After days of intensive care following a suicide attempt, 17-year-old Kelsey Duggan was full of hope about her future — until she entered Royal Jubilee Hospital’s adult mental health ward, and froze.
“Kelsey was so vulnerable and at 17 she was not an adult,” Duggan said. “She left ICU — where she had been on life support — full of hope and she was talking about being a nurse, being so thankful for being alive.” The young-adult unit — for voluntary and involuntary patients requiring acute-care admission — is adding a clinical counsellor, mental health workers and peer support workers.
Admission to the unit via the hospital’s psychiatric emergency department is based on physician assessment and referral. Young adults must be experiencing an active episode of psychosis or mood disorder and be deemed able to benefit from specialized assessment and recovery-focused programming as well as able to engage in structured programming.
Duggan spoke positively about the changes to the unit — but gently made it clear that there’s still more to do given capacity problems, wait-times and gaps in care, especially in out-patient community mental health services and supports. The Duggan family was living in Vancouver and fully focused on Kelsey’s older brother. Now 26 and thriving, he was then struggling with his mental health and subsequent substance use.
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