Raji Kaur Aujla is a writer and cultural strategist based out of Toronto and Goa, India.
My husband and I were standing in a Toronto IKEA last summer when my world fell apart. We had just moved into our new home, searching for pieces to fill it, trying to settle into a life we had just begun. But instead of excitement, I remember thinking how unfair this all was.
Earlier that summer, my parents’ home in Vernon, B.C., had burned down to a total loss in a fire inadvertently started by my brother while he was cooking; a spark from the barbecue had spread across the roof.
For hours, my family stood outside watching the house burn, knowing that nothing, none of the evidence of 50 years of immigrant life – family photographs, VHS tapes of childhood memories – would be retrieved.
Raji Kaur Aujla and her brother at her wedding sangeet in their family’s backyard in Vernon, B.C., in August, 2024.Kate Tutty
My brother had schizophrenia, and for years it bent his reality, eroded trust and made ordinary life feel adversarial. He believed he had mentally displaced our parents. Now, he had physically displaced them.
In IKEA, my husband’s phone rang and he stepped away. I ran through the familiar catalogue of worst-case scenarios and called my sister. When she answered, she was crying inconsolably.
I was trying to understand her when my husband returned, his face composed but his eyes heavy.
“We knew this could happen,” he said. “He passed away in his sleep.”
My knees gave out. I could not catch my breath. My brother was dead.
My family had tried desperately to avoid this possibility. But the way the Canadian system handled his life made his death feel inevitable, shaped by cultural barriers that prevented early intervention inside our home and institutions that misread his illness outside it.
ong before the fire, and before any diagnosis, I knew my brother was not well. In high school, he was an undefeated boxer. But he got into fights outside the ring, on school grounds and at parks, and those fights became how people understood him.
There was another side to him. He was artistic and thoughtful in ways that were not always obvious. He felt things deeply, paid close attention to the world, and cared about its injustices, expressing himself through sound and visual art. Still, that perception of him as violent followed him into adulthood and shaped how others encountered him.
As the working-class son of Punjabi immigrants, his behaviour was often seen as threatening or suspicious before it was understood as illness. By the time he graduated in 2000, that perception had hardened, and he leaned into it, shaving his head, dressing in baggy streetwear and carrying himself with the intensity of someone used to fighting. Police and other authority figures saw a problem, not someone who might need help.
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By 2015, when I took a sabbatical and moved back home, the situation had escalated. That summer, at a family wedding on Vancouver Island, an incident involving a former partner sent him into a state no one could de-escalate. He screamed through the night, guttural and relentless, picking fights with those around him. There was no way to calm him. By morning, my broader family understood what my parents and siblings already knew: something was wrong.
My family lacked tools to deal with my brother’s issues, and lacked language for what was happening. Our culture added pressure on my parents to avoid dealing with it: he was their only son, after all, and there was fear of social judgment. In the absence of a road map for how to respond when their son began to unravel, the community chimed in with advice. In his earlier years, we were told it would just pass. Then people spoke of black magic. Others suggested we needed to pray more, or be stricter, or take him to India, or stabilize him with an arranged marriage.
These suggestions did not come from malice; they came from desperation, from cultural frameworks trying to fill a void left by the absence of accessible, credible care. But they delayed what we needed most. By the time we understood what we were seeing, there were limits to what we could do. Once he became an adult, decisions about his care were his to make. His privacy and autonomy were protected by law.
I understand why those protections exist. But when a loved one is in the grip of severe mental illness, they can leave a family watching someone they love disappear, with no way to intervene.
At home, we adjusted around him. We monitored what we said. We locked our doors at night. There was always a sense that things could shift without warning.
There is no clear system that steps in at that point. There is only delay until the situation becomes critical. Each time it did, the people who arrived were the police, which is why the response became discipline, rather than care.
n 2016, my parents called me in a panic. They said my brother had tried to kill my father the night before. While on the call, he charged into the house, and they said he had something in his hand.
Then the line went dead.
For 10 long minutes, I could not reach them. I called the Vernon RCMP and booked the first available flight to the Okanagan from Toronto. When my father called back, he said my brother had fled. Police intercepted him on Bella Vista Road, having almost overdosed on painkillers.
But instead of being taken to a hospital, he was taken to a police station. That decision mattered.
Even when we told officers he was not well, he was treated as a criminal. Each time he threatened to kill my father, and I told the police, they said they could only intervene if they caught him acting on the threat. They were never around when he did.
From there, the pattern set in. He moved in and out of jail over the next several years, entering through the criminal system and leaving without psychiatric evaluation. Each time he was released, it got worse. He became more suspicious and more convinced that we had betrayed him.
After he was arrested for trying to kill my father, we did not know where he was for more than a week. His identity and whereabouts were protected by law. I wrote to prisons across British Columbia and Alberta before a staff member from the Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre called to say I had been granted permission to visit.
The problem was not the absence of services. It was that they were fragmented, isolated from one another and able to refuse responsibility.
When I saw him, sitting in his orange jumpsuit, I asked why he’d attacked our father. He laughed and said our dad was speaking to him telepathically. Then he turned to his right shoulder and began speaking to someone who was not there.
I asked him: “What if those voices are not real?”
It was the only time in this entire process that he looked directly at me, fully present.
“Then I need help,” he said.
I had been saying that for years, to police, to courts and to my parents, but no one had believed me.
n 2018, he was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia, though only by chance, after a community advocate intervened with the courts and a warrant was issued for him to be taken to hospital instead of jail.
Only then did things begin to change. We learned he had started using cannabis at 13, and that early substance use, combined with repeated blows to the head, can increase the risk of severe mental illness. By the time he was treated, that risk had already become reality.
The difference when he went to the hospital was immediate. He was calmer, he could sit still, and he could talk to us in a way that felt like him again.
After he was released, there was nowhere stable for him to go where his addiction could not find him. Not long after, he was arrested again and returned to the hospital. We learned he was smoking close to an ounce of cannabis a day, moving through increasingly precarious environments. As his health declined, my parents took him in again.
When their house burned down, he was forced back into instability, moving between hostels, motels and friends’ homes, each move stripping away what little structure remained.
My parents stayed with him and fought for him when institutions and communities failed or gave up – acts of love and survival stretched too thin, over years that wore them down.
Toward the end, he began asking for help. A community member offered to secure him a place in a rehabilitation facility, but despite calls and messages, nothing materialized.
On Aug. 6, 2025, he died on a friend’s couch.
t each of these turning points in my brother’s life, there was another path. Not a theoretical option, but a real one.
There could have been early intervention when the signs first appeared. There could have been mentoring or counselling when he was an angry teenager in 2003. He could have gone to a hospital instead of a police station in 2016. There could have been continuity of care after his diagnosis in 2018. There could have been stable housing when everything else collapsed.
Aujla’s brother celebrates Lohri during a family trip to Punjab, India, in 2009.Courtesy of family
I used to believe Canada’s systems would protect him, that if someone showed clear signs of mental illness, they would be assessed early and placed into pathways of care that did not depend on acute crises. Now I believe that Canada did not just fail to save my brother, and so many people like him. It structured the conditions in which his survival became less likely.
The problem was not the absence of services. It was that they were fragmented, isolated from one another and able to refuse responsibility. When my brother needed help, we called across these systems and were met with redirection. Mental health services deferred to addiction services, addiction services pointed to forensics, crisis lines routed to emergency responders. Each organization operated within a narrow mandate. What appears on paper as a network of care functioned in reality as a series of exits.
It is within that fragmentation that police become the default point of response and co-ordination. They are the net that has to catch those who slip between jurisdictions, tasked to determine, in real time, whether a situation constitutes criminal activity or a mental health crisis – a decision requiring a clinical judgment they are not trained to make. Police are a force trained to assess risk and assert control, not to interpret trauma or psychiatric distress. Yet they are granted the incredible authority to decide which pathway a person enters, care or custody, a decision that often determines how the story ends.
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A better Canada would not rely on policing to triage social suffering. It would build integrated, accountable systems of care, where mental health, addiction and housing are co-ordinated, and where individuals are carried along their journey rather than processed at discrete points of acute crisis. It would establish unarmed, community-based crisis teams led by health professionals. It would ensure families are not left to assemble a system that already claims to exist.
My brother’s death was sudden, but it was not unpredictable. It was the foreseeable outcome of years of being misclassified, criminalized and moved through systems that were never designed to keep him alive, that prioritized punishment over prevention.
He did not fall through the cracks. The cracks were the system itself. Each decision moved him along in cycles, but none of them took responsibility for what came next. None of them were designed to work in unison, and we could not repair what was fundamentally broken. And so he moved between them, until there was nowhere left to go.