Chelsea Lall's anxiety lifts through unique Ontario hospital program

When Chelsea Lall's anxiety and suicidal thoughts escalated in high school, she was able to find the help she needed through an Ontario hospital's team-based model that is drawing attention from experts nationally.

For Lall, 17, her problems with hallucinations and voices triggered by heightened anxiety first became noticeable to classmates at age 11.

"I would be cornered in the washroom. I would be thrown down flights of stairs. I would be attacked on my way home from school. People [would] attach razor blades to my locker with a note saying, 'Just end it. Nobody wants you here.'"

Lall was repeatedly in and out of regular hospitals, with nurses in scrubs walking around and code blue announcements. The weeklong hospital stays "weren't doing anything."

At a time she was afraid she would hurt someone, Lall, an Ajax resident, was admitted at Ontario Shores in Whitby, Ont. She enjoyed the bright surroundings and activities such as swimming, walking outside and movie nights, as well as school lessons and meetings with psychiatrists, social workers and peers.

"I refused to believe the anxiety was causing voices," she recalled. "At Ontario Shores, they reduced medication and taught me how to learn to deal with it."

Early intervention needed

Mental-health care for children and youth needs more programs like Ontario Shore's, because the system is fragmented and lacks support for families, said Dr. Marshall Korenblum, a psychiatrist at Hinks-Dellcrest in Toronto.

"We know that one in five adolescents have a diagnosable mental illness," Korenblum said. "Only one in five of those get mental health treatment, and 70 per cent of all mental health illness starts under the age of 20."

Kornblum said that access to care is often delayed by a number of reasons: the need to pay out of pocket for psychologists and social workers; lack of child psychiatrists to meet the demand; and the need for patients to tell their stories numerous times to different people to get help.

"Early intervention results in better outcomes," Korenblum said. "To think of 6,000 children [in Ontario] having to wait a year, they could lose a year of school. In the meantime they could get into trouble with the law, they could start using drugs."

The Ontario Shores program is aimed at patients 12 to 18. Before the program was revamped, the length of stay for adolescent residential beds was up to one year. Now half of patients stay 27 days in a more intensive program. The findings were presented this week to 700 health-care leaders from across the country at HealthCareCAN in Charlottetown. 

"If we can catch the issues early, then we are preventing distress later in life," said Sheila Neuburger, executive vice-president of clinical services at Ontario Shores.

Patients are linked back to their home community with followup to ensure they maintain a healthy lifestyle and strong coping skills, Neuburger said.

For the first time in two years, Lall is back in school.

"I didn't expect to live to my 17th birthday," Lall said. "I had it in mind that I would have committed suicide by then. Now I actually see myself with a future, which is weird but comforting at the same time."

Lall wants to share her story, which she's also blogged, to help parents, teachers and principals and other adults to see the effects bullying and cyberbullying can have.