How Ontario kept a man in isolation for 20+ years

frequency podcast network, stories that matter, podcasts that resonate. Isolation, also referred to as seclusion, is the act of a person being placed in a room with no human contact for 22, sometimes 23 hours of the day. It's a measure mental health experts, criminologists, lawyers, even Nelson Mandela, describe as

cruel and humane and effective, at best, a last resort response. Now, it's mostly used in hospitals or mental health facilities. Its penal counterpart, solitary confinement, is found in most prisons across the country. In 2015, the United Nations, through its Mandela rules, described prolonged solitary confinement

of more than 15 consecutive days as a form of torture. Now, today we're talking about the medical version, seclusion, and the story of a Toronto man who spent more than 20 years in isolation at a hospital in Penitanguasheen, a town some two hours north of Toronto. His name is Camelot Hamblett. He's still in isolation to this

day as he lives with treatment-resistant schizophrenia. And he's not alone. Many others at that hospital who stay in isolation way past what experts think is necessary are there as their cases are reviewed year after year with not much change from the Ontario Review Board.

I'm Maria Castain and today on The Big Story, I'm talking to Jacques Galant, a courts and legal affairs reporter for the Toronto Star who made a four-part investigative series on the story of Camelot, Hamlet and what treatment and hospitalization looks like for those in isolation.

Jacques, thank you so much for joining me today on The Big Story. Glad to have you back on. Thanks for having me. Great to be back.

Your reporting at the Toronto Star as courts and legal affairs reporter has taken you to a ton of trials and court hearings and hospitals and homes and facilities. As you report on some of the most heartbreaking truths and stories that happen here in Toronto and Ontario, and two of those stories are what brings us to speak today.

published a four-part investigative series called 20 Years in Isolation. And something that piques my interest, I guess, is the decision as a journalist to be like, you know, this story is bigger than just one article. It's bigger than just one story that could be published and maybe updated once or twice.

You know, there's so many details that go into a story like this. I guess I'm just wondering, as we begin, what was the point for you where you began reporting and you were like, you know what, this needs more time and attention than just one story?

Like we need to tell the story in a way that encapsulates just how big of a beast that is. Like what was that point for you that was like, this is going to be more than just one?

Yeah, I think it's when I first learned about the first case that I wrote about, which which is Camelot Hamblett, who's been at Waypoint now in seclusion for 20 years and counting. When I learned about his case at the beginning of this year, it was because his case was

up for an appeal at the Ontario Court of Appeal to try to figure out ways to help get him out of seclusion. So I did a news piece at the time about the appeal, hearing, and the subsequent decision. But I realized as I was reading through the materials in that case, it hit me that there

must be so many different reasons for why someone would be held in seclusion, effectively isolation for so long, different bodies involved, like the hospital's decision to do it, the role of the Ontario Review Board in supervising people accused of crimes who are in these hospitals like Camelot, what they could have done, or were they even aware of this? So I had all of

these questions and it was just, it was never going to fit in a, in a news story about the appeal. So I did the news story and then it was like, okay, now I have to read through 20 years worth of ORB decisions in Camelot's case to figure out just what happened here and how is it that this man could be spending every day of the last 20 years, which is half of his life, because

he's only in his early 40s, in seclusion. So that's how it just, and it just went from there. Yeah. Let's dive into the story of Camelot Hamlet.

He's the man that you based the series on initially and reading his story, you know, was so, so incredibly heartbreaking. Tell us about Camelot and what happened to him. So Camelot Hamlet, like I said, he's a man in his early 40s.

He was born and raised in Toronto, had a great upbringing very close to his siblings, was very popular at school. But as he got a bit older, like in his teenage years, he started to show symptoms of psychosis. And what followed was just like a number of hospital admissions, not really knowing

what's going on with him. He's eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. And it's soon recognized that it's a severe form of schizophrenia. treatment resistant, meaning they've tried many different medications and nothing seems to be

working in terms of bringing his symptoms down to what a hospital would describe as like a manageable level. So he was found not criminally responsible over 20 years ago for a sexual assault. They describe it as a sexual assault, but what happened is he, in the throes of being in psychosis, he exposed himself to a woman he didn't know. He said that he wanted to have sex with her,

and he soon fled, and that was the end of it. But he was found in CR for sexual assault. And for the last 20 years now, he's been detained at Waypoint, which is the only maximum security psychiatric facility in Ontario. And he has spent the entirety of that time in seclusion, locked in his room alone for about 22 hours or more a day. And that's because

the hospital says, due to the fact that he's treatment resistant, he continues to present with aggressive behaviors. And that's the only way they can basically manage him. Now, just to clarify, you mentioned this, what is Waypoint Center for Mental Health Care? Like, who are the type of people that get sent here?

So Waypoint is, it's a psychiatric hospital, but it's the only one in the province that