Where Does the Madness End!?!

This past month I organized two interviews and then waited. As I have said in a previous posting there are so many ways that silence works for people. So I waited nearly two weeks for one interviewee to make a two word edit in her story. I waited nearly as long for the other one to drop by my apartment for ten minutes. He is in my building six days out of seven.

While I was waiting I happened to be on the phone one morning with a woman in her mid-thirties (another Joan – all the women interviewees are going to be Joan!) I have known her well since she was ten. We visit about once a year and talk two or three times a month on the phone.

Joan lives in Montreal, in a group home where she shares a room with another resident who is not in any way a spousal or sexual partner. She prefers this arrangement over others in her recent past because the “house mother” is much more relaxed and the rent is cheaper.

Joan has lived on welfare – the Quebec version of ODSP – for fifteen years. She lives this way because she is on a complex of psychiatrist prescribed medications – at last count 14. She became diabetic about ten years ago so a few more meds have been added to the cocktail. Beyond the $900 she receives for food and rent welfare pays for these prescriptions and for some “training programs” and the transportation to these programs.

I put “training programs” in quotes because Joan has been training on and off for exactly the same sort of job for nearly as long as she has been on welfare. When she is mentally well she works as an assistant in a seniors’ residence. She performed this job more than adequately in one establishment for over five years.

Her tasks are simple, repetitive and absolutely essential – if she didn’t do them a regularly paid employee would be called in. Once or twice a day she sets up the furniture in an activity room, wheels the residents into the room, sits with them while they do exercises in their chairs or play board games, helps serve a light snack, wheels the participants back to their rooms and cleans the room. Joan does this 3 days a week usually for about 2.5 hours a day, and sometimes she will take a 5 hour shift.

Joan performs these simple tasks with a genuine affection for the old people she supports. Her high regard for the elders has won her several acknowledgements at various memorial services from grateful relatives after a resident has died.

Joan provides other social support as well. In her words: “I am there for my friends. I help them out when they don’t feel good. I had to call 911 twice for my friend last month who had taken four days of pills and slit her wrists.”

Similarly to the way things work in Ontario, Joan says that being on the “disability” benefit creates some obstacles for her. She says: “It makes it harder because even if I wanted to work for the people I could lose my welfare.” In such a case she would lose her medical and dental coverage, and have to pay the prohibitive cost of her medication.

Joan has had some private arrangements in the past, providing one-on-one support to an elderly woman for cash. She says: “I want to work for the elderly under the table so I could have more money to buy things like shoes and more tattoos. I would work more than 7 hours a week if allowed, but I’m scared of losing my welfare.”

When Joan is undergoing an episode of hearing voices, anxiety or other disturbance life gets very rough and it is clear why she needs ready access to a stepped-up level of medical and social support. It is perfectly understandable why Joan equates working for money with taking an unnecessary and dangerous risk. In my view I wonder what it would take to create a government funded financial support system that permitted Joan to access medical and other health funding, and even life cost money from time to time, while also participating in the regular economy when she is well.

Ah, but maybe that’s another story.
Judith