A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism. I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction. For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened. Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The cop...

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving. Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times. Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for. “The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse...

If words in a newspaper could solve the social crisis on our streets, we'd be on our way with the back-and-forths that have been happening in the Victoria Times Colonist since a Sept. 24 column by Les Leyne kicked things off.  But things have gotten confusing on Facebook what with the ridiculous fight between Meta and the Canadian government that has left us unable to share newspaper links in Canada. So here's all four parts of the back-and-forth laid out in order - Les's piece, then my response, then a comment piece by retired nurse Barbara Wiggins, then my response to that. Hope this helps for those trying to follow all of this. And while there are some differences in opinion throughout, it's really heartening to see the TC devoting all these column inches to this issue. Les Leyne column in the Sept. 24 Times Colonist that started things off: B.C. has slid into an attitude of “endless accommodation” of antisocial behaviour by desperately ill people on downtown street...

  Bylaw sweep is on in Victoria and this man has to run to get to his stuff before it's gone A communications strategist living through a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude right here in her own province spends a lot of time mulling how to shift the conversation to the advantage of all the people living the crisis.  So I'm testing something new on Instagram, @streetstoriesvictoria . If you're familiar with Humans of New York, my little test is taking the lead from that fine feature. My aim is to be a pair of eyes out there and tell some small stories - no opinions, no casting blame, just seeing.  I've only just begun so currently have a mere seven posts, but stick with me and I'll get those numbers up fast. After 40 years of observing all the factors that have gotten us to this tragic place, I am seeing people - the public, policy makers, most definitely the politicians - getting things so wrong on so many fronts, and I think much of that is because people hav...

Nobody knows the challenges of getting out from under harmful substance use like someone who has actually done it. The third event in the Peers Victoria speaker series on the toxic drug crisis brought together a powerful panel of six past and present substance users to talk about their journeys with frankness, wisdom and so much insight. (I was the lead organizer of the series.) But while we've got a complete video of the event , it's a rare devotee of the subject who would watch the whole thing, clocking in at over two hours. So I made a "greatest hits" compilation, if you will - 40 minutes all in, with clips reordered and with a bit of categorization that helps bring more focus to the panelists' comments.  Here it is for your viewing pleasure . If you have people in your circle who are still saying stupid nonsense about substance users not wanting recovery sufficiently or being content to exist in a state of oblivion, please share it with them.  What kind of sys...

Thank you to long-time community organizer Ann Livingston for pointing me to this 17-year-old blog post that takes us back to 1950s Vancouver to remind us that there's nothing new about the strategies being talked about now to improve health care for people who use substances - or the political tactics used to block those efforts. The Community Chest and Council, the forerunner to the United Way, struck a Narcotics Committee in 1952 to examine the problem. The Committee recommended a comprehensive drug strategy that included rehab centres, educational campaigns, and stiffer penalties for traffickers. But what really stirred debate was its proposal for clinics that would provide maintenance-level doses of heroin to addicts. The drug clinic scheme was intended to “maintain a constant check on the number of addicts in any community. It would also protect the life of the addict and support him as a useful member of society. This existence would hasten his rehabilitation, or at least r...

And just like that, institutionalization is back.  My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come.  “This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby  in a statement released yesterday  in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe." "We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said E...

Hip, hip, hooray - Woodwynn Farm's going forward Hey, could this be hope I’m feeling? It’s such a hard thing to hold onto amid the gloom and doom of the day, but this past week I started to notice a distinct cheery bonhomie creeping over me. I’d almost forgotten how good it feels. It started last Wednesday, after I toured Vancouver’s terrific new emergency housing for people living hard on the street - the so-called “hardest to house. “ It’s a label that calls up scary images of people beyond help, but the Vancouver experience - set in motion by a committed city council focused on homelessness - is rapidly disproving the myths of that (more on that in a future column). And then this week, it was over the moon for me when I got the news that Richard LeBlanc and his team were successful in their bid to buy Woodwynn Farm. Chalk one up to instant karma, which LeBlanc has surely earned after a particularly hard year of trying to acquire Woodwynn in the face of a fierce NIMBY campaign f...

Detox rules work well for some - so let's do it both ways Speaking up for the rights of one group invariably means stepping on those of another, as I was reminded following my recent column on the no-smoking policy at the new detox. An old acquaintance of mine - I’ll call her Shelly - phoned me after the column appeared to tell me I was wrong to be critical of Vancouver Island Health Authority staff for prohibiting smoking at the detox. She’d arrived for a stay at the brand-new unit last month prepared to hate the prohibition, too, but instead quit smoking - for the first time in more than 40 years. She was proudly 28 days nicotine-free when I met up with her last week at the Pembroke Street stabilization unit, which is where people fresh from detox ideally get to stay for a month while they work out the details of a life without drugs. Shelly had gone to detox primarily to get off heroin, valium, alcohol and cocaine, but was delighted to have gotten out from under her cigarette ha...

Health authority's detox rules block access for street users We met over coffee last week, each with our own reasons for being there. I was there to find out why the region’s new 14-bed detox unit is virtually unavailable to people from the street community. He wanted to know why the media always fixate on the negative. We talked for an hour and a half. I’m not sure that either of us fully understood the other one’s points by the end of it all. But at least we heard each other out, and I appreciated his frankness. As the director of addiction services for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, Dr. Laurence Bosley is an important man when it comes to addressing some of the immense problems on our streets. Addiction certainly isn’t the only reason why people end up homelessness. But it’s a major reason for why they get stuck out there. So when the health authority opens a new detox with policies that essentially exclude most of the several hundred people with addictions on our stre...

Insite not the answer, but it helps June 6, 2008 Perhaps you’re already familiar with that ancient fable about the six blind men and the elephant. I find it coming to mind a lot these days in the fight over Canada’s only supervised injection site. The Indian fable, put into charming verse in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe, tells the story of how the six men interpreted what an elephant looked like based on whatever part of the elephant’s anatomy they touched first. One touches the animal’s massive side and concludes it must resemble a wall; another grabs the trunk and presumes that elephants are shaped like snakes; and so on. (http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html if you’re curious). The point I’ve always taken from the fable is that it’s impossible to reach the right conclusion if you presume that what you know is all there is to know. Problems are solved not by bickering over six different versions of an elephant but by bringing those viewpoints together to understan...

Family devastated by late-life addiction March 21, 2008 We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It’s a tight fit for two in the tiny seniors’ apartment. She’ll soon be 77, and up until a couple years ago believed that she’d reached a point in her life where things had more or less settled out. With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking forward to an uneventful old age. Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family’s annual campout in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son told her the problem was cocaine. She didn’t believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia to visit that same year, and her son showed up looking sick in a way that really alarmed her. “That’s when I started to wonder,” she acknowledges now. As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addic...

"Temporary" food bank sees no end in sight March 7, 2008 Noon is approaching, and the lineups have slowed to a trickle. The little food bank at St. John the Divine Church closes at noon, so the regulars know to come early. Anne Henderson is one of several St. John congregation members who volunteer at the church’s food bank every Tuesday and Friday. A 10-year veteran of the work, Henderson admits to feeling increasingly discouraged. “Seeing the young people is hard,” says Henderson. “They come in looking like relatively nice kids, but they’ve obviously got pain in their lives. They can’t get any income assistance because they have no work history. “Pretty soon, they’re into the drugs because of their pain. Six months later, you see them in here looking so lost.” The food bank was intended as a temporary measure in a time of crisis when it first started. But 15 years on, the need has only grown. “We’ve all gotten a little older, a little more tired, and a little shorter of m...

Recovery sparks drive to do more for others Feb. 29, 2008 By the time Thea dragged herself into the health authority’s drug and alcohol centre on Quadra Street in November, she was drinking so heavily that death was looking like a terrifying possibility. The 35-year-old was knocking back a bottle of vodka, two bottles of wine, a six-pack of coolers and a bottle of Baby Duck every day by that point. “And using heroin and crack on top of that,” Thea recalls. “If that’s not a cry for help, what is?” What she needed was a detox bed. What she got was an appointment for two months down the road to see a drug counsellor, who would then decide whether to refer her to one of the region’s scarce detox placements. “I told the guy I didn’t have two months - hell, I didn’t have two hours,” says Thea. “But it didn’t change anything. I remember crying on the phone to my friend, telling her, ‘They can’t help me.’” That night, Thea called her sister in Chilliwack and begged to use her address in order ...