Anyone with doubts about just how dysfunctional British Columbia’s approach to providing help to those with mental health issues has become need only look at the recent case of Daniel Sutherland.

Here’s a guy who for 28 years, since he was 14, bounced through the streets, mental health facilities, shelters, courts and jails like some kind of human yo-yo.

Court was told Sutherland has a severe personality disorder. He’s anti-social, narcissistic and paranoid. He’s intellectually impaired. He’s schizophrenic. He has recurring psychotic episodes.

During his sojourn in the care of our mental health and corrections systems, he set 21 fires, many of them in institutions from a Salvation Army shelter to a Cool Aid Society residence for people in need. He set fire to beds in hospitals and prison cells.

After 90 convictions — the judge noted his backstory fills seven binders — the system consigned him to indeterminate incarceration in a federal penitentiary although “long term a secure forensic treatment facility may be the best option.”

Great, this is how we now deal with the seriously mentally ill. Lock ’em up and toss the key. And this represents an advance on the medieval practice of chaining the mentally ill in the castle dungeon precisely how?

One can understand the frustration with dealing with difficult individuals who are the way they are not by choice but by circumstance beyond their control. But there is just something abysmally wrong about criminalizing the mentally ill as a default position because nothing else is available.

But there it is. Out of sight, out of mind. Don’t actually do anything about troublesome homeless people, just make sure we can’t see them in our neighbourhood, doorway, street corner, park and so on.

This acceptance of the streets and homeless shelters as a dumping ground for people with serious mental health issues — which often manifest in substance abuse, behavioural barriers, problems with social interaction that render people unemployable and in conflict with the law — this just abandoning the problem to the police, the courts, desperate family members and stressed-out charity and social workers, is a collective disgrace.

The original idea was that psychiatric institutions, a way of warehousing people with serious ongoing mental health problems, were inhumane. The proper place for treating and caring for such people was in the community, everyone agreed.

But somehow, when it came to actually providing adequate and accessible services, housing and long term support in the community, the noble intentions fragmented into this under-resourced, under-staffed, misaligned, ad hoc mishmash of services so lacking in coherence and integration that we can have people in “supported” housing die, lie there without being missed for five days and nobody cares.

That’s the unpleasant truth in a B.C. Coroner’s Service document. It shows that of the 82 people who died in supported Vancouver housing between 2010 and 2015, it took from two to five days to notify the coroner in 23 of the deaths, something every agency is supposed to do immediately whenever somebody dies.

Over the last six years we’ve had a near 90 per cent increase in mental health emergency visits logged at St. Paul’s Hospital — that totals more than 50,000 since 2009. Vancouver City Police have logged 14,000 apprehensions under mental health act provisions over the same period.

The vast majority of those coping with mental illness pose no threat to anyone, although their condition clearly poses a significant threat to themselves. It throws them into poverty. Poverty increases the risk of self-harm 400 per cent compared to the wealthy.

One in 10 male high school students and two in 10 female students now tell us they had thoughts of suicide in the previous year. Over the past decade, about 5,000 British Columbians took their own lives. Medical statisticians tell us unreported attempts probably number 100,000.

Denial, blaming the victims, shifting responsibility from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, crying poverty by well-paid politicians, bureaucrats and medical professionals while anti-tax lobbyists foment in the background speaks poorly of us as a society.

Look, money for the kind of resources and facilities front line workers tell us they need isn’t scarce. Canadians spent $60 billion on lottery tickets alone over the last seven years. What’s scarce is political and social will. We don’t need studies. We know what needs to be done. We just need to do it.

Surely we’re better than this. Or are we? Maybe not.

shume@islandnet.com