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Terrified that her mentally ill son might be killed or seriously harmed due to his erratic behaviour, Mary*, a senior citizen, says she had no choice but to use her monthly pension to place him in a nursing home. Struggling to find the $50,000 each month, she is now pleading with the relevant authorities to establish more long-term housing facilities for people living with severe mental illness.

"I had to get somewhere because I am afraid that people will kill him, plus he is very aggressive," the concerned mother said.

She told THE STAR that she has reached out to state-run facilities that cater to the needs of persons with mental illness but was told there was no space to accommodate her son.

Mary also believes that greater empathy is needed from the public toward people affected by mental illness. She recalled a recent incident in which her son, *John, was physically attacked and had to be hospitalised.

"A lot of people treat those with mental health issues like animals and not humans. Just a few weeks ago I saw him with his back and foot swollen and bleeding, and he was hopping. Persons from another community beat him and he even had a cut in his head. He was admitted in the hospital for a while," she said.

Mary said she began noticing strange behaviour in her son when he was a teenager. He had started hanging out with the wrong crowd and eventually joined a gang.

"When we realise that something was really wrong was when I came home from church and he was just smashing all the furniture in the house," she recalled.

She sought medical help for him, and he was treated. However, by his 20s, John's condition worsened. He was eventually taken to Ward 21 at the University Hospital of the West Indies, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia - a serious mental illness that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

"When he got home he just wouldn't take the medication he got from UWHI. I tried to put it in his drink and he found out because it seems it tasted different, so he stopped eating from me for a while. I had to build a section around the back of the house and let him stay there because he would just smash things," she said.

"He threatened us that he was going to cut our throats. He hit his father and he ended up in the hospital. Persons in the community were afraid of him. He would hit me, and one day he grabbed me and I fell to the ground and he started squeezing my neck. A neighbour came to my rescue. Another time he attacked me with a knife, and thankfully my daughter was there to help me. Another time he attacked me with a chair. The family has been experiencing these things for years," Mary added.

President of the Psychiatric Association, Dr Saphire Longmore, says there is a critical need for specialised forensic facilities to care for individuals like John, who present with complex mental health issues and pose a potential risk to others.

"The whole effort towards mental health care and the whole community approach that we have been embarking on has to have medium and long-term responses, especially when you have someone who is high-risk [for] violence," Longmore said.

The psychiatrist noted that an increasing number of mental health professionals are recognising that many individuals facing mental health challenges are also grappling with deep-rooted trauma. She explained that trauma, coupled with other underlying issues, can significantly increase a person's risk of violent behaviour.

Longmore emphasised that while long-term treatment is essential, it must go beyond confinement.

"In that facility, you want it to be therapeutic and rehabilitative. It should not just be a matter of locking someone away almost like an asylum, so yes, a long-term facility would be very helpful, but we also need to recognise that it needs to be holistically therapeutic and addressing likely whatever underlying issues are predisposing persons to this risk of violence," she reasoned.

* Name changed to protect identity.