The Mayo Clinic defines schizophrenia as “a serious mental health condition that affects how people think, feel and behave. It may result in a mix of hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking and behaviour.
“Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that aren't observed by others. Delusions involve firm beliefs about things that are not true. People with schizophrenia can seem to lose touch with reality, which can make daily living very hard.
“People with schizophrenia need lifelong treatment. This includes medicine, talk therapy and help in learning how to manage daily life activities.”
That lifeline in our city is provided by the BC Schizophrenia Society of Prince George (BCSSPG).
Located downtown at 1139 Sixth Ave., the society has a client list of 760 people they serve in the region. The hub of the society is its Activity Centre for Empowerment (ACE), a welcoming gathering place in the heart of downtown for people struggling with mental health problems and substance addictions.
“We don’t just serve people with schizophrenia,” said BCSSPG executive director Nansi Long. “We serve anyone in our community who is living with a mental illness, substance use disorder and/or addiction. Lots of our people have brain injuries and mental illness, or a developmental delay and mental illness.”
ACE is the place for activities, including foosball, billiards, bingo, crib, board games or Yahtzee. Staff and clients engage in weekly craft classes, tai chi sessions, swimming at Canfor Pool and bowling once a week at Black Diamond Bowl.
Clients know they’ll find a friendly face waiting for them when they come by for a sandwich or cup of coffee while they’re waiting for the centre’s washer/dryer to clean their clothes. They have access to computers and someone is always there to help a client submit a job application or tap into a dental care program.
“Some of those people we serve every day, sometimes they only come when they need something, but they’re always welcome,” said Long.
“We operate person-centred services making sure people’s lived experiences are at the centre of everything we do. All of the activities we do here are peer-led all led by people with lived experience as a family member, caregiver or as a person with mental illness or substance use.
“We try and make sure we have support programs or are connected to other agencies that provide that support so we can make sure the families are getting support too.”
Long says there’s stigma attached to mental illness and people hide their conditions and are afraid to reach out for help for fear they will be ostracized from the jobs or lose custody of their children. She knows how families can be affected because she went through that personally with her mother and aunt both having had mental illnesses and her oldest child living with anxiety and depression.
“Families don’t talk about it because we don’t want to be judged,” said Long. “We don’t want people to think that we did not do the best we could for our family members.
“I think I did a fabulous job as a mom, but I can’t control that my child’s brain chemistry isn’t right. I’m not to blame for the brain chemistry not working and that’s what people fail to understand is that mental illness is a brain chemistry imbalance and it can have many causes – trauma, genetics, bad luck.”
Funded privately, through BC gaming grants and from the City of Prince George and Northern Health, the society operates with three full-time staff, five part-timers, 27 volunteers and eight board members.
BCSSPG was formed more than 30 years ago by a group of parents, including founding member Evelyn O’Sullivan. Her church, Trinity United, collects food and O’Sullivan personally delivers monthly donations to ACE.
Feeding hungry people is one of the primary functions of the activity centre, which is open Tuesday-Saturday and closed Sundays and Mondays and to try to address food insecurity, meals are available to clients four or five hours each day.
BCSSPG keeps food supplies well stocked and clients pay for their own meals, usually $5 or less. The centre serves 40 or 50 meals per day, and there’s an outreach program that provides for about a dozen clients who qualify for delivery of at least three meals per week. The society partners with the Canadian Mental Health Association for holiday dinners at Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving.
“If at any time in the last six months they felt they had to make the choice between food a and the other necessities of life or they are living unsheltered, it’s all confidential and they can come and talk to us,” said Long.
The activity centre opened in April 2003 as a Northern Health initiative to offer something different for people with mental health/addiction issues. ACE clients are required to be receiving services by a program tied to the health authority.
“The reasoning behind having the connection with Northern Health or those other services is we can fill in the gaps and provide background support,” said Long.
“If we see an individual struggling in our community we can help by reaching out to the people who support you and make sure you’re getting what you need. That helps to keep people out of the emergency medical system. If we can catch somebody before they’re feeling really unwell, their support team kicks in before they have to go to the hospital.”
Clients are not allowed to be under the influence of any substances and Long says they all respect that rule. Close connections with clients she’s known for years have opened Long’s mind as to how addictions take hold of their lives and she gained a new level of understanding in a conversation she had with a man hooked on heroin.
“He said to me once, ‘I live with chronic pain and migraine pain and the medication that was available to me at the time wasn’t really working and someone said try heroin, and the heroin took away all the pain, so why am I not going to do it?” said Long.
“I had no argument for that other than ‘I want you to be safe, I don’t want you to die from an overdose, and if you’re getting your drugs, please get them tested or maybe consider safer supply.’ I so appreciated he could be honest with me and trusted me enough to tell me the story and trusted I wouldn’t judge him for it.
“I say to him all the time that if you ever really decide that you’re done with it and you need something from me to make that happen, call me. Because once you’ve decided you are done with it you’re going to be done, and you’re going to be successful kicking it and you’ll take on the world.”
Many of the society’s regulars have no fixed address. While some estimates peg the city’s homeless population at about 200, Long says when you factor all the people who are couch surfers staying with friends the number is likely closer to 300. There are fewer people living on the streets now because temporary housing projects built by BC Housing have been completed, like the new 42-unit Third Avenue transitional housing complex that opened in late December adjacent to the Moccasin Flats encampment.
“A lot of the people that I know that were unsheltered that we were directly providing spaces to are moving into these new housing spaces, which is making it easier for partners in the community to provide services because it’s easier to find them,” said Long. “We’re not worried about where they are, they have shelter.”
But there are still people living in tents or makeshift shelters in the city this winter and a few of them are still camping outdoors. Prince George RCMP reported on Feb. 4 the discovery of a frozen body near the Highway 16/97 intersection. Winter raises the danger of accidental death considerably for people who have no place to call home, complicating the issues that come with mental illness, substance addictions and poor physical health and Long says hearing about those deaths is the toughest part of her job.
“Losing them, especially when it’s something they’ve been struggling with, like an overdose, is really hard on us,” she said. “We know there’s nothing we could have done but was there something we could have changed if they had been here that day.
“Over COVID I would say we lost 10 or 15 people we had served in the past, and that is a huge number for us. COVID hit us particular hard in terms of those losses because we hadn’t seen those people for so long when they passed.”
BCSSPG is backing Prince George psychiatrist Barb Kane’s online petition to have the province bring a psychiatric hospital to serve northern BC communities, which now has 3,700 signatures.
“We truly believe that people are entitled to compassionate quality care in their communities near their families, near their friends and caregivers, so that we can all be part of going forward and healing,” said Long.
