An Abbotsford, B.C., mother who lost her son to a suspected fentanyl overdose is hoping to change the conversation about addiction and treatment with a powerful new video.
Shirley Wilson, who is also an Abbotsford School Trustee, lost her son Jacob on Nov. 11, 2021. He had been turned away twice from the Abbotsford Regional Hospital in the 48 hours before he died.
In an interview with Global News, Wilson said she’s hoping to both help reduce the stigma around addictions and create pressure for more front-line resources to help people in crisis so they don’t meet a fate like her son’s.
“The individuals who die from an overdose are real humans, and we need to humanize them. We need to move away from the statistics, and say that they’re just a number,” she said.
“We have to remember that they are part of someone’s family, that they are loved … but they don’t have enough support in the right places.”
In the emotional 13-minute video, produced with the help of the Abbotsford police department, Wilson lays out the accident that altered her son’s life, and the family’s struggles to get him help before his eventual death.
In August 2018, at age 21, Jacob suffered injuries in a car crash, including a crushed skull and a brain injury. In the three years that followed he struggled with psychosis and turned to drug use.
Wilson believes the same health-care system that saved her son on that life-changing night later failed him as he grappled with the fallout.
“The same ones that saved his life in a critical accident, the same ones that rescued him and stabilized him when he was run over, turned him away at the emergency department when they could have saved his life,” she said.
“I am very frustrated with that.”
Unlike many people grappling with addiction, Jacob was not homeless and had the financial resources to seek treatment and counselling. But Wilson said those resources simply weren’t there when he needed them most.
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In one incident nine months before his death, she told Global News, he arrived at hospital only to be discharged shortly afterwards without shoes or a jacket, and placed in a taxi that dropped him off a few blocks away from where he was supposed to be.
She only found out when a social worker who was at the hospital called her to say he’d been discharged in a psychotic state. When she brought him back to the hospital she was told he’d have to wait another 24 hours before he could be re-admitted.
Only after a police officer convinced Jacob that he should admit himself did the hospital agree to take him in — at which point he was admitted and stayed for 17 days.
Wilson said it was one of many experiences that showed her how a lack of easily-accessible, no barrier supports for people seeking help simply aren’t there.
“By the time a person goes to the hospital like that, they’ve missed the other parts of the service that should be available but aren’t,” she said.
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“We have a lot of services that are available on what I call bankers hours, and I am not particularly pleased about that. Because someone who is abusing services, they don’t do that during bankers hours and they don’t call for help during bankers hours.”
In the critical period before his death, Wilson said Jacob presented twice at hospital. The first time he was released, she didn’t find out until nearly half an hour afterwards. The two spoke, and he seemed OK. But the next day, he was back in hospital — after calling 911 himself because of an overdose.
The last time they spoke, she said he told her he thought he might be staying in hospital this time — but she wasn’t able to reach him again after that.
“Sometimes health care says, ‘Been there, done that,’ maybe frequent-flyer comes to mind, and they say, ‘No we can’t help you anymore.’ Jacob was discharged twice in 24 hours before he died,” she said.
“And on Nov. 12, I got that call that no mother ever wants.”
2021 was B.C.’s deadliest year on record for toxic drug and overdose deaths, with at least 2,310 lives lost. Drugs claimed at least 2,293 deaths last year.
According to the BC Coroners Service, 79 per cent of overdose victims are men, nearly 90 per cent of them between the ages of 19 and 59.
B.C.’s current system, which requires people in crisis to be a danger to themselves or others, fails to recognize that sometimes people experiencing a psychotic episode need to be stabilized before they’re in a place where they can accept care, she said.
She added that she was disappointed the province’s latest budget did not include a major expansion of front-line services, no-wait treatment and counselling, and free psychiatric care, something she said her son could afford but countless others cannot.
“People say its a choice. It’s not a choice to become an addict. It may be a choice to use some substances, experiment, but the addiction is pretty harsh when it comes to some of these street drugs. And they’re using them to mask something,” she said.
“So why is that help not available earlier, and at no cost? People don’t have benefits, not everybody.”
Wilson has taken her advocacy to the province’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, and said she will continue to press provincial and federal leaders for change.
She wants the province’s drug and mental health crises to get the same kind of full-system emergency response the COVID-19 pandemic did.
And she said the way people view those struggling with mental health and addictions needs a reset, with love and compassion taking front seat.
“When they see somebody walking down the street and they look at them with disgust, they’re going to change their mind and say I wonder whose child that is, I wonder whose brother that is, I wonder whose sister that is — that’s what I do, because I see things more clearly now than I did before,” she said.
“(Jacob was) kind, caring, funny, witty. Very smart. He loved animals, incredibly loved animals. He loved his family … and he had some very close friends, because he was a giving, compassionate young man. He never wanted to hurt anybody.”
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