A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

So now the head of the region’s new psychiatric emergency service has quit. In a funny sort of way, that’s almost good news. Dr. Anthony Barale’s passion and rare candour around the crappy way we’re managing addiction and mental illness will be missed. I don’t like to think of people like him getting squeezed out of the Vancouver Island Health Authority, because we desperately need them to guide change. And boy, do we need change. All will not be lost along with Barale, however, if his high-profile resignation this week finally wakes people up. Finally, it’s not just the social groups sounding the alarm about dwindling community services and support, but the clinical director of a barely two-year-old VIHA service intended as a leading-edge response to people with mental illness. Archie Courtnall Centre, at Royal Jubilee Hospital, has instead become the “default processing centre for addicted individuals seeking treatment,” complains Barale. Apparently, nobody at the centre contempl...

Addiction misread Aug. 18, 2006 The trouble with drugs is that most of us can use them just fine. The majority of people who try drugs - even street drugs - can quit using them fairly easily if they need to. I’ve come to suspect that fact is why we’re still so damn hopeless at dealing with addiction. We just don’t get it. We’re a nation of enthusiastic users that really struggles with the concept that not everybody has such an easy relationship with drugs and alcohol. Most of us will drink, drop, smoke or swallow various drugs over our lifetimes with little incident. We’ll go hard as teenagers and less hard as adults, and we’ll quit when the time seems right, for reasons ranging from the kids getting old enough to notice, the mornings getting harder to bear, or just the embarrassment of being 40 and having to buy marijuana from the kid on the corner. For those of us so blessed, our drug use remains within our control. When we want to stop using, we do. We understand addiction exists on...

Here's a thoughtful piece from today's Vancouver Sun opinion pages that sums up so much of what's wrong with the federal and provincial governments' approach to health.

Development in B.C. parks Aug. 11, 2006 Parks are important places. They’re gifts from the taxpayers of today to every generation that follows, in perpetuity. Any change to the way we use our parks is potential cause for alarm, because one bad policy shift is all it takes to betray the public trust that our parks represent. With that in mind, here’s hoping that British Columbians think long and hard about what it will mean in the long-term to open up more development in B.C. parks. A call for proposals went out this week for construction in six provincial parks, and six more will be put on the list at the end of August. We have mere months to decide if this is what we want for our parks. The wonderfully isolated Cape Scott Provincial Park was on this week’s list, and thus could be the future site of a small lodge, cabins or yurts. As Parks Minister Barry Penner noted, that would make things much nicer for Cape Scott visitors who didn’t like to tent. But is it true to the park legacy en...

RCMP and crime in the media Aug. 4, 2006 Having experienced the challenge many times of trying to squeeze information out of the RCMP in the course of chasing a news story, I can’t imagine how much tougher the task will get if B.C.’s Mounties take the advice of their communications department and clam up further. People in B.C. are much more fearful of being a victim of crime than they need to be, the department found in an internal report last year, made public this week after the Vancouver Sun got hold of a copy. The report speculates that the problem might be the volume of crime stories in the media. If RCMP media officers weren’t quite so open and prompt in their dealings with the media, the report wonders, is it possible the media would fixate less on crime and people would calm down a little? Two-thirds of the British Columbians surveyed as part of the report said they were fearful of being a crime victim sometime in the next year. Not even close to that many actually will be. Th...

Joys of exercise July 29, 2006 I’ve been sitting in front of the keyboard for more than half an hour now, trying to come up with a way to talk about physical activity that conveys - without sounding preachy - what a fine, fine thing it is to have in your life. It’s not easy. Exercise has had the misfortune of being linked in a beneficial way to so many health issues that it’s now one of those “healthy life choices” like quitting smoking, losing weight, and eating sufficient vegetables. Exercise is good for you - reason enough to deter anyone who has grown weary and resentful of the lengthening list of things to feel guilty for not doing. But forget all that health business for a moment, and consider exercise for the truly joyful thing that it is. Sure, it’s good for you, but it would be something I’d be hooked on even if it wasn’t. What bothers me most about the fact that millions of Canadians are inactive isn’t that they’re making an unhealthy lifestyle choice, but that they don’t kn...

Addiction July 22, 2006 The latest survey on the habits of street-level injection drug users in the Capital Region is a grim little reminder of all the things we don’t yet get about addiction. Since the last assessment in 2003, the only bright spot in the most recent survey is a two per cent decrease in the HIV rate. Virtually all other indicators - rates of hepatitis-C, amount of needle-sharing, condom use - have gone in the wrong direction. As is our wont, we’ve talked and talked for years about addiction and drug use. If words were all it took, we’d be living in a drug-free paradise by now. But we’re not. The Vancouver Island Health Authority’s newly released report on needle users in the downtown is most definitely proof of that. Almost three-quarters of the 250 needle users surveyed by VIHA at two downtown social agencies last year tested positive for hepatitis-C, an increase of more than five per cent from the 2003 survey. Forty-two per cent reported sharing needles, also a fiv...