Investing in neighbourhoods - social recovery and connection

Overcoming addiction with social recovery and connection. 

SafeGrowth catchwords - Ted Talk by Johann Hari, 2015 London

GUEST BLOG: Larry Leach is Executive Director of 12 Community Safety Initiative (12CSI), a non-profit crime prevention collaborative in Calgary, Canada, one of the initial sponsors of the 2015 SafeGrowth Summit. In 2018 12CSI won the Alberta Solicitor General's Award for Community Collaboration and the Ambassador program won it in 2022. Larry has been a Huffington Post blogger and is involved in the SafeGrowth Network. He was awarded with the Queens Diamond and Platinum Jubilee medals for his contributions to community-building.

Addiction and Mental Health issues continue to tear apart families and communities. As a follow-up to my previous blog, “Scale is good for economies, but is it good for social policy?", I wanted to dive a bit further into what should investment and engagement with communities look like.

It is important to know a little bit more about how people have managed to come out of severe addiction. Wisdom among those who have had success in this space teaches us how addicts need a strong support system. They conclude that the opposite of addiction is connection. This is a central tenet of the neighborhood-building strategies in SafeGrowth. The research on addiction and recovery points to the same conclusion. Watch the Ted Talk video at the top of this blog.

The missing and most important piece of the puzzle is the same for helping agencies tasked and funded to help vulnerable individuals. In this case, addiction is the belief that you and your organization are the experts on how to get out of addiction, instead of helping people build healthy lives based on their own individual, personal, circumstances. Agencies wanting to complete that task need to strongly consider a holistic approach that includes connection to the communities in which they work. 

PAY ATTENTION TO LOCAL SOLUTIONS

There are times when community organizations arise organically to deal with addiction and we must do everything possible to nourish those locally-based solutions. 

For example, consider the recent blog on the City of Prince George, British Columbia nurse, Jordan Stewart (our 2023 SafeGrowth Person of the Year), and her now-closed harm reduction site for inhalation addicts. Her effective local solution was defunded, illustrating how easy it is for city leaders to squander the local talent and solutions right at their own doorstep. 

Clearly, we must do better in the future.

INVESTING IN OUR NEIGHBOURS

Investing time into your neighbours has always paid large dividends. When community support is needed, it will arise with full enthusiasm and the knowledge to work with community members. In turn, communities can support vulnerable individuals better by having strong bonds with the services that can help people within their own communities. This is the essence of the concept of capacity-building.

Like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Long-term investments of time and energy into the neighbourhoods across the city will pay huge dividends in the long run. Building relationships and trust goes a long way in achieving the outcomes that everyone wants. How much time does it take? Greg Saville echoes the mantra of community development workers when he says: “We go at the speed of trust”.

Mental health - COVID's impact

Did mental health reports increase during COVID? 

Tarah Hodgkinson 

We talk about liveability in SafeGrowth a lot. A liveable community is a healthy one. And that includes mental health. 

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the mental health of our communities and how we live our lives. While we saw an international decline in most crime types during the initial stages of social restrictions (starting in March 2020), we know less about how these restrictions impacted police-reported mental health. 

There are countless articles and reports raising concerns about the short and long-term impacts on mental health as a result of COVID-19 social restrictions. Most claim that mental health deteriorated across the board, but impacts were particularly acute for disabled, marginalized groups, and women. 

LESSONS FROM CANADA

Furthermore, from Nova Scotia on one coast to British Columbia on the other, there have been calls for increases in Canadian police personnel to respond to the increasing demand for mental health services. In a recent study we published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, we sought to determine if the concerns about mental health were warranted in the Canadian context and if calls for additional resources were necessary. 

The pandemic affected everyone -
A new Canadian study examines mental health impacts

We were able to examine 13 jurisdictions in Canada using a Statistics Canada special survey of police-reported mental health-related incidents. Surprisingly, we didn’t find major increases. 

Rather, police-reported mental health-related incidents were generally stable. More specifically, we found that suicide attempts and incidents generally declined. Apprehensions under the Mental Health Act (a danger to themselves or others), were generally stable with significant increases in only 4 out of 13 jurisdictions. Other mental health-related calls were also generally stable with only 3 jurisdictions seeing a significant increase. 

Counter to widespread concern about the impact of social restrictions, the police-reported mental health-related data shows an unexpected resilience in Canada. When you explore the psychological literature on mental health, this finding is consistent across other contexts.  

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

First, it means we may be more resilient than we actually thought. Second, it means that calls for increasing mental health resources to police may be unwarranted.

This is an important point because police are usually not the best equipped to deal with mental health-related incidents. Indeed, because of the de-institutionalization of mental health facilities and cuts to social resources and preventative measures, police have become the only responder left. This isn’t fair. Mental health is not a crime! Police should not be the ones to respond. 

Mental health is not a police issue.
The mentally ill deserve treatment, not prison.

Keep in mind that even though mental health-related incidents are stable, we still have a lot of work to do. And that work shouldn’t be reactive and enforcement-based. Rather, we need to demand our governments invest in evidence-based solutions like basic income, housing, social services, and wrap-around supports. 

These solutions need better funding and neighbourhood-level support to ensure they are appropriate and reach those who need it most. Neighborhood-level capacity-building is precisely what occurs within SafeGrowth programming. We believe this is how we rebuild the kinds of 21st-century neighbourhoods that will help us stay resilient and healthy.