children that are experiencing presentation of mental illness to fight for services,” Graham says.
Graham’s position is supported by Howard Sapers, Canada’s ombudsman for federal prisons. In his report into Smith’s death last year, Sapers concluded that the teenager died following the “inability of federal and provincial health-care and correctional systems to provide her with the care, treatment and support she desperately needed.”
Sapers made 16 recommendations for improvements in the areas of: compliance with law and policy in correctional operations; responses to medical emergencies; use of force interventions; governance in women’s corrections; inmate complaint and grievance procedures; offender transfer process; segregation policy and practice; and the delivery of health care, including mental health services.
Graham remains hopeful it’s not too late for other parents.
“When you lose a child, you remember the pain and the anguish and the horrible circumstances behind him not needing to die,” Graham explains. “And you notice that there are other people in the same pain.”
Graham says there’s no room for a “them and us” in the Canadian lexicon. She believes this stigma and discrimination is at the root of our inability to offer appropriate services for the mentally ill.
For her, it’s all about love of family, love of each other and love of our children.
“If the government can’t see that there are family values that we need to adhere to, we’re really off the map,” Graham concludes.
