By Joe Fiorito
Toronto Star
City Columnist Published On Mon Jun 29 2009
Comments (7)
Pat Capponi had an omelette and I had a glass of watermelon lemonade. We were at lunch in Parkdale. Oh, yes, you can get watermelon lemonade around here, and why would you not if you could?

Pat is a psych survivor, an expert on the subject of mental health, an organizer and a mystery novelist. And I had a question I thought only she could answer.

I reminded her of Aimee, the woman with dementia who can no longer care for herself. Aimee was able to fend off the nurses and social workers at her door, simply by saying, “I’m fine, go away, you can’t come in.”

I talked of other people who were able to fend off help or, worse, who needed help but were ignored: Dirty George; the woman who smelled bad; the man who lived with pigeons; the woman in love with the sound of running water.

If I can find a handful of such cases without breaking a sweat, surely there are hundreds more.

The dilemma is this:

If a person’s illness means that they need personal care, but if one clear sign of that illness is a flat-out refusal to accept care …

My question?

Why it is so easy for the vulnerable to fall through the cracks?

Pat made a sour face. She said, “It’s not cracks, it’s chasms. If the health-care system was a mosquito net, we’d all be bitten to death. Here’s the thing – we wait too long to deal with problems – we wait until the problem is acute.” She paused. “But if somebody showed up at my door, I’d scream, too.”

And that is a critical part of the dilemma: many people with mental health issues are afraid that if they accept “help” they will be hauled off, doped up, locked down and never heard from again.

So how do we help someone who shows signs of slipping away? Pat said, “You have to get to know your neighbour.”

That is not always easy in private rental housing, where isolation can be acute; nor is it easy in community housing, especially when the people who run it like to boast that they are not social workers, they are merely landlords.

Pat said: “It’s not always easy for people who live in those buildings to help each other. Those buildings are so scary that people get desensitized. Your emotions get blunted. You have to keep your head down. It’s a matter of survival.”

So how do we help those who cannot help themselves? Pat said, “(Toronto Community Housing Corp.) should have staff living in those buildings. I mean people whose job it is to organize tenants, floor by floor.”

By organizing, she meant plain old-fashioned community-building; an interesting suggestion, but an expensive one.

She said: “What’s the cost of someone’s life? What’s the cost of depression? What does it do to our sense of self when we read about a person like Dirty George?”

Back to my first question, then: How do you help an Aimee or a George?

Pat said: “You have to be persistent. You have to say hello. You leave notes. You offer cigarettes. People have to go out and shop; you give them a hand.”

In other words, you act like a neighbour.

A pox, therefore, on anyone in the helping professions who does not bother to get involved; a pox on those who do not use their wits to find a way through a closed door; a pox on those who take no for an answer.

The simplest way is the best way.

Act like a neighbour.

Try the lemonade.

Joe Fiorito usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Email: jfiorito@thestar.ca

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