He works the fine strand of wire carefully, soldering with his lighter, winding the wire around and around until his tiny creation is done. It looks like a miniature fishing rod; he says it’s a divining rod to find things buried in the ground. I ask his name and he pulls up his sleeve to show me his hospital bracelet: Tyler. Back at the 1955 peak of institutionalizing people in BC, there were 4,500 people held involuntarily in Riverview psych hospital. Today, 20,000 individual British Columbians are “sectioned” every year under the Mental Health Act – the highest rate in Canada. More than a fifth have a primary diagnosis of substance use disorder. Some are held involuntarily many, many times in a given year, totalling 30,000 holds. But psychiatric beds are rare things these days, and the phenomenon of placing people on “extended leave” and releasing them back to homelessness is increasingly common.