Groups Warn Against Blaming Mental Illness for Lapu-Lapu Day Tragedy

Politicians and the public should be cautious about pinning the blame on mental illness as the reason behind the Lapu-Lapu Day attack, experts warn.

This could further stigmatize people with mental illnesses and be used to increase policing and surveillance of already marginalized communities, they told The Tyee.

Around 8 p.m. April 26, East Vancouver resident Kai-Ji Adam Lo allegedly drove an SUV through a crowd at a festival honouring a Filipino hero, killing 11 people and injuring dozens more. He was arrested at the scene.

A day later, interim Vancouver police chief Steve Rai said Lo had a “significant history of interactions with police and health-care processionals related to mental health.” Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim called on the federal government to implement bail reform to keep people who are a danger to themselves or others locked up.

On Wednesday Premier David Eby said the province would review the Mental Health Act after learning Lo was being treated under the act.

Sim has also said a recurring pattern of people in mental health crisis becoming violent highlights a “failure in the mental health system.”

The Mental Health Act outlines how voluntary and involuntary mental health care is to be provided to British Columbians.

According to reporting by the Globe and Mail, Lo was an involuntary outpatient in the care of a community mental health team at the time of the attack. He had been deemed at high risk of a decline in his mental health and his care team noted his unwillingness to take his medications for schizophrenia.

People on extended leave under the Mental Health Act are assessed and approved for supervised, mandatory care in their community, which often allows them to live at home or work their regular job while receiving care.

In a statement, Vancouver Coastal Health said Lo’s care team didn’t see any flags that would have suggested he was violent.

Jonny Morris, CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s B.C. division, said that reaching for solutions to tragedies is a natural response to trauma and can be based on public safety concerns.

But the public and politicians should avoid drawing conclusions as the investigation is just getting started, he told The Tyee.

Blaming mental illness might oversimplify the situation and miss an opportunity to look at the bigger picture, Morris said. It could also further stigmatize mental illness and make people less likely to seek mental health care, he added.

That’s important because the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto reports that in any given year, one in five Canadians experiences mental illness, and by the time they reach 40, one in two has had a mental illness, he said.

The quick response also allows politicians to take the easy out and propose an increase in law and order as a solution, said Ethel Tungohan, a Canada Research Chair in Canadian migration policy, impacts and activism and an associate professor of politics at York University.

“As a racialized migrant group, Filipino communities get surveilled all the time,” she said. In Toronto, “we’re hitting the 21st anniversary of the death at the hands of police of Jeffrey Reodica, the Filipino high school student. So that’s not the solution we want.”

Reodica was shot in the back three times while two police officers handcuffed him. The police had been called in to break up a fight.

Proposing “law and order” solutions ignores the larger history of discrimination, surveillance and targeting of the Filipino community, dismisses the incident as a one-off and allows for increased surveillance of an already over-surveilled community, she said.

“We’re not talking about surveilling and policing mainstream Canadian communities,” she said. “When people and politicians talk about that, they’re thinking specifically of racialized groups who they think don’t belong in Canada and are a danger to Canada.”

Earlier last week BAYAN Canada, an alliance of anti-imperialist groups organizing for democracy in the Philippines, and Migrante Canada, an alliance of Filipino migrant and immigrant organizations in Canada, also condemned the blaming of mental illness for the attacks.

In a press release, BAYAN Canada pushed back against the use of mental health to “justify more state-sponsored harassment of marginalized communities and to distract from the growing racism and anti-migrant sentiment in Canada.”

Instead they called on politicians to look at solutions to issues like poverty, isolation, state violence and cultural extermination faced by migrant and immigrant communities in Canada, which can contribute to mental illness.

Migrante Canada similarly condemned the “downplaying” of the attack by considering it an isolated mental health incident.

“Mental health issues are not just personal struggles but products of a society marked by exploitation, alienation and discrimination. Mental health must not be used as an excuse to erase or distract the course of justice and accountability,” Migrante Canada said in a press release.

If politicians want to focus on mental health they could look at how this attack has impacted immigrant, migrant and Filipino communities’ mental health, Tungohan said.

“We should think about structural supports that are needed by communities and to make sure these supports include robust protection for people facing mental health crisis and the underlying factors causing mental health distress,” she added.

The Canadian Mental Health Association’s Morris said the best way to respond to the attack is to let ourselves grieve and feel angry, while being cautious of jumping to conclusions or trying to push solutions that will make us feel better in the moment.

“We’re in a critical moment to prioritize the care, support and resources that are required to really deal with the aftermath, the grief, loss, pain,” he said.

“That’s going to be really underscored by needing to listen to and provide support and being really present in and around this.”

As the investigation unfolds, people should try to remain open-minded and work to avoid drawing “simplistic and potentially very flawed conclusions,” Morris said.

This will help everyone to be able to take a really deep look at what needs to change, he said.