Marlene Bryenton looks at a photo of her son Andrew in his former bedroom in Charlottetown, P.E.I., on Aug. 18, 2023.John Morris/The Globe and Mail
By rights, Marlene Bryenton should be sitting back and enjoying a hard-won victory.
The 73-year-old Charlottetown mother spent most of last year fighting to get mental health treatment for her son Andrew, who was roaming the streets of Toronto, sleeping on lawns and asking supermarket shoppers for food.
She enlisted scores of Torontonians to post on Facebook when they saw him, allowing her at least to follow his movements and reassure herself he was still alive. She lobbied police to pick him up, hospitals to hold and treat him and Ontario officials to send him home to Prince Edward Island for more help. She gathered thousands of signatures on a petition, sent a blizzard of e-mails and made scores of phone calls.
After months of work, she won. She got her son transferred to Charlottetown’s Hillsborough mental-health hospital. Back on his medications and under the care of a good psychiatrist, he has been improving ever since.
He often gets a pass from the hospital to visit his mother and father to play cards and have dinner. He offers to do the dishes and, indulging his fondness for baking, often stays in the kitchen to make cookies or brownies.
Old friends come to the hospital to visit or take him bowling. A top-notch bowler, he has already qualified for a national tournament in Ottawa this May.
It is a remarkable recovery, but Ms. Bryenton says her fight is far from over.
As thankful as she is to have her son off the streets and back home, she worries about what will happen when his stay in hospital runs out. Will he go off his medications as he has before and end up back in the streets? If that happens, will authorities have the power to get him back into treatment again?
As she sees it, provincial legislation on the subject is inadequate and she says so in no uncertain terms in daily social media posts on the subject.
“I am not crying wolf,” says Ms. Bryenton, a retired civil servant and an author of books for children.
In November, a new Mental Health Act passed in the PEI legislature. It permits authorities to compel patients to take their medications when they are released from hospital. Other provinces already allow for community treatment orders, or CTOs. They are intended to prevent revolving-door hospitalizations, in which mentally ill people go in and out of hospital because they fail to take the drugs that allow them to function.
Like many Canadian parents with children who have mental illnesses, Ms. Bryenton feels let down by a system that puts far too much stress on their privacy and autonomy and far too little on their welfare. Ms. Bryenton, who calls herself the ultimate “mama bear,” is ready to keep baring her claws until that changes.
She says the PEI law is too weak. It applies only to patients who have been kept in hospital without their consent at least twice in the span of two years and only if their combined stays amounted to at least 30 days. That means a patient could be held in hospital four times for seven days each time and still not be subject to a CTO.
The PEI law, she insists, in a daily flurry of angry posts on her blog, is the worst in the country. (The provincial government declined to comment.)
Ms. Bryenton’s struggle began six years ago when her son began suffering from delusions. He was in his early thirties, with a nice house, a wife, two kids, and a good job as assistant manager at a bank. He lost all of that over the next few years, ending up jobless and homeless in Toronto.
Three times, she managed to persuade police to pick him up and take him to hospital, but each time doctors released him after the standard 72-hour holding period and he went back to the streets.
Finally, last fall, after her son had been taken to hospital once again, she succeeded in getting him back to Charlottetown. Ms. Bryenton and her husband met him at the airport. Gaunt and long-haired, he waved gingerly to them from the ambulance that was taking him to hospital.
“It was like a dream,” Ms. Bryenton says. “We could not believe that he was finally home and would be safe.” A few weeks later he was sitting around the Christmas tree opening presents with his mom and dad.
But Ms. Bryenton is still haunted by fears about the future. Mr. Bryenton turns 40 in April. Eventually, he will come out of hospital. His mother doesn’t want to see him freezing on the streets again. That is why she wants better ways to protect people like him – those who may be too ill even to know they need help.
She explains how an effective CTO would work: “If a mentally ill person stops taking their medication a family member can contact the police. The person would be picked up and taken to a clinic to have either their needle or pills administered.”
Ms. Bryenton asks readers to sign a petition calling on the province’s Progressive Conservative government to amend the law in the coming spring session of the legislature. Otherwise, “Islanders could die on the streets of P.E.I.”
Her campaign is part of a larger national debate about when and whether to use compulsion to help those who are mentally ill or suffering from addiction on Canadian streets. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has promised to bring in a “compassionate intervention” law that would allow those who are a threat to themselves or others to be held for treatment against their will. British Columbia’s NDP premier, David Eby, has spoken about the need for involuntary care in some cases, though he appears to have backed off since making the remarks last year.
But advocates for the mentally ill say incarcerating sick people is cruel and ineffective. Forced treatment, they say, simply doesn’t work.
Ms. Bryenton insists it can. Her son’s improved condition shows it.
A dedicated runner who has competed in 15 marathons, he gets a pass from the hospital to go on daily two-hour runs on the nearby trails. If his health keeps improving, he hopes to take part in the annual PEI Marathon in Charlottetown in October.