As a citizen of London with severe and persistent mental illness I am alarmed by the death of David McPherson and the displacement of a group of individuals with mental health difficulties.

We are giving these individuals our best when they are in crisis but we care less when they are chronic. Many surgeries are discharged prior to what would be considered good health as are mental health patients. What would we think if 25 post surgeries were displaced from a dangerous and disgusting dwelling? We can be proud of how hospitalization for mental illness has been transformed here in London but when I share my mattress with mites before and after it will be like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. Hospitalization will be a bizarre episode in a stupor of squalor.

It needs to be asked why so many individuals with mental health concerns are housed together. Is it really community integration when we have ghettos? When affordability means shared toilets and prolonged periods where privacy is extinct these dwellings essentially become a third world hospital with fewer staff. It should also be asked how much longer these individuals would have been allowed to be unsafe, unsanitary and defiled of dignity had there not been a tragic fire? Solitude is a human need, safety, security and sanitation should be absolutes.

If we are astute enough to recognize that clean and pleasing environments facilitate healing in hospital, why do we not employ it for people who are healing in the community? It all becomes mute when individuals are endangered, denied dignity and are made to endure circumstances and confines that would lead many to mental health difficulties. Possibly we would not remove the revolving door of hospitalization but fewer would need hospitalization if basic human needs were met in the community.

Many fine people and agencies came into contact with this tragedy far before it never should have been. Individuals with severe and persistent mental illness do not ask to be in these circumstances they simply need our assistance. I’m fairly certain it is against the law to do otherwise.