Sad story of a young woman with BPD

I stumbled on this sad story of a woman with BPD…

Failure of system spirals into family tragedy

George and Alice Schellenberg took it as good news when their daughter Laura, just out of high school, coming off a nervous breakdown, was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Borderline. How bad could that be?

Over the next 17 years, the Saanich couple found out.

It was hell. Laura began doing things totally out of character — she shoplifted, got angry, shaved her head twice, began cutting herself, then tattooed the lacerations on her arms.

On and on. She worked as a hairdresser and had a doting partner, but the internal demons were always there to pull her down. Obsessive compulsive disorder and severe depression piled on. She wouldn’t open her mail. Wouldn’t pay bills. Wouldn’t answer the phone. She could be anxious, unresponsive, violent. Doctors just increased her medication.

Her parents desperately tried to get her help, but there was always a barrier, a box that couldn’t be ticked, to prevent her from getting into a program or facility. “There was always something that didn’t fit,” George says. Most of the time, the system would spit her back out, so it fell to her parents to pick up the pieces on their own.

Desperate for advice from the professionals, they got none. Indeed, privacy laws prevented mental-health workers from bringing George and Alice into the loop. “Nobody ever told us how we could help,” he says.

Laura’s disease would sometimes lead her to sabotage her own life when things were going too well. One day in February 2008, thinking it might get her admitted to a hospital where a “new doctor” would help her with her obsessive thoughts, she started a small fire in her living room. Instead, she got done for arson and was locked away. “That was the beginning of the spiral with the corrections system,” George says.

In November 2008, her obsessive compulsive disorder sent her to her now ex-partner’s home in Duncan, a breach of her probation. Charged with assault, she was incarcerated in the Surrey Pretrial Services Centre, even though everyone — cops, lawyers, health professionals — agreed that kind of confinement was the worst thing for her. Laura got depressed, wouldn’t eat or wash and ended up in solitary for much of the four months she spent awaiting trial. Her parents’ pleas that she needed to be in a psychiatric hospital with ongoing treatment fell on deaf ears. Laura lost 100 pounds.

On April 7, she went to court, where the court-appointed psychiatrist suggested federal time — two years plus — so that she could get better mental-health treatment not available at the provincial system. The judge agreed.

Laura’s lawyer and parents were aghast at the idea of her being locked up for that long. Fine, said the judge, your option is to take her yourself: 18 months of home arrest, with Laura not even allowed out for a walk around the block.

Stuck in their home, she sank further into depression. On Easter weekend, after she asked for a gun with which to kill herself, Laura’s parents took her to the Archie Courtnall Centre.

They wanted her admitted to the Eric Martin Pavilion, but getting a bed there was impossible. “I think it would have been easier for me to get an appointment to meet the pope,” George said. Instead, Laura was held for three days. Then her parents were told to come get her, the alternative being the cops hauling her to prison.

So they brought her home, well aware of how ill-equipped they were to care for their own troubled daughter.

A week later, on April 19, 2009, Laura Schellenberg finally gave up. She hanged herself in the family home. She was 34 years old.

Over a year later, the Schellenbergs’ despair and frustration remain. Politicians might boast of $1.2 billion in mental-health funding, but it did nothing for them or their daughter.

“The judicial and mental-health systems don’t converse,” says Alice. “They don’t know what to do with these people,” says George. “It is no use throwing good money after bad if the system is dysfunctional.”

As the Schellenbergs say this in the living room of their Broadmead home, another couple sits and listens, heads nodding at the familiar tale. So much of what is said about Laura could be said of their own son, still desperate for treatment. The couple, who contacted the Schellenbergs after reading a letter they wrote to the Times Colonist, say the system lacks co-ordination, empathy and understanding.

It’s people like them whom the Schellenbergs want to help now.

“We are committed to trying to help make a difference,” Laura’s parents wrote this week. “Too late for our dear daughter but not for many others if there is a collective political and personal will.”

jknox@tc.canwest.com
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