The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/02/23 at 07:00 EST

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/02/23 at 07:00 EST

In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine.

But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. The mental illness, and there was other attempts to try and get he and his partner off the street. You know, they set him up beautifully in an apartment and all the rest of the stuff.

But all through these years, whenever there was attempt by himself or by caseworkers and stuff, what lacked was a continuity, if any, of mental care, mental illness care. There was no counsellors and also the accountability too. His check-in, oh yeah, I laid eyes on you, check the box and and away you go. Okay, well, that doesn't lead to any discussion for any therapy at all. I don't understand why our politicians or our health professionals or whoever it is

that needs to take care of this, aren't recognizing this issue. So Latonya and Justin, we've been talking a lot about the money side of this. So the cost of housing and the cost of living and how quickly people have fallen out. But here we have someone who's speaking to very serious trauma, her son's sexual assault resulting in a number of difficulties, being able to hold a job to be, you know, feeling

that he's mentally well. LaTanya, maybe I could come to you first. What should be done to ensure that people with mental health issues or addiction get the help that they need to succeed? I think that's a challenging question for cities specifically, because as the counselor did mention, one thing that he did mention is about the budget. So cities are dealing with social issues that their budgets were never meant to manage or handle.

So a lot of cities that we speak to, for example, talk about this issue of not having the funding or the resources necessary to address mental health issues. And so that's a major challenge. So sometimes even when they're trying to provide housing units, they don't have the funding for wraparound supports. And so this is where we really speak about the collaboration amongst all levels of government because cities are dealing with this issue of homelessness pretty much on their own. They're not having the resources that they need from all levels of coming together and collaborating and pooling

resources and pooling services to ensure that those that are experiencing homelessness have the resources that they need, that they can go to one place and have all the supports that they need, rather than having to figure out which places to go to get which services, which is a real issue. But I think there's also another part of this that has to be discussed in that sometimes we look at homelessness and we focus heavily on the addiction and mental health side and think that people have to be housing ready in order to be put in a home. And in a lot of cases, a lot of people just need a home. It's not,

let's get you addiction free or let's deal with this mental issue and then we can put you in a home. This is what we call the housing first model of putting somebody in a home and then dealing with all those different issues because housing stems from that trauma, is that piece of trauma that leads a lot of people into those mental health addiction issues. So how do we kind of change the narrative and saying? Let's get everybody housing first and allow those other issues to be dealt with in in tune. Thanks for that Latonya Justin Did you want to add to that? Yeah. Well, I meant to hit on this earlier but one of the things that hasn't

That to my knowledge hasn't mentioned is that some people as was it Hamilton we were talking about earlier mentioned is that some people, as what was it, Hamilton we were talking about earlier, they apparently have a surplus of shelter beds. Like, there's less homeless than there are shelter beds, which I highly doubt. But assuming that's true, why would anyone choose to live in a park and a tent in the winter as opposed to a shelter? There's a reality there too, is that the people, as one of your callers said, they're afraid to go in the park because of the homeless people. Those same homeless people that she's afraid of are in the shelters as well and a lot of people do not feel safe in the shelters Where I am you have a cot and your possessions are around you. There's no locker or anything There is security watching things and cameras, but your stuff gets stolen all the time

There's it's a low barrier situation. So you also have a lot of drug use. So all this you don't escape it. It's just warehoused and There's people there that like they honestly feel safer in A tense situation because there is at least some unhaught autonomy in the shelter system You also have the rules and regulations which I have no problem with but some people treat their job Not a social work, but as a prison You're treated like a prisoner and an inmate. Like, must do this, must do that. The rules make sense to an extent, but you'll find that some staff are very capricious about how they apply them, and you start to feel like a prisoner.