A trump is a playing card which is elevated above its usual rank in trick-playing games. Typically, an entire suit is nominated as a trump suit, these cards then outrank all cards of plain (non-trump) suits. In other words, the term trump card or to trump can refer to any sort of action, authority, or policy which automatically prevails over all others.
Source: Wikipedia
Second Meditation:
Even though there may be a deceiver of some
sort, very powerful and very tricky, who bends all his efforts to keep me
personally deceived, there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he
deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never make me
nothing as I think that I am something.[1]
Third
Meditation:
But when I considered something very simple and
very easy concerning arithmetic and geometry, as, for example, that two and
three joined together produce the number five, and other similar things, did I
not conceive of them at least sufficiently to guarantee that they were
true? Certainly, if I have since judged
that these things might be doubted, it was for no other reason that it occurred
to me that some God might perhaps have given me such a nature that I would be
mistaken even about those things that seemed most obvious to me. I am constrained to admit that it is easy for
him, if he wishes it, to bring it about that I am wrong even in those matters
which I believe I perceive with the mind’s eye with the greatest possible
obviousness. And on the other hand,
every time I turn to the things I think I conceive clearly, I am so convinced
by them that I am spontaneously led to proclaim: “Let him deceive me who can;
he will never be able to bring it about that I am nothing while I think I am
something, or, it being true that I now am, that it will some day be true that
I have never been, or that two and three joined together make more or less than
five, or similar things in which I recognize a manifest contradiction and which
I see clearly could not be otherwise than as I conceived them.”[2]
Descartes, Meditations (1641)
So many people are talking about mental health needs these days it has become almost fashionable. Those who abide by Covid-19 protocols may suffer from isolation and anxiety, if not depression, while anti-maskers might be considered by the rest of us as truly crazy, if not stupid. But now more than ever we should revisit the idea of establishing a new mental hospital at the Riverview site. As someone who has worked with schizophrenics locally – I am convinced that closing Riverview was a mistake.
Deinstitutionalization
was a global phenomenon gone too far, guided by ideology, cost-cutting,
advances in medication, and in BC’s case it has led to a hospital vacated. Those who advocated for Riverview’s closure
included Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace and local resident. Other principal actors were: former Premiers
Dave Barrett, a Coquitlam MLA who had degrees in Social Work; Bill Vander Zalm,
who introduced the preliminary plan to replace it in 1987; and, Gordon Campbell
who continued with the logic of Glen Clark’s policy of decentralization despite
the former having learned – in adulthood – of his father’s death by suicide.
Self-determination
was considered key; after all, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were a time of
“liberation”. The Vancouver experience
with the patient-led Mental Patients’ Association, a first in Canada, was
spearheaded in 1971 by Lanny Beckman and the late Dave Beamish. Their approach shaped the BC branch of the
Canadian Mental Health Association (an institution guided in policy these days by some in academe – yet another kind of institution) which argued in 2013, the year after Riverview closed, that:
“Our Government has made the right decision.”
The Riverview model, it said, lacked “compassionate care.”
If we look
closer at the historical record – for example the BC Legislature Hansard for
Dec. 1, 1987 – we even find something of an alliance between the Socreds and
the CMHA: both parties wanted the downsizing of Riverview to continue. This is despite local NDP MLA John Cashore’s objections
to the then Minister of Health Peter Dueck: “The minister knows full well that
there have been comments from street workers, community workers and health
workers about the number of ex-mental patients who have fallen between the
cracks and ended up on the streets of Vancouver and other locations.”
It is an
irony that we have mentally ill people on the streets at least in part because
of ex-patient advocacy. Those displaced
onto our alleyways were deemed to be better served by “housing options” in
“community-based settings” – a further indication of utopianism, given present-day
property costs and availability. In my
opinion, this abysmal and long-standing failure to deal with the here and now
of those in despair reflects poorly on all people of British Columbia.
I do not
see the squalor of some Vancouver streets and our tent cities as less
stigmatizing than Riverview, which is depicted in popular culture – to this day
– as an “asylum”. Without specialized
treatment acute needs can go unmet – it is that simple. I am not advocating for a Riverview reincarnated
but for a new reimagining. Now is the
time to abandon rhetoric and search for solutions: clearly Covid-19 teaches us
that mental ill-health can be everywhere and affect everyone.
Mr. Cashore: The minister knows full well that there have been comments from street workers, community workers and health workers about the number of ex-mental patients who have fallen between the cracks and ended up on the streets of Vancouver and other locations. ...
NDP MLA John Cashore speaking in opposition to
the Minister of Health, Peter Dueck, appointed by Social Credit Premier Bill
Vander Zalm. John Cashore represented
Coquitlam-Maillardville from 1986 to 2001, eventually serving in a number of different
portfolios as Cabinet Minster. He is also a United Church Minister.
The Self-Coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France
on 2 December 1804
Painting by Jacques-Louis David
