At the moment Brandy Skinner was arrested she was in a full-blown mental heath crisis. She had lost her job, was facing homelessness, and had stopped taking medication for anxiety and depression. It was the worst time in her life and she snapped.

“I was lost. I had no ability to control my thoughts, my feelings and my emotions. I wasn’t able to sleep. I had no hunger, no desire to speak to anybody.” Skinner said. “My hair was falling out. I was a completely different person.”

In 2014, Skinner, 37, was charged with a low-level non-violent offence and, about a month-and-a-half later, met a court support worker who referred her to the mental health court at Old City Hall. After being treated by a psychiatrist and connected with a social worker, Skinner was able to access disability payments, stay in her home and stabilize her life. A year-and-a-half after she was charged, she received a conditional discharge.

Skinner, who is Black, said it was extremely important for her that the support worker was a racialized woman, someone she felt she could trust and who understood her experiences growing up in Regent Park.

“I was a deer caught in the headlights,” Skinner said. She didn’t have a lawyer and was barely able to answer questions at the first few court appearances before she was connected with the support worker.

“I was a non-participant. I just appeared because I was told if I didn’t I would be issued a bench warrant and put in custody,” she said.

Skinner’s experiences are typical, according to a report from the Canadian Mental Health Association released Friday examining the experiences of racialized people with mental health courts. Most, the report found, were not made aware of mental health court at their initial court appearances and only learned about the court’s existence from others at jail or from court staff several weeks later.

“The only reason I found out (about mental health diversion) was because I missed court dates for being in the hospital. If I didn’t miss those court dates, they wouldn’t have known about my condition, they wouldn’t have known about anything and they wouldn’t even have asked me,” one person said, according to the report.

There are 19 mental health courts in the province, staffed by a specially trained Crown and judge. Other than the dedicated mental health court at Toronto’s Old City Hall courthouse which is open five days a week, the others sit only sporadically. The courts are supported by psychiatrists, mental health support workers and other social services, and are intended to avoid sending people to jail by creating a plan that the accused person must follow that can include treatment and regular check-ins with the support workers and the court. In the end, the charges may be withdrawn or the person sentenced to an absolute or conditional discharge.

Usually, to be eligible there must be a connection between the offence and the mental health diagnosis. Most of the courts do not accept people charged with serious and violent offences.

The lack of a standardized process across the province means that there is a huge variation in the availability of mental health courts and in who gets the benefit of being diverted to them, said CMHA director of public policy Uppala Chandrasekera.

“In my experience across the province, if there is a sympathetic Crown who wants to do it, it will happen,” she said.

Without the collection of race-based data throughout the criminal justice system it is difficult to establish whether racialized people are less likely to be referred to mental health court, Chandrasekera said.

For the report, the CMHA researchers spoke to a total of 20 Toronto-based people: nine who went through the mental health court process, six who did not and five who work with people with mental health issues and face criminal charges. It is a small sample size, Chandrasekera said, but the interviews show that the individuals who were charged felt that their race played a role in how they were treated by police and affected their trust in the justice system.

Low-income racialized populations may be less able to access legal representation that can help inform them about mental health court or advocate for a referral, Chandrasekera said — a problem advocates say recent cuts to Legal Aid will worsen. They are also less likely to get bail or to be able to pay for optional rehabilitative programs and mental health care, the report notes.

One service provider expressed concern that racialized individuals may face more or excessively harsh charges — a trend documented in the 2018 Ontario Human Rights Commission interim report on racial profiling by Toronto police — which could exclude them from eligibility for mental health diversion.

The report calls for an increase in the number of mental health court locations and longer hours of operation, as well as for every member of the justice system, including judges, police officers, and mental health court support workers to promote mental health court diversion.

There need to be “culturally-specific system navigators” available to ensure racialized people are able to understand and access diversion programs, the report adds.

A key recommendation of the report is for race-based data to be collected throughout the criminal justice system.

“We can’t determine how effective we are being as a society at fulfilling the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or other human rights instruments if we are simply not collecting this data,” says human rights lawyer Anthony Morgan, who has researched and written about race-based data collection. “This is a call that has been made for decades.”

Skinner wishes she had known she was eligible for mental health court diversion from her first appearance in court. Or, that instead of the trauma and risk of injury in being arrested and charged, her mental health crisis would have been recognized immediately and she could have been taken to a hospital and accessed the treatment and supports she needed.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Without the help she got through the mental health court not just for her mental illness but for all the other problems she was facing, she said, “something terrible would have happened... It would have been bad for everyone in my family and my community.”

Instead, she will soon graduate with an advanced diploma in business and project management from George Brown College and runs her own business.

“With the right interventions in place and the right supports we can have mental stability and be whole and healthy,” she said. Diversion to mental health court “can’t be something that some people get offered and some people don’t.”