As a mental health professional with 50 years' experience, I can remember the effort made by advocacy groups and governments to reduce the costs of institutional care for vulnerable individuals with mental health and developmental challenges. I also remember care providers advocating for community supports to keep clients out of institutional care, after discharge.
While there were promises to have community supports in place, it's easier to cut existing institutional services than to fund new community-based follow-up programs. That is what happened in Alberta in the 1980s and 1990s. Clients discharged prematurely into the community were readmitted back into institutional care due to inadequate community follow-up.
The Alberta Hospital was always progressive in providing psychiatric care (Martin, J., Hometown Asylum: A history and Memoir of Institutional Care p.146). The hospital worked with the Town of Ponoka, and other community partners, to develop the Ponoka Rising Sun Clubhouse (PRSC) as a place to provide vulnerable mental health clients with recreational, social, educational, nutritional, housing, and employment supports through interagency collaboration. Over the years, many other community organizations and churches have thrown their support behind the clubhouse leading to its overwhelming success.
By all metrics, the PRSC is an unprecedented achievement. Serving over 150 clients annually, the quantitative and qualitative evidence is clear – the Rising Sun Clubhouse makes a huge difference in the successes of their clients.
In a time when any reasonable organization or government makes evidence-based decisions, there seems to be no evidence to support this irrational plan. There is no rational evidence to support the sudden and unexpected termination of funding for the clubhouse.
The government is spending $189 million capital dollars to build two “forced recovery” facilities in Edmonton and Calgary. The tens of millions of operational dollars required to run these facilities are in addition to the capital expense. Addictions experts know that recovery is not something that can be imposed on people; that people have to transition through stages to want to abstain (Prochaska and DiClemente).
The $312,000 they are cutting from a proven successful social program is “egg money” compared to the hundreds of millions they are gambling in their forced recovery dreamworld.
I am told that the opposition to this by our mayor and town council, local businesses and churches, individual citizens, and (above all) the clients of the clubhouse is overwhelming, and that financial support must be re-established to maintain this important social program.
There are letters of support you can sign at various businesses in town and at the clubhouse itself. I encourage all Ponokans to sign one of these, indicating your support for continued funding. I also encourage you to write to the premier, the minister of Mental Health and Addictions, our local MLA, and the opposition shadow ministers for related social programs to inform them of this egregious decision. If interested in assisting us to organize a peaceful demonstration, please leave your name with the clubhouse.
It has always been apparent that United Conservative governments know the cost of essential public services. It is equally apparent that they do not know their value. As I indicated above, evidence-based decision making is a reasonable action. Decision-based evidence-making, is not.
Doug Hart,
Ponoka
