We are of the generation that voted for those who “in the past had the impulse to raise the spirit of Quebecers very high,” as Odile Tremblay expressed it in a recent column. This situates you in relation to our age.
And the psychiatrist Camille Laurin was, with a few others, one of those visionaries who fought tooth and nail so that the mentally ill could live with dignity and really benefit from the care they needed in order to be able to integrate into society.
Thirty-four years of living with schizophrenics, the fourth and fifth children in our family, allow us to bear witness to the suffering they had to endure and still endure, alas, when their health has been, since their adolescence, in the hands of psychiatrists. . Our twins are now 48 years old and here is their journey.
stolen years
In 1989, at the age of 15, one suffered severe psychosis followed by a three-month hospitalization at the Allen Memorial in Montreal. The other manifests, almost at the same time, his first signs of the disease. Both are then followed by psychiatrists.
Our family then lived in Montreal. About two years later, we chose to settle in the Baie des Chaleurs, among other things to prevent them from experiencing their illness in town and, it must be said, from running the risk of them becoming homeless.
As soon as we arrived in Chaleur Bay, psychoses and hospitalizations resumed in one, and it took barely another year for the second to also fall seriously ill. Needless to say, we’ve had our fair share of police use for 15 years, if not more. In addition to running into the syndrome of the “revolving doors of psychiatry”.
So much suffering for these two young adults from whom the disease (even when cured) took everything away: the ability to succeed in school or sport, to keep a job, even in the community, to succeed in a romantic relationship, to integrate into activities volunteering and, above all, to integrate socially. In short, schizophrenia robbed them of everything. But, to make matters worse, it is the indifference of psychiatry towards them that has been the most harmful to them: about fifteen years for one and a little less than ten years for the other. Here are some concrete examples:
twin noh 1: he decides to go and live alone in Rimouski. Her psychiatrist, who knows the worsening of her symptoms, invites her parents to a meeting where she tells them she has the right to impose monthly injections of her medication, a treatment to which we subscribe, of course. But he refuses. Reaction of the psychiatrist: “We will continue the current medication then. »
There followed 13 years of problems, increasingly serious relapses, repeated moves, multiple trips between Rimouski and Gaspésie for hospitalizations and, worst of all, homelessness and prison in Rimouski as well as a suicide attempt. Thirteen years of total forfeiture that will end thanks to the involvement of his parents and Legal Aid. He now lives in an intermediate resource in Gaspésie thanks to which his progress and his recovery are constant to his great happiness and that of his family.
twin noh 2: obviously multiple relapses and hospitalizations, but living in independent accommodation for more than 25 years. A chaotic life, but filled with good times and repeated false successes. Then, in 2014, he was prescribed a new antipsychotic to be taken in rather high doses; two years later, she finds herself with a new psychiatrist who maintains this medication despite visible and constant weight gain with various negative symptoms.
A serious heart problem brought her to Quebec in 2019 and since then her doctors have been saying that many health problems threaten her. Being overweight becomes morbid and even prevents him from leaving his own house. She is alone, and her mental state is obviously deteriorating. Nine years of degeneration and, at 48, a whole hill to climb and no one to reach out to him. Really nobody.
Out of 34 years of living with illness, twenty-two have already been stolen from our children because psychiatry does not deviate one iota from the basic rule of the law: “If you are not dangerous to yourself- even or for others, nothing obliges me to accompany you or to help you. And in mental health, this fully applies even today.
A brief flashback
We have not quoted the psychiatrist Camille Laurin in vain. It was he who signed the afterword to Jean-Charles Pagé’s book The madmen are crying out for help!published in 1961, in which he attacks the Quebec culture of the time which “does not recognize the mentally ill and treats him as a foreigner from whom it is necessary above all to protect oneself”, quite the opposite of what he wishes as the instigator of the major reform finally set in motion in 1962 and which wants to “establish a new system which gives back to the patient his dignity and the chance to be treated as he should be”.
Sixty years later, here we are with 4,000 homeless people in Montreal, at least 30% of whom suffer from severe mental illness. Advertising telling us over and over again that “talking about mental illness is not enough anymore”, so it’s our turn to shout. We have testified because the evil is too great and makes us suffer too much… us too.