This is Part 1 of 20 Years in Isolation, a four-part investigation into the use of seclusion at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care.
Audrey Watson-Pinnock wasn’t going to let her voice go unheard.
It was May 2025, and her son, Camelott Hamblett, was in his 20th year of being detained at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. He had spent that time almost entirely in isolation, or what is known in the medical world as “seclusion.” Found not criminally responsible or “NCR” for a sexual assault two decades ago, the 43-year-old Toronto man living with treatment-resistant schizophrenia had not improved since.
And the Ontario Review Board (ORB) was being asked at a hearing to continue his detention, in the name of public safety.
Watson-Pinnock spoke up: “I have a question.”
In her mind, the registered practical nurse says, she was thinking about how an animal wouldn’t be treated this way. In 20 years, her son’s mental health had only seemed to get worse from being locked in a sparsely furnished room for 22 hours or more a day. His teeth had been removed, he had missed funerals for family members, and he’d repeatedly said he’d rather go back to jail.
“My son is going to die in this place,” she told the gathering of doctors and lawyers. It was not a question — more a statement of fact from a mother who was finally fed up with the lack of progress in her son’s case: “He’s never going to come out.”
“My son is going to die in this place,” Audrey Watson-Pinnock says.
Giovanni Capriotti for the Toronto Star
Mental health experts agree that the longer someone spends in isolation, the more detrimental it will be to their mental health, especially if they already have a serious mental illness.
Camelott Hamblett may be the person who has spent the most time locked in seclusion in any Ontario hospital.
That a very ill man can spend 20 years and counting in isolation calls into question not only the treatment practices at Waypoint — where others continue to be held in similar situations — but also of the independent oversight of forensic psychiatric care in Ontario.
A Star investigation into the use of long-term seclusion at Waypoint has conducted numerous interviews and pored over hundreds of pages of medical records going back 20 years to reveal those responsible for Hamblett’s situation: the many doctors at Waypoint who continue to recommend seclusion, and the countless ORB members who have repeatedly ordered his detention while rarely flagging any issues about Hamblett’s living conditions.
Psychiatric experts have said that the use of seclusion for prolonged periods of time at Waypoint, the province’s only high-secure forensic psychiatric facility, is not appropriate. Eminent doctors, giving their opinion for a lawsuit against the facility, have described the hospital’s practices as “overused,” “abused” and “grossly in excess” of other North American psychiatric facilities.
“It is egregious. It is abusive. It is completely inconsistent with recovery,” said one 2023 report by a pair of U.S. experts behind the best practices that Waypoint itself says it is implementing. They wrote “without hesitation” that no U.S. facility uses seclusion the way Waypoint does.
The grounds of Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care in Penetanguishene, Ont.
Sophie Bouquillon for the Toronto Star
Seclusion is necessary at times, all experts agree — but it should be measured in hours, not years.
The ORB — made up of former judges, doctors, lawyers and laypersons — decides the fate of anyone found NCR or unfit to stand trial, many of whom have complex mental health challenges and represent some of the most vulnerable members of society.
Among other things, the board’s mandate includes analyzing an individual’s living conditions when considering whether they should remain detained. But almost two decades’ worth of decisions show that the board’s hearing panels — comprised of different members each time — never expressed any major concerns about Hamblett remaining in seclusion; some decisions make but a passing reference to the fact.
Last May was no different. Despite Watson-Pinnock’s pleas, the ORB’s decision was once again the same: Hamblett should remain detained at Waypoint. The board also declined to order an independent assessment of his case, as they didn’t believe there had been a treatment impasse.
For Watson-Pinnock, that couldn’t stand.
Hamblett’s new lawyers hope it’s the step needed to finally get him out of seclusion.
“My view is that the house is on fire,” his lawyer, Anita Szigeti, told the Court of Appeal in January. “The board has to acknowledge the emergency, the inhumanity of the situation.”
What emerges from the records of Camelott Hamblett’s life at Waypoint is the story of a man whose plight was well known to those with power to try to change his circumstances.
But little was done — a fact that was met with disbelief from the appeal court judges: “No progress appears to have been made in 20 years,” Justice Grant Huscroft said.
“With the greatest of respect to all those involved, trying their best: It ain’t doing any good.”
Waypoint president and CEO Dr. Nadiya Sunderji, second from left, is joined by Ontario health minister Sylvia Jones, then-Waypoint board chair Ernie Vaillancourt, and Simcoe North MPP Jill Dunlop at an event in December 2023.
File photo
Waypoint’s president and CEO told the Star in a statement that while she can’t comment on individual cases due to patient confidentiality requirements, the hospital is committed to reducing or discontinuing the use of seclusion and restraint where it’s safe and clinically appropriate to do so.
Presented by the Star with the experts’ criticism from the lawsuit launched by Toronto firm Rochon Genova about Waypoint’s prolonged use of seclusion, Dr. Nadiya Sunderji said that the hospital has achieved meaningful improvements over the past few years, including a decrease in violence and a “reduced reliance” on seclusion, though she did not respond to a follow-up question asking for data.
Sunderji did not respond to questions about why Waypoint uses seclusion for prolonged periods, nor about how many of its patients are currently in long-term seclusion.
Camelott Hamblett’s life before Waypoint
As a child growing up in Toronto, Camelott Hamblett had many friends, did well in school, played soccer, hockey, and basketball, and loved travelling to Jamaica to visit family.
He was humble, he was dear, honest, bright — “everybody loved him,” his mother said in an interview.
His sister, Cheyenne Phillip, described him as a “gentle giant,” the brother who bought her first pair of Air Jordan shoes and took her trick-or-treating, determined to fill up two pillowcases with candy.
When his other sister, Schennelle Hamblett, talks to her own son about the way to treat his younger sister, she said she tells him about Camelott — how he “was so sweet and loving to me,” never fought with her, and would ask if she was OK if she seemed upset.
Camelott Hamblett as a young boy
“It hurts me that so much of his life has been taken from me as well,” she said.
His mother could count on him to pick up his younger sisters from school and daycare, sometimes making them macaroni and cheese until she got home from her job as a personal support worker. When she was studying to become an RPN, her son would take out her books and quiz her.
“Camelott was a very athletic and vibrant young boy,” Watson-Pinnock said.
As his family remembers it, things started to change in 1999, when he was 17 years old. Hamblett got in a street fight — his mother said the attacker mistook him for someone else — and the other person bit off his lower lip.
He was admitted to the Hospital for Sick Children, where doctors attempted to reattach the lip, but the tissue did not survive.
“I didn’t think it would affect him that badly,” his mother said. “He was such a strong person, with a strong will, strong mind.”
She then paused, before continuing: “And from there, he just went downhill.”
Watson-Pinnock told a psychiatrist in 2001 that after the lip injury, her son reported hearing voices. He had become “quite withdrawn and aloof,” failing to attend school or to look for jobs, and became “unduly preoccupied about the scar on his face.”
Schennelle Hamblett vaguely remembers this time. “He wasn’t violent,” she said. “Looking back, I think he was just trying to manage it and cope with it.”
The hospital visits for psychiatric concerns began in 2000, according to voluminous summaries of medical records. A diagnosis of schizophrenia was made in short order, but the records suggest Hamblett had a pattern of initially refusing to take his medication, only to be discharged once stable.
Hamblett racked up charges stemming from his illness and substance use disorder — assault, failing to comply with court orders, threats and drug possession. He spent time in jail but was never convicted of anything. To this day, he has no criminal record.
In June 2004, he was arrested in Toronto for following a 53-year-old woman he didn’t know, grabbing her arm, exposing himself to her and, before he fled, declaring they were going to have sex. This was the basis for the sexual assault charge for which he was later found NCR.
He was released after the arrest but was admitted several more times to hospital. While at Humber River Regional Hospital in June 2005, he punched two visitors at random in the face without provocation. They didn’t suffer any visible injuries, but he was once again arrested, and this time he was held in custody.
He’s never been out since.
Life in seclusion
The general consensus in psychiatry — and according to Waypoint’s own policy — is that seclusion is the option of last resort when dealing with a patient who presents an immediate danger to themselves or others. It’s also usually supposed to be brief.
For Hamblett, it’s been his whole world for half of his life. Over 20 years, Waypoint’s doctors have tried every possible antipsychotic medication, cognitive behavioural therapy, multiple sessions of electroconvulsive therapy, and have sought at least three outside reviews. But they have been unable to bring his psychotic symptoms down to a manageable level.
Hallucinations
When he was experiencing extreme hallucinations, it’s probably because he’s just in a room year after year by himself.
Numerous pages detailing his aggressive behaviour due to persistent auditory hallucinations — including assaults on staff and patients, threats, punching walls, exposing himself to female staff, and self-harming — have been filed by the hospital annually with the review board.
The records note his mental status can fluctuate wildly and that he’s “genuinely a nice person” when less symptomatic. Nevertheless, he’s rarely let out for more than two hours — almost always in restraints — and some days not at all.
His family argues that it’s the seclusion itself that is at least partly to blame for Hamblett’s behaviour. Schennelle recalled the family being told during a hospital visit that Hamblett was in an aggressive state and didn’t want to see them, but he was brought out after they insisted.
“He was so calm, so happy, so elated,” she said. “That experience alone just goes to show that when he was experiencing extreme hallucinations, it’s probably because he’s just in a room year after year by himself.”
Camelott Hamblett, right, being visited by his brother-in-law, Ebenezer Yamoah, at Waypoint in 2015.
Hamblett had his teeth removed by a dentist, as records state he has poor oral hygiene. That’s left his brother-in-law, Ebenezer Yamoah, wondering how Waypoint could be so “cruel” to not do more to help him take care of himself.
“Under no circumstances should people, as human beings who live on this Earth, be put in the situation that Camelott is in,” said Yamoah, who used to play basketball with Hamblett before he became ill.
Inside Hamblett’s room, a bare mattress sits on a plastic platform with no sheets or pillowcases, according to Szigeti, who recently became his lawyer and visited him earlier this year. There’s also a toilet, a plastic bookcase and a seating area, as well as a large window facing outside onto Waypoint’s grounds next to Georgian Bay in Penetanguishene.
“The thing that broke my heart is Camelott has a stuffy,” said Szigeti. “He’s 43 years old and has a stuffy on his bookshelf. I thought it was a bear, and he said it was a moose.”
It’s important for decision-makers to go see how people like Hamblett live, Szigeti said. “Because you can read about it, think about it — but nothing prepares you for it.”
Szigeti described feeling a “sense of panic” being in the room — “I kept glancing at the door behind me to make sure it was open.”
A typical patient room at Waypoint is seen here in a rendering by the design firm behind a recent renovation.
Cannon Design
The push to get Camelott Hamblett out of isolation
After his final arrest in 2005, Hamblett was first sent to Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) to be treated so that he could be declared mentally fit to stand trial, and it was at this point that it started becoming apparent to health-care professionals that he presented with an extremely difficult form of schizophrenia.
In a July 2005 report, a CAMH psychiatrist wrote that despite receiving “multiple medications,” Hamblett remained “psychotic, bizarre, and unpredictable,” and that the bulk of his stay at CAMH had been “in an isolation room due to the obvious potential for serious physical aggression.”
The doctor wrote: “The relative lack of improvement with quite large doses of multiple antipsychotic medications to date suggests his long-term prognosis is guarded, to put it mildly.”
Hamblett was transferred to what is now Waypoint in August 2005. A few months later, psychiatrist Dr. Derek Pallandi told the court there had been no improvement: “Unfortunately, despite aggressive pharmacotherapy … Mr. Hamblett has remained highly symptomatic and unstable in his mental state.”
Hamblett was ultimately found not criminally responsible for the sexual assault and hospital assaults in 2007.
Ever since, the order keeping Hamblett in seclusion has been made by a doctor and his case is assessed daily, but not necessarily by his treating psychiatrist, nor always in person. The assessment by a physician is completed “in collaboration with the on-site clinical team directly involved in the patient’s care,” Waypoint said.
The atrium at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care.
waypointcentre.ca
The staff check on Hamblett regularly, and a “seclusion relief team” will escort him out for brief periods of time, so he can do things like shower or listen to music — his family says he likes Sean Paul and old reggae. In other years, when he was less symptomatic, he was able to play basketball.
A patient in long-term seclusion is also supposed to be evaluated in person by a psychiatrist every 28 days; it emerged at Hamblett’s review board hearing last year that five psychiatrists completed 12 seclusion consultations in the prior year, meaning some of them assessed Hamblett more than once.
How can it be that a man could spend 20 years in isolation before his case appeared before the courts?
This was the question the judges kept coming back to at the Ontario Court of Appeal in January.
Part of the answer can be found in the ORB decisions, where each year Hamblett’s longtime lawyer, Peter Mudry, made the same request on behalf of the family: That Hamblett be transferred to a facility closer to home in the Greater Toronto Area — for instance, CAMH.
Year after year, the other institutions said they would not take Hamblett, believing only Waypoint had the staff and expertise to manage him.
But Mudry’s requests never changed, and the board’s decisions to continue Hamblett’s detention at Waypoint were never appealed.
Mudry, who is now retired, could not be reached for comment. (The Star received an “undeliverable” message from his old law firm email address, and the firm now using his office number said it could not pass along a message.)
When Szigeti came on board in the last two years, her firm took the approach that an independent assessment was needed to at least try to get Hamblett out of seclusion.
Lawyer Anita Szigeti is fighting to get Camelott Hamblett out of seclusion.
Sophie Bouquillon/Toronto Star
She explained in court that such an assessment is different than the external consultations requested by Waypoint in Hamblett’s case, in that the review board would pick the assessor and set the parameters if the parties can’t agree, and the board would maintain oversight of the assessment. It could also be much more comprehensive than external consultations, which are more like “second opinions” where the hospital gets to pick the doctor, she said.
Szigeti believes the reason the status quo has been maintained for so long is, in part, that people working in the system have become desensitized — “They can no longer step back and see what is obvious to the rest of the world, which is that there is something terribly wrong.”
The change in tactics was also driven by Hamblett’s younger sister, Cheyenne Phillip, who became more involved in her brother’s case in the past few years as one of his substitute decision-makers.
It was a “dead end” to keep asking the board to move her brother closer to home, she said.
“There has to be a doctor out there who has seen Camelott’s situation and can help him in some sort of way, where Waypoint has failed,” she told the Star.
The independent assessment ordered by the court in January is expected to be conducted in the coming months.
Camelott Hamblett being visited at Waypoint in 2024 by his sister, Cheyenne Phillip, left, nieces and nephew, and mother Audrey Watson-Pinnock.
Family photo
‘It’s the accountability that is the outlier’
“These cases are not the outliers; it’s the accountability that is the outlier,” the longtime prison reform advocate said.
Dr. John Bradford, one of the world’s leading experts in forensic psychiatry, who briefly worked at Waypoint, suggested that what’s needed is an independent judicial review. He proposed former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, who would have the power to go into any part of a psychiatric hospital, whenever she wished, to report on the conditions — similar to the authority granted to MPs, senators, and judges to access any part of a federal prison.
Bradford wondered in an interview with the Star: Why is it only now that a treatment impasse has finally been declared?
“It could have been after one year, it could have been after one month,” said Bradford, who worked for decades as the clinical director of the forensic psychiatry program at what was then the Royal Ottawa Hospital, and is a past chair of the examination board for forensic psychiatry of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. John Bradford
Ronald Zajac/The Recorder and Times
“There’s a logic there that escapes me. As a psychiatrist who I think has the psychopharmacological skillset to manage treatment-resistant schizophrenia in difficult cases, I don’t think it would take me 20 years to decide that there’s a problem and a treatment impasse.”
Bradford worked at Waypoint for one year, between 2016 and 2017. He resigned after his concerns about the prolonged use of seclusion went unaddressed.
A common theme in the review board decisions is that Hamblett’s psychiatrists remained optimistic that there could be a breakthrough despite years without success.
“The accused remains very, very ill,” the review board said in 2010. “Even in the most highly-structured ward, in a maximum secure facility, with the most highly-trained staff and the greatest staff to patient ratio, the accused’s risk for the most part of the year can only be contained in seclusion.
“But while extremely ill, the treatment team ‘has not given up on him.’ The board is hopeful for an improvement.”
One of his previous psychiatrists, Dr. Craig Beach, confirmed for the review board in 2011 that “almost every medication known to psychiatry has been tried on Mr. Hamblett.”
In 2015, Waypoint solicited help from an outside doctor. In a report, Dr. Chekkera Shammi at Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences wrote: “There are no easy solutions that can be recommended.”
Every medication
Almost every medication known to psychiatry has been tried on Mr. Hamblett.
He suggested putting Hamblett back on clozapine, a medication used to treat schizophrenia when other antipsychotic drugs have failed, but which comes with serious potential side effects, including a sudden drop in white blood cell count and irregular heartbeat. Shammi also recommended a weight loss drug that has potential anti-impulsivity effects.
“It is important to maintain hope and an optimistic attitude,” Shammi wrote.
By 2017, clozapine was a “mainstay” of Hamblett’s medication regimen, and staff were noticing “heartening improvements.” He was leaving his room more often without restraints to shower. He was also engaging in cognitive behavioural therapy and learning strategies to cope with his hallucinations.
But the improvements didn’t last. Two more external consultations, this time by Dr. Karen De Freitas at Ontario Shores, recommended a further increase of clozapine, but Hamblett’s then-treating psychiatrist felt his clozapine levels were already quite high. De Freitas also suggested increasing the dosage of valproic acid, a mood-stabilizing medication, but it ended up worsening Hamblett’s mental state and reducing the time he spent outside of his room. An increase in the antipsychotic medication loxapine had the same effect.
De Freitas also mentioned once again trying electroconvulsive therapy — the procedure, which involves causing brief seizures by passing small electrical currents through the brain while under general anesthesia, is used to alleviate symptoms of severe mental illness.
But Hamblett’s family and substitute decision-makers were against the idea, as the treatment appeared to have had little positive effect on him when he underwent 18 sessions around 2008. Hamblett’s current psychiatrist at Waypoint, Dr. Stephanie Bouskill, told the review board she would not be recommending it.
As of last year, Hamblett was on four different antipsychotic medications, as well as medication to sleep and to stabilize his mood. Bouskill told the review board she would explore putting her patient on an antidepressant, as well as once again looking at the use of cognitive behavioural therapy.
“I don’t anticipate improvements to occur quickly,” she said.
‘Give him a chance’: Hope for a better life
Aside from his parents, Camelott Hamblett has several siblings, aunts and uncles, and many nieces and nephews. Relatives have attended most of his review board hearings, and they visit him at Waypoint as often as they can.
His sisters have no hesitation in bringing their children along; Watson-Pinnock described how her youngest grandchild adores Hamblett.
“She doesn’t look at him like a monster,” she said. “She knows that’s her Uncle Camelott and he’s not well.”
Watson-Pinnock firmly believes her son can live a fulfilling and law-abiding life, with the support of his many relatives and the right medication. She pictures him living in his own apartment, maybe with a wife and children.
Camelott Hamblett as a teenager.
“I’ve begged them to give him a chance,” she said through tears of her efforts to help Hamblett. “I know that God is going to give me back my son.”
The family is hoping the independent assessment will lead to Hamblett becoming well enough to be transferred to a facility in the GTA, and maybe even released one day. But they’re not naïve about it happening overnight.
“I don’t think I’m asking for too much,” Phillip said. “He deserves to be free, but with the proper care.”
She called her brother recently when he was having a bad day, telling him not to listen to the voices in his head, as she played reggae music videos for him over Zoom.
“We have to keep his faith alive,” she said. “He’s asked to go to jail, he’s had thoughts that ‘maybe I’m just gonna die.’ But we have a saying: What is not dead, we don’t throw away.”
In Part 2 of 20 Years in Isolation, coming Friday: Why Waypoint is being called an “abusive” outlier for its use of long-term seclusion.