In Amqui, Prime Minister Legault, eager like so many others to frame the drama in terms of mental health problems, said that more had to be done on this side. Will he now repeat the same thing after each tragedy, like a month earlier with the Laval bus driver or again, four days later, with those bloody murders that occurred in Montreal, in the Rosemont district? In any case, in addition to sympathizing, the Prime Minister has promised to invest, according to a simplistic plan which wants that for each complex problem there is a simple solution.
Sympathize and promise to invest: here are the two keys to a single speech, that of a Prime Minister who shows up at the scene of a tragedy with the status of the providential man appointed every four years. Even repeated to satiety, can these words brandished like talismans be enough to inflect in another direction the social slope on which we are slipping?
The Prime Minister admits, at least, a dire lack of mental health resources. He is right. Hard to deny it. It has been pointed out to him many times. In the current structure of the health system, abused by the Dr Gaétan Barrette, psychologists, mostly women, are leaving the ship massively. They flee in part because they are poorly represented and poorly paid within the medical system. In 2022 alone, there were five times more departures than in the past! Everyone, although sorry, swims on the private side.
On all sides, the waiting lists to consult a psychologist continue to grow. According to projections, half of the psychologists needed by the health network will soon be missing. And of course, psychologists are not the only ones to suffer. All health personnel see the burden of individuals whose mental health wavers shifted onto their shoulders, in the midst of a society that does not, however, question its foundations.
“We added resources with the pandemic,” said François Legault. The Prime Minister may congratulate himself on adding lifeboats, but the pitfalls lie in wait more than ever. For years, the boat of the public health system has been sinking. In the current state of things, the drowned and the washes are increasing. The meager help available manages to pull them out of the water, just long enough to let them breathe, before letting them sink back into the waves, without changing anything at the root of the problem.
“The hospital is sick”, said Marc Favreau, alias Sol, a long time ago. This remains true. Isn’t this a sign that it is society that is profoundly so?
The sums reserved for “mental health” in the next budget will be increased, assures the Prime Minister. They already have been, he adds. “We have to add even more,” he said again, trying to be reassuring.
Is it permissible to ask whether it is by reducing taxes, as it is doing, that a government gives itself all the latitude to seriously inject more money into this network?
Pulled from one side then the other, Mr. Legault continues to be subject to the waves of current events. It will be nice to promise, one drama after another, to always row more towards the drowned, the fragile model that he presides will nevertheless continue to take everything to the bottom. At each pitfall, the undertow will be greater.
Faced with the crises and social problems that surround us and multiply, our system of understanding the world tries to free itself by reducing everything, these days, to the sole dimensions of mental illness. See the hasty comments of François Bonnardel. People in treatment should be deprived of driving licenses, he suggested in a pirouette. How many others, like him, threw themselves immediately, at full speed, on the wide boulevard of such stupidity?
Let’s get along well. Mental health issues are glaring. They are pressing. They exist. Psychoses, bipolarity, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders and many other sufferings of this register are long-standing realities. And they can’t be treated with chicken broth. We know it. We understand that. You need trained people. Health professionals. Dedicated people. It lacks it. It is a fact. A heartbreaking fact.
But we are also faced with a social and economic system that produces excesses and that we refuse to question. Consider, for example, the death toll on America’s roads. It is appalling. Also consider the effects of the pollution it produces. Beyond the “crazy driving”, all lives threaten to be crushed by these steel rams that adverts boast to us. Is it asking too much to see that part of the problem lies there? On the crazy highway of our uncontrolled collective failures, should we bring everything back for a long time to the sole mental health of each other?
Look at the case of the Horne foundry. For decades, it has been spitting death, without generating outpourings of compassion. On many occasions, the Legault government has been alerted, like its predecessors, to the dangers associated with such a high level of polluting emissions. “Unjustified concerns”, retorted the Legault government. The responsibility for this exploitation, of its bosses, the violence generated on the living world evades the idea that an industry and the health of the economy must be kept alive, even if it means sacrificing those who make it live. . So that it seems normal, in the order of every man for himself where we live, that it is the sick and the mistreated who still pay the broken pots. Thus, a whole district is announced, without further ado, that it is invited to move!
In other words, we change the evil place. Waiting for the next tragedy to break out.