A Newmarket couple is at their wits’ end trying to get their teenage daughter the help she urgently needs to keep her safe, out of harm’s way and out of jail.
Tiffany, 17, is kind, caring, has a great sense of humour, and is incredible around animals, parents Brad and Meagan Whitehorn say.
In many ways, she’s still a little girl who loves her unicorn poster and Hello Kitty, likes to make gingerbread houses and bake cupcakes, mom Meagan said.
“You’ll never meet a more joyful person, she wakes up every morning so happy,” said Meagan. “We drove around (last) weekend and looked at the Christmas lights. We had a great time. She loves to do that.”
But the young woman has dual diagnosis, which means she lives with both a developmental disability and complex mental health needs, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The latter diagnosis came when Tiffany was just 10, about six months after the Whitehorns adopted her from the foster-care system.
She needs care around the clock and can’t order herself a hot chocolate without support. Tiffany has been on York Regional Police’s vulnerable person registry since she was 12, and functions at a Grade 1 level. She doesn’t have the capacity to remember to do basic hygiene or take her medication, said Meagan.
The Whitehorns have been reliant on group-home placements for the past three years to provide a supervised environment in which the teen would have the best chance of success.
That most recent placement has ended, however, as staff at the Newmarket facility called York police for mental-health crisis support to safely transport Tiffany either back to the group home or Southlake hospital.
“Tiffany was out in the community and struggling and staff were trying to prevent her from running out onto the road,” said Meagan. “They called for police support, but the police have been incredibly frustrated with my daughter because they’ve been involved in her life for the past few years due to mental health crises. They’ve started charging her, like that’s going to help. It’s not a solution.”
Since October 2018, the local force has charged Tiffany five times, most recently with assault, Meagan said.
York police could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.
In early November, Tiffany was released on bail into her parents' custody. After exhausting every avenue to safely house their daughter, from trying to secure a new group home placement to locating a mental-health bed or a space at a secure treatment facility, the Whitehorns took matters into their own hands.
With direct funding received from Ontario’s Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, as Tiffany is someone who has been designated with complex special needs, the Whitehorns rented an apartment in Markham and arranged for support staff to supervise her 24/7.
“We sort of made up our own little group home for one,” Meagan said.
The Whitehorns are in constant contact with their daughter, visiting her and face-timing on the phone. But they say she can’t come home because they are not equipped to keep her safe.
The additional complication of the teen being charged by police when they are called for crisis support means that if an incident occured at the Whitehorns, their daughter likely wouldn’t be allowed to have contact with them.
“If she comes to our home and I call for police support, they will charge her and prevent her from seeing me, and I can’t help advocate for her, give her medication, take her to doctor’s appointments, or take her to court,” Meagan said. “That’s not fair. Tiffany can’t understand that, she’s like a six-year-old.”
The Whitehorns said they are completely at a loss and don’t know what to do. Their daughter's unique and complex needs doesn't fit within any one government ministry mandate, and the various departments don't seem to talk to each other and are not accountable, she said.
They have even turned to the Children’s Aid Society, which says the girl isn’t within their mandate due to her significant special needs and lack of a child protection order.
The Newmarket hospital, too, has taken to turning them away, offering advice instead that Tiffany needs behaviour support and other appropriate community supports, she said. Other local mental health agencies say Tiffany’s needs are outside of their scope.
“No one is taking responsibility for safely housing her,” Meagan said. “We need secure treatment so we can get her stabilized, including a full psychiatric assessment, review of medications, a behaviour support plan, and a transition plan from that secure setting to a community-based setting to allow her to be successful.”
“It doesn’t seem to exist,” Meagan said, her voice wrought with frustration and sadness.
“It’s been a really rough road, to be honest. My daughter is a wonderful young lady but she’s been through hell,” Meagan said. “Our daughter’s story is filled with trauma from her early life with biological family members and then foster care, and other systems have continually failed her. But we fear for her life at this point.”
When Tiffany turns 18 next October and ages out of the child and youth system, the Whitehorns will lose provincial funding for her housing and support staff. That gives them 10 months to find a solution before starting over again in the adult mental health sector.
NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche, who represents the Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park and is the government critic for mental health and addictions, has tabled Bill 63 in the Ontario legislature known as the Right to Timely Mental Health and Addiction Care for Children and Youth Act, 2019.
That bill, if passed, would ensure a person who is less than 26 years old and deemed to require mental health or addiction services in Ontario receive it within 30 days.
“Many children and youth are on waitlists and are waiting very long times, often years, to access the services they need,” Karpoche said. “During the time they’re on the waitlists, they go from mild and moderate cases to severe and reaching crisis points and needing to go to emergency.”
“We have many who are suffering because the government is not making the right investments,” she said. “We’re simply just transferring greater costs to other parts of our system when, very simply, we could invest in supportive housing so that people are not on waitlists. At the end of the day, it’s not also only about saving costs, which it does, but it’s about letting the person live a dignified life.
"How are you going to just let people have this kind of an experience when we know what the solutions are?”
“Services for people in mental health and addictions crosses so many different ministries, and it’s a completely patchwork system, and that’s why it’s so easy for people to fall through the cracks,” Karpoche said.
Ontario’s Conservative government just passed a bill so it can create a centre for mental health and addictions, but the legislation doesn’t have any funding attached to it, or timelines, she said.
“There’s no point in having a centre without actual funding attached, otherwise it just becomes another layer of bureaucracy without the investments that are needed that are actually going to help people,” she said. “The bottom line is you can’t do anything if you’re not investing.”
Dad Brad recently went to Newmarket-Aurora MPP Christine Elliott’s constituency office for help, determined to sit at the office until he could speak with someone. The couple have also filed a complaint with the Ontario Ombudsman’s office.
Elliott’s constituency manager, Dawn Gallagher Murphy, confirmed the Whitehorns had approached the MPP, who is also Ontario’s health minister, for assistance with their daughter.
“We have been working with the family and have ongoing communications,” Gallagher Murphy said in an email. “As any work we do with our constituents is confidential, especially any support related to private health matters, I am unable to provide further comments.”
For now, Tiffany will stay at the apartment the Whitehorns rented temporarily to house her and will have staff support day and night until they find a new group home placement.
"But we have no idea where in Ontario it will be or when it will be available," she said. "So, until that placement is found, we will continue waiting in this non-ideal set-up in the apartment."
The teen is also on waitlists for secure treatment facilities across Ontario, which is generally court ordered, Meagan said.
Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, a Whitby hospital that provides a range of specialized assessment and treatment services to those living with complex and serious mental illness, flatly turned them down, saying there's nothing they can do for the teen, said Meagan.
“Tiffany has the capacity to be a contributing member to this community,” she said. “If she has the right support she could probably work a few days a week and volunteer. Why aren’t we giving her the support to do that? We have to give her those supports now so she can be that person five years from now.”
Children’s Mental Health Ontario has advocated that the government raise the age of child and youth mental health services from 18 to 25.
“Raising the age to 25 allows youth more time to build their resilience with intensive services and to prepare themselves for the adult mental health sector, should they still need care,” the agency said in a 2019 report to the Ontario government. “This also affords service providers more room to collaboratively work on a transition plan with the youth to ensure that their transition to adult services is smooth and sustainable.”
According to the 2018 Youth Action Committee study, upon which the report was based, 93 out of 123 Ontario youth, or 76 per cent, who have already been through the child and youth mental health system, said they did not have a transition plan in place when they moved to the adult care system.