By Feroza Master
Margaret Beauchamp hopes to paint a better future for Canadians suffering from mental illness.
The 71-year-old Ottawa artist will be selling about 35 of her original paintings. They are on display at the Lord Elgin hotel as of Sunday, Oct. 20 to raise money for Ottawa Salus.
The organization creates supported, low-cost housing for people suffering from schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression.
Illnesses of inner turmoil are a far cry from the canvases Beauchamp has hung in the yellow-lit, cream-walled rooms of the hotel. She’s turned swirling thick strokes of richly-hued oil paint into yellow roses, pastel watercolours into tropical landscapes, ink and pastel into a patio in Cuba and reclining nudes.
“Happy” and “relaxing” are words she says people have used to describe her idyllic paintings.
But Beauchamp is no stranger to the pains of mental illness.
Twenty-three years ago one of her six children was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Jacques, then 17, had been behaving “erratically” says Beauchamp. She remembers him doing yoga in front of the house in his underwear, upsetting the neighbours. The family had a barbeque and he filled his plate with ketchup.
He was hospitalized, dropped out of Grade 11 and started taking antipsychotic Clozapine pills that never entirely helped him.
Sheila Deighton, executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Ottawa, says one in every 100 Canadians males will develop the illness, in their late teens and in their 20s for females. Despite medication, many schizophrenics are unable to live independently.
“A person might leave something on the stove and forget to turn it off,” says Deighton. People with schizophrenia might also lack the motivation or skills to keep their homes clean. “It makes landlords nervous to rent to them.”
Beauchamp says she was saddened by the shoddy, privately-owned halfway homes where her son was sent to live after being discharged from the hospital.
For lunch, one home gave him “what looked to me to be a piece of bread with margarine and a piece of bologna with a cookie or something, says Beauchamp.”
The family heard of Ottawa Salus in 1980, where Beauchamp said her son was given more independence, coupled with more caring support, and Ottawa Salus had no profit motive for helping clients.
She became involved in fundraising and is now the fundraising chair.
At a cost of nearly $2 million a year, 87 per cent of which is paid by the province, Ottawa Salus provides subsidized housing and support to 200 clients living in 11 buildings. Five hundred are on a waiting list to get in.
“They wait two, sometimes four years,” says Christa McIntosh, executive assistant director.
In addition to being unable to hold jobs, she adds many people with mental illnesses lose their homes when they are hospitalized or their landlords become angry at their inability to maintain them.
The organization wants a 12th building, but McIntosh says they don’t have the money.
Beauchamp hopes her paintings, which sell for between $150 to just over $1,000 will raise about $100,000 that can be used to help erect a new facility.
“When you have a gift you should share,” she says.