Tony Akoak, who has served as Gjoa Haven's member of the legislative assembly since 2013, says the hamlet of about 1,300 people is growing quickly and needs more mental-health services to support its population.
GJOA HAVEN, NUNAVUT -- Tony Akoak's house sits atop what Gjoa Haven's residents call the uptown, a hill that overlooks the turquoise Arctic Ocean in the otherwise flat Nunavut community.
Akoak, who has served as Gjoa Haven's member of the legislative assembly since 2013, says the hamlet of about 1,300 people is growing quickly and needs more mental-health services to support its population. Gjoa Haven is nestled on the south coast of King William Island about 1,900 kilometres north of Edmonton. Like all of Nunavut's communities except Iqaluit, it doesn't have a hospital. It has one dedicated mental-health worker, but most diagnoses and treatments need to be done in southern Canada.Akoak says he's seen an increase in drug and alcohol use in Gjoa Haven in recent years, and worries that residents don't have enough support to deal with addiction.
Now, there is a "formal crisis response team" that flies to communities, but she said more needs to be done. "A mental-health worker would know how to assess for delusions and know that the erratic behaviour is actually because thinking something or believing something that's not true."There's a pilot project in Iqaluit in which mental-health workers have been hired to work exclusively with the RCMP, but it will take a couple of years for that program to become full time, she said.
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