Radoine Haoui, head of the general psychiatry center at the Gérard Marchant hospital in Toulouse, from whom three patients ran away in about ten days, believes at the microphone of France Bleu Occitanie that the caregivers have “do [leur] work as it should”. The teams will “rework the flaws if there are any”, he says. ARS Occitanie has requested an administrative investigation from the management of the Marchant hospital, after having reinforced security around the care center. The fourth man, who had fled Friday afternoon, was found on Saturday evening January 29 in Paris.
franceinfo: How to explain that three patients were able to run away from your establishment?
Radoine Haoui: I would like to remind you that psychiatry is not the discipline of miscellaneous facts. It is a medical discipline that treats patients, saves lives and avoids tragedies. We have this constant attention to reconcile care and restrictions on freedoms.
“Our wards, and most licensed psychiatric establishments, are not prisons, they are not fortresses.”
Radoine Haouiin France Bleu Occitanie
For us, it’s a pain to close the pavilions, because it has an impact on our patients, we had to explain why we closed our pavilions and suspended permissions. Patients have the feeling of suffering a double, or even a triple penalty: already because of their disease, because of being stigmatized, and also because of finding themselves in this media frenzy. We cannot effectively ignore that in psychiatry.
How are your patients treated?
We have an active queue of 15,000 people that we see over the year. 20% of patients are hospitalized, with different profiles. Two thirds are in free service and a third is hospitalized under duress. Of course, when you have patients who have a criminal history and who have been deemed irresponsible because of their clinical condition, the whole complexity of our work is to see how we support these people. These are not people sentenced to life imprisonment, psychiatric disorders improve with treatment, and little by little, we try to work on psychosocial rehabilitation, even their reintegration into society.
What drives us crazy is this paradoxical injunction. We are asked to care for people, saying to us: “be careful, we must guarantee their rights, their freedom”. And at the same time, society asks us for more security by saying we have to lock people up.
Four runaways in about ten days, including three from your hospital, does that raise the question of failures?
The ARS inspection will be able to determine if there have been any shortcomings. However, the three situations are completely different. I tend to say that all the caregivers did their job properly, once again a very complex job. We are going to do what we call experience feedback, mortality reviews, to examine all the sequences. I’m not saying there can’t be flaws, of course. The idea is to be able to rework these flaws if there are any. Today, we decided to reinforce our vigilance. But in any case, we are already hard at work trying to carefully examine each of these situations with a fine-toothed comb. Me, I would also tend to have a thought for the victims, I am someone who also thinks of the people who have been assaulted.