The saddest stories heard by Ontario MPPs in many years have been told to a group of them who toured the province looking at mental health issues — and the saddest part of all is that there is no assurance they will be remedied soon.

The MPPs’ committee listened to highly personal accounts volunteered by many suffering from mental illnesses and their families, who spoke bravely because much of the public wrongly attaches a stigma to being mentally ill, and from professionals and organizations helping them.

In an interim report it has praised those who testified for their courage and recommended improved services that mostly cost money, which the province will not find easily, faced with its biggest-ever deficit caused by an economic recession.

Kevin Daniel Flynn, a Liberal backbencher who chaired the committee, said, however, that the victims are committed to recovering and the province must commit itself to helping them recover.

Christina Jabalee and her sister, Jennifer Takacs, told in Toronto of their brother Michael, who committed suicide at the age of 25.

Christina, a social worker, said Michael began suffering from depression when he was 15, sleeping 16 hours a day, refusing to eat, crying, unable to function, and eventually dropping out of school.

At 17 he was admitted to hospital after he threatened to jump off a four-storey parking garage and was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, but not provided with any psychiatric follow-up.

His mental state continued to worsen and he was treated repeatedly for brief periods without any continuing plan to keep him well.

Jennifer, a family doctor, said Michael’s behaviour led him to run-ins with the justice system and jail, where he remained untreated and deteriorated. She took her two young daughters to visit him there to show he was still loved. But when Michael was released, he was paranoid, delusional and hearing voices, and within weeks had killed himself.

The sisters, although better prepared to help him than most, said they tried hard, but feel the health system could have done much more to help him than it did.

Simone Usselman-Tod, an x-ray technologist and massage therapist, told of the younger of her two daughters, who in her early teens became withdrawn and prone to angry outbursts, which increased in severity. She became more and more irritable, intolerant of everything and everyone, refused to attend school and told her friends she was thinking of cutting her wrists.

Four counselors advised the family and their most common theme was that it was too lenient and should be firmer with her, but she went on to cut her wrists, arms and body with blades and her family was told “there was nothing we could do that would make her stop.”

Her family found a private agency, Recovery Counseling Services in Toronto, which treats patients. It suggested that her daughter, as a high-risk case, attend successively two residential centres in the United States, where she spent a total of 20 months being treated and medicated.

The daughter, now 18, is back home and an outpatient at the Toronto agency, She has learned many techniques to help her cope day-to-day, has not relapsed and is doing well, and once said, “Thank you, Mom, for saving my life.”

The mother said she was so impressed with the system in the U.S. that she has asked the Ontario government to help fund programs here so Ontarians can use them. A witness who preferred to use the name Ms. X said she is a Bay Street lawyer, working long hours, loving every minute of it and happily married with a five-year-old son.

But two years ago she awakened in the intensive care unit of a psychiatric ward, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Ms. X told the committee, “We need to make the public understand mental illness takes many forms and can attack anyone at any time through no fault of their own,” adding that MPPs will have taken a useful first step if they can make this message known.