Ottawa Centre MPP Richard Patten wants Ontario laws changed so psychiatric patients can be forced to take their medication after they leave hospitals.
Patten is working on an amendment to his private member’s bill, Bill 111, proposing a community treatment program that would give more freedom to mental patients by allowing them to rejoin the community sooner.
The aim of Patten’s original bill, introduced at Queen’s Park last fall, is to make it easier for doctors and families to hospitalize mentally ill people against their will.
Patten made his amendment public on Oct. 28, at an inquest into the death of sportscaster Brian Smith, who was gunned down by Jeffrey Arenburg in 1995. Arenburg was a diagnosed schizophrenic with a history of violence.
“Under a community treatment order, Arenburg would have had to be taking his medication or he would have been sent back to the hospital,” Patten says.
“He was already threatening people and doctors couldn’t get him back in for assessment or to get him back on his medication,” says Patten. “There’s something wrong with the system.”
Alana Kainz, Smith’s widow, says she supports Patten’s proposal.
“You can’t end hospitalization and then do nothing,” she says. “We need to give the community the power to treat mentally ill patients.”
Bill 111 proposes to give doctors more flexibility in hospitalizing patients. Under existing laws, it is illegal to forcibly hospitalize patients unless they are likely to cause serious harm, or are in danger of “imminent and serious physical impairment.” Patten’s bill proposes patients may be hospitalized if they show “substantial mental or physical deterioration.”
Janice Wiggins, executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, says the changes would help families and patients.
“Often the patient doesn’t have an insight into how sick they are . . . There is a lot of denial.”
But Joanne Lowe, executive director of the Ottawa-Carleton branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association, calls the bill “a huge step backwards.”
“Bill 111 infringes on the rights of the individual,” she says. “It broadens the criteria by which individuals could be certified into a hospital.”
Bill 111 has passed second reading. Patten says he figures his bill has about a 40 per cent chance of becoming law.