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When it comes to psychiatric wards, the Walden family of Surrey has an unwelcome bounty of experience.

Spencer Walden was first diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as a teenager and, over almost two decades, spent months in hospital being stabilized with anti-psychotic medications.

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“He was a regular customer,” says his older brother Brodie. Every two or three years Spencer would stop taking his medication, relapse into psychosis and paranoia, but then rebound with treatment. He’d return to his life, raising a young daughter with his wife, running a window-washing company and volunteering at his church.

That changed about a year ago when the 32-year-old was admitted to three hospitals in less than a month — discharged from the first and walking away from the second — to die on Feb. 18, 2016, in a fall from a seventh-floor window at St. Paul’s Hospital in downtown Vancouver. He was on a medical unit when he smashed through the glass with an oxygen tank, later sitting on the ledge and falling backward. The psych ward, where windows are reinforced with Plexiglas, was full.