Are mental health services improving for people with dual diagnosis?
Kim Goggins As Wendy Richardson’s 21-year-old son, Nathan, was led to an ambulance in handcuffs, he asked her for a kiss, not knowing if he would ever see her again. The incident marked the end of several weeks of Nathan spiralling into a state of “unreality,” explains Wendy, where he took on the personalities of characters in a game. When he became irrational and then violent towards his brother, she had no choice but to call 911. As someone with autism, Nathan appears and speaks well but is very anxious about change and has trouble relating to others. When he is fearful he can be more aggressive, but his family had never seen this behaviour before. He had seen a psychiatrist regularly since he was 13 but had never been hospitalized. Nathan was taken to the emergency department by police and then transferred to a local hospital’s psychiatric ward. But Wendy felt that the attending psychiatrist didn’t believe Nathan was in crisis. “We got the impression that the psychiatrist thought we
