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A new inpatient mental health unit for children and youth will provide community-level support at Oak Valley Health’s Markham Stouffville Hospital.

Everyone has done something, unintentionally or not, to hurt another person and later felt guilty about it. When Luther Wood felt he’d wronged someone, he’d keep replaying the incident over in his mind. “I would feel an overwhelming sense of guilt,” says Wood, now 18.

These types of intrusive, seemingly never-ending thought cycles are a hallmark of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which often drive the sufferer to perform repetitive behaviours to stop them. “I just thought that was kind of who he was,” explains Luther’s mom, Julia Wood. “I didn’t at all understand the deeper level of the emotional and mental burden.”

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Dr. Rustom Sethna, Oak Valley Health’s Chief of Psychiatry

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Luther is far from alone in his mental health struggles. The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates that approximately 20 per cent of Canadian children and youth (ages three to 17) have a mental health disorder.

To help address the disorder in the community, Oak Valley Health’s Markham Stouffville Hospital (MSH) recently announced plans to build a six-bed youth mental health inpatient unit to accommodate patients requiring intensive, long-term treatment.

Dr. Rustom Sethna, Oak Valley Health’s Chief of Psychiatry, has witnessed this youth mental health crisis first-hand during his 33-year tenure. “There’s a critical shortage of inpatient beds dedicated to this demographic, which leads to long wait times, increased emergency department (ED) visits and just inadequate care,” he notes.

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I feel like a completely different person.

Luther Wood

Untenable wait times

Luther managed his undiagnosed OCD for most of his childhood, but things took a turn for the worse when he hit his teens during the first pandemic lockdowns. Soon, his compulsions seeped into his daily life and impacted his ability to complete schoolwork.

Realizing that something serious was happening with their child, Luther’s parents took him to their family doctor who immediately identified his symptoms as OCD. Thus began the arduous journey of finding an effective treatment plan, joining some 28,000 children and youth that Children’s Mental Health Ontario says were on wait lists for mental health treatment across the province in 2020. In York Region, wait times could be as long as 2.5 years. “We needed something sooner than that,” says Julia.

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A light at the end of the tunnel

Luther’s OCD turned out to be too complex for the community adolescent counsellor, so his family doctor referred him to MSH. The outpatient program was the perfect fit for Luther and his parents, offering a combination of therapy and education for the entire family. However, for those who arrive at MSH’s ED in crisis and need admission for more intensive treatment and observation, it’s an entirely different journey.

“If we determine the child cannot return to their home or community, we place them in a hold in our ED in one of our mental health suites,” explains Dr. Sethna. “They’re held there, usually supervised by security guards, until we find a suitable child and adolescent treatment facility in the GTA that’s willing and able to take them.”

The new Child and Adolescent Mental Health Inpatient Unit at MSH will provide a specialized environment and individualized treatment plans designed for today’s youth. With generous support of the community through Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation, and a $500,000 donation from Hyundai Canada to kick-start a $3.1-million fundraising project, the hospital plans to break ground for the new unit in a few years, pending government approval.

As for Luther, after two years of treatment, he’s living a full life as a first-year linguistics student at Wilfred Laurier University. “I feel like a completely different person.”

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