Last Saturday in the Noel Lloyd Positive Action Movement Park, I ran into a man I had not seen in quite a while. He was sitting on one of the benches where I last saw him more than a year ago. He happens to know me through a family member, so he approached me. Just like all those times more than a year ago, he asked me for $5. You see, this man is a bête noire, a person who is particularly disliked and avoided. He is one of the men who can be seen roaming the streets of Road Town begging for money. In the time since I had seen him last, he was incarcerated for assaulting someone who refused his request for money. This gentleman has had a history of mental illness, and has been incarcerated before for a similar case of assault.
Strangely enough, later that same day on my way home I saw a second man who I also had not seen in many months. This man, like the first, was back where I last saw him: sitting under a tree at the side of the road not too far from Rite Way Supermarket in Pasea. This time he was clean-shaven, and he had his right leg and foot in what appeared to be a cast or bandage of some kind. Sadly, this man, too, is treated like a bête noire, and he also has had a long history of mental illness.
Mental Health Act
In the time since I last saw these men, a new Mental Health Act was passed by our House of Assembly. The act spells out when a person can be compelled to receive mental health care, and it aims to ensure that treatment is up to international standards. On the surface, it appears that at least in the cases of these two men, this new powerful tool for helping people suffering from mental illness has failed. These men have been freed only to return to captivity. They’re not captive within the walls of some facility (which they urgently need), but in their troubled minds, which have robbed them of their true freedom.
Challenges
Now, it is not lost on me the difficulties of treating people with mental illness — particularly those with longstanding issues. Moreover, there are people in the territory who have dedicated their lives to the study and treatment of mental illness and who have given these men the best care they were in a position to provide. However, it has also not been lost on me that the lack of money so often cited for our inability to build a proper long-term care facility for our mentally ill has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the monumental waste in our health care sector.
In closing, the story of these two men is a reminder that there is a real human cost to our territory’s wasteful ways: Residents who are in no position to help themselves are being deprived of the help they so desperately need.
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