Vince Daigle knows what it’s like inside a mental institution — he’s been hospitalized four times.
Sometimes patients are released too early, he said, and end up back in the hospital because they’re not ready.
Ground has already been broken on a new facility which acts as a half-way house for patients leaving the Nova Scotia Hospital.
The Community Living Initiative is a complex of four detached units, and each of them contains 10 beds.
“People in each household will learn to live together, learn to do their laundry, get groceries, how to catch the bus again and things we take for granted,” said Barbara Hall, with the Capital District Health Authority.
She spoke to Metro at a celebration event for the complex yesterday.
Daigle, who’s lived with schizoaffective disorder for 20 years and struggled with addiction, said he wished this facility was available a decade ago when he last left the hospital.
“If services like the Community Living Initiative had existed back then, maybe I would have been able to build some cornerstones and avoided future hospitalizations,” he said.
