Mental Health Services in Maple Ridge Are Not Keeping Up With Mental Health Need. The Gap Is Widening.

The connection between mental health, addiction, and homelessness is well established. Maple Ridge has more visible evidence of that connection than most communities. Its mental health service infrastructure does not reflect the scale of the problem.

Fraser Health Authority serves the Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows area. It operates mental health and substance use services that are, by the authority's own measures, operating at or near capacity. Wait times for non-emergency mental health assessment in the community stretch to weeks. Access to psychiatry for complex cases is constrained by a shortage of practitioners willing to work in a non-urban setting at Fraser Health salary scales.

The consequences are visible. They are visible in the people cycling through the Maple Ridge hospital emergency department with mental health crises that should be managed in a community setting. They are visible in the people who disengage from services because the wait for those services is longer than their capacity to stay stable without them. They are visible on the streets and in the parks.

This is a resourcing problem that sits with Fraser Health and the provincial government. Maple Ridge council cannot fund a mental health system. What it can do is make the case — loudly, persistently, with data — that the mental health service deficit in this community has direct costs that the municipality is absorbing: in emergency response, in bylaw enforcement, in community safety resources, in the damage to commercial districts that affects the tax base.

The argument for better mental health funding in Maple Ridge is not only humanitarian. It is fiscal. The cost of not providing adequate community mental health services is paid by someone. Right now, much of it is being paid by Maple Ridge.

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