SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - All Chris Green says he wants is some help. However, by his account, it's hard to come by at Stanton Territorial Hospital.

Green, who has been a voluntary patient for the last two weeks on the third-floor psychiatric ward, said doctors and nurses on the ward are ill-prepared to help patients like him recover.

Chris Green is a voluntary patient in the psychiatric ward at Stanton Territorial Hospital. Green, a recovering crack addict, said he's trying to seek the help he needs to change his life around, particularly after two suicide attempts earlier this year. However, the 50-year-old doesn't feel the psychiatric ward staff is equipped to help him and he feels he's slipping in his progress. - Ian Vaydik/NNSL photo

A middle-aged man broken by depression and two suicide attempts - the latest in mid-March - Green, 50, said he just wants to live a normal life again.

In a story published in last Friday's Yellowknifer, hospital CEO Kay Lewis said Stanton is "a hospital, not a jail," but Green takes issue with that statement. Having experienced prison in the 1980s, Green said though he agreed to have himself committed, its very much like being in jail but with nurses in charge.

"There's no bars but they have their rules and their head games," Green said.

"In jail there are people who try to push buttons and we have nurses like that. As soon as you've got a locked door, you've got a jail."

Green said there are no consistent rules concerning smoke breaks, during which several patients have escaped hospital grounds. He added he was responsible for two of the 15 instances reported by police after psychiatric patients went missing while on a temporary pass out of the ward over the last six months.

"I've been given regular smoke breaks one day and I'm allowed to go on my own and then the next (day) I'm not allowed to go out without an escort or in a group," he said.

The Ottawa native landed in Yellowknife 13 years ago and began working in Yellowknife's Home for the Homeless shelter. On one occasion he was repeatedly stabbed by a man breaking into the shelter in 2000. After it closed he started a shelter on Highway 3 with the NWT Peacemakers Society but eventually moved into a trucking career.

He developed heart trouble, however, and was forced to shut down his trucking company two years ago. In 2010, Green said he turned to crack cocaine during a bout of depression, and it wasn't long before Green's life revolved around getting high.

He first attempted suicide was in late February. From his account, he ingested more than 300 antidepressant pills. He was in the hospital getting medical treatment for fluid build-up around his heart - which, due to a heart attack some time ago, is now 20 per cent smaller - and after a disagreement with the nurse he left the hospital.

"Three hours later I went to my house. There were six or seven people cracking it up, and I took a pile of antidepressants," he said. "I didn't know any other way. I wanted to die."

Whomever it was at his house - he couldn't quite remember who was there at the time - got him to the hospital. When the nurse asked him what day it was he said Monday.

"It was actually Thursday," he said, sitting on the couch in the family room of the locked-down psychiatric ward. "I had been in a semi-coma for four days."

He subsequently had himself checked into the psych ward where he spent the next couple weeks.

During Green's latest suicide attempt he tried the same method as before. Right after being discharged from the hospital - he said he was kicked out of the ward after refusing to leave voluntarily - he went to Wal-Mart and took handfuls of pills.

"I told the doctor that was discharging me, she's giving me a prescription for pills and I'm going to pick up those pills and take them all at one time," he said. "I told her I was going to hurt myself and she didn't have me committed."

He arrived at the emergency room an hour after taking the pills. His blood pressure bottomed out and he almost succeeded in his goal.

"They almost lost me again," he said.

Since getting himself committed for a second time two weeks ago, Green said he's become close with the guards - but not so much with the doctors and nurses. He said seeing a doctor is difficult because they are never around.

"These guys, they've become friends and I spend more time talking to them than I see a doctor or nurse," he said of the guards, some of whom stood watch at his door after his suicide attempts. "I ask for a doctor and I don't get to see them. We're just psych patients, it's not medicine. Seeing a doctor is near impossible. It's a lot like jail. It's a lot of stress."

Green said he chooses to be in the psychiatric ward because there is nothing left for him on the outside. While he was in the hospital earlier, the people looking after his home destroyed it and left, leaving his dog to suffer alone, he said. With numerous health issues - diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems - Green said it's a bleak situation right now.

"I have nothing left out there in the real world," he said. "My house is trashed, things broken, stolen, broken windows. I've got nothing to go to. Here, things work faster and it can get me my disability (pay) and a place to live."

While seeking a one-bedroom apartment at the Bailey House transitional home for men, Green said he has to foreclose on his home in order to get accepted.

"Social assistance only pays up to $900 and the rent is higher so it's got to go to the supervisor above the social worker," he said. "I have to turn my house over to the bank and foreclose on it for social assistance to say they will pay the rent."

Meanwhile, it's a daily routine of nothing in the psychiatric ward, he said.

Outside of a program he attends at the Tree of Peace in the afternoon, he spends a lot of his time in his room and talking with other patients. Green said television isn't allowed on between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. and besides a daily program in the morning, there isn't much to do. He feels it's causing a deterioration of his mental health, he said.

"I'm not the same guy," he said, talking about an incident when he threw a garbage can in the ward. "I would never do that before. People have seen a change in me. Guys that have worked closely with me, they've seen a change. I'm losing it. It's like I'm sane and I'm going to leave insane.

"I think the nurses aren't prepared to deal with people like me who have mental issues. Some of us, we don't feel like we're getting help. They just give us drugs and there isn't much to help us here."

Damien Healy, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Services, said the department has 10 beds at the psychiatric ward, all of which are full. He added the hospital has two psychiatrists..

"Stanton partners with (Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority) to provide a continuum of care for mental health services," said Healy in an e-mail.

CEO Kay Lewis was unavailable for comment at press time.

Green said he likes to think logically about life and the world around him. He knows the severity of his choice to smoke crack, especially with his health issues.

Making the effort, he said, is what will help bring him back to a stable life - a job and a home is what he'd like to have back.

While he sits in the locked-down psychiatric ward at the hospital, he holds hope he can bring change for people here and not just change for himself.

"This is about the other people who come here in the future," Green said. "I want things to change so people here get the help they need. They (hospital staff) aren't trained to deal with psychiatric patients. We're people, too. They need to be helping me and not trying to control me."

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