Shattering La Vie en Rose: A Vancouver Mental Health Outreach Worker’s Response to Mass Killing

The horrific car ramming event that slaughtered eleven attendees and maimed dozens more at the Lapu-Lapu Day Festival on April 26, 2025, was Vancouver’s baptism by fire into a club into which no city seeks membership. This urban gem of “Beautiful British Columbia” – where one can ski down snow-capped mountains, sail in the ocean, cycle along rolling hills, and relax on a beach on the same day – is now also home to a notorious mass killing incident. Life for Vancouverites will never feel as rosy again – nor should it. As aVancouver resident and mental health outreach worker who hails from the United States – where such events have become far too commonplace – I can only hope that this unfathomable massacre will serve as a wake-up call to the province for the need for more mental health beds in the region.

Specifically, I pray that this tragedy will lead to the political will necessary to reopen a reformed Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, which British Columbians should never have allowed to close in the first place. While the exact circumstances of what led the individual charged with committing this murderous act remain under investigation, he had indeed been a well-known client in Vancouver’s mental health system. That system’s current broken state is at least partly the result of the legacy of the closing of Riverview, which was the only dedicated psychiatric hospital serving the greater Vancouver area.

Riverview, of course, was rife with abuse. I experienced something similar while working as a Chaplain Resident at Washington DC’s notorious St. Elizabeth’s Hospital from 2012 to 2013 when it was undergoing a years-long settlement agreement with the U.S. federal government for mistreatment of patients. Instead of following St. Elizabeth’s successful model of investing in reforming a century-old institution, BC’s elected officials chose to capitalize financially and politically on Riverview’s deservedly nefarious reputation. They drew upon the understandable outcry over these violations and the contemporary trend toward deinstitutionalization to justify closing the hospital altogether in 2012. These excuses offered ample cover for what was at the heart of their motivation to close Riverview: saving taxpayer dollars to become endeared with the voting public.

In the thirteen years since that financially motivated and power-driven decision, Vancouver’s downtown eastside has effectively replaced Riverview as an open-air psychiatric hospital. Rather than living in a protected environment, individuals in the greatest need of mental health support now must try to survive amidst a fentanyl-laced, drug-laden dystopian metropolis. Members of this highly vulnerable population succumb every day on the streets and in their homes to fatal overdoses of drugs, to which their illnesses make them abundantly susceptible. This public health crisis has burst Vancouver’s mirage as an Eden of the Pacific Northwest. It underscores an abject abomination that cannot stand in a civilized nation the likes of which Canada professes to be. Indeed, British Columbia is now the only Canadian province without an exclusive psychiatric hospital. For a province whose largest city – Vancouver – is a hotbed for the suffering and preventable deaths of human beings living with the dual diagnosis of mental illness and addiction, this is simply inexcusable.

As Riverview prepared to close, community mental health outreach programs opened, partly hoping to meet the needs of clients discharged from that moribund institution. Among those initiatives were new, innovative mental health outreach teams, such the ones on which I am privileged to serve as a Spiritual Health Practitioner. Despite the best efforts of highly-skilled professionals alongside whom I am privileged to work on these teams, Vancouver’s veritable “capital” punishment of its mentally ill persists. As I write these words now, I have learned that another young client of ours has perished, the latest victim of a broken system plagued by chronically lacking mental health housing and hospital beds – someone whose life a reformed Riverview might have saved.

There is no guarantee that the rebuilding of Riverview Hospital would spare Vancouver from another horror like the Lapu Lapu Day attack. It will, however, ensure that our society is taking every reasonable action to remedy the system intended to help support those at heightened risk of endangering themselves or others.

As a Spiritual Health Practitioner for these outreach teams, I run a weekly Spirituality Group for clients and staff. I guide attendees through images, poetry, and live music each week as we explore a universal spiritual theme. For this week, I prepared a session to probe the concept of “springtime,” playing songs such as “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf. As with Vancouver’s rose-colored veneer at this cherry blossom season, this year’s Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy also shattered that plan. Instead, we made time for individual and collective mourning for the members of the Filipino community – as well as our fellow client who just passed today – by offering a rendition of “A Tree of Life.” This song by Idina Menzel and Kate Diaz commemorates the eleven victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting in Pittsburgh, PA, on October 27, 2018, employing the Hatikvah melody to instill hope in the face of such inconsolable loss. In the wake of the senseless killing of eleven more victims on 41st and Fraser, the lament helped to hold space for the profound need for grief support for my clients from across Vancouver.

How many more deaths will it take before fellow Vancouverites break through the patina of the rosy-coloured hues of BC’s rainforest paradise? Rather, may we grow our own “Tree of Life” in the Lower Mainland as a new and improved psychiatric hospital on the Riverview grounds. Former Riverview Vice President and Assistant Administrator Dr. John Higenbottam adroitly mapped out exactly how to achieve this over a decade ago in his detailed proposal entitled “Into the Future: The Coquitlam Health Campus – A Vision for the Riverview Lands.” It is high time the public heeded his advice. All of us impacted by the recent attack deserve the very real Tikvah – Hope – that the prospect of such a house of healing offers for this blissful, pained city.