Most of rural British Columbia has a severe shortage of mental health services. The prevailing attitude is that people choose to live in rural areas and should therefore accept lack of funding for the provision of mental health services by qualified professionals. Furthermore, there is an erroneous belief that if one lives in the country there is less stress and therefore less mental and emotional distress. This is far from the reality of the situation.
For nearly 20 years I worked at regular intervals in the far northwestern part of British Columbia—first as a family physician and then as a psychotherapist focusing especially on “trauma-spectrum disorders.”
During the early 1990s I was the medical director of the clinic at Dease Lake for the BC College of Family Physicians. In that role, I undertook an overall assessment of how health care was delivered and I interviewed many interested parties—school principals, social workers, band office leaders, church leaders, and the RCMP.
The goal of a research project initiated in December 2000 was to determine the level of dissociativity in the inpatient population of the psychiatric unit at Mills Memorial Hospital in Terrace (northwestern British Columbia). Dissociative disorders are characterized by disturbances in the functions of identity, memory, consciousness, or perception of the environment.
