I never would have believed that my training in political science would one day allow me to extricate myself from a psychiatric emergency unit.
During the years preceding my hospitalization, I had learned to develop precise, convincing, hard-hitting arguments. At the hospital, just hours after being tied to a bed and forcibly administered medication to calm me down, I painstakingly prepared my presentation to convince the psychiatrist in front of me that I was fit to return. in the community. I knew I wasn’t, but I was ready, and I managed to convince him to give me my leave.
The day before, a friend and my brother had seen me scream and burst into tears as the guards approached me. I had barely walked through the emergency room doors when I immediately wanted to get out. The place was run down, the staff overworked. The trauma was immediate. It was there that I understood that the place I had in mind, the one that was to serve as my supreme sanctuary to finally calm me down, not only did not exist, but that the place where I had ended up had worsened my condition.
A few years later, I set foot in psychiatric hospitalization units in the greater Montreal area as a research assistant, then as a worker. This made me realize that my observation at the time was not attributable to the blackening filter of mental illness from which I had then suffered. Their condition was truly desolate. People were still crowded there, the atmosphere just as tense. Some places, though designed to heal, therefore “produced” psychological suffering.
What was my indignation to learn that some of these units were also not air-conditioned, transforming the psychological nightmare into a physical nightmare during heat waves. An unbearable nightmare that now recurs every year.
Such units are the ultimate expression of the lack of consideration that still persists vis-à-vis people with mental disorders. They deny human dignity. No wonder that a whole scientific literature focuses on what is called the trauma of hospitalization. But there is worse. As mentioned by an expert interviewed by The Press a year ago, the lack of resources would be involved in several of the suicides committed in the psychiatric units of Quebec in recent years.
The latest interdepartmental mental health action plan, unveiled in January, was certainly praised by the Association of Psychiatric Physicians of Quebec for the implementation and deployment of solutions other than “traditional” hospitalizations, such as hospitalizations in residence. In an ideal world where we would overcome the chronic underfunding of mental health denounced almost universally on all platforms, we would intervene early with an arsenal of tools that would reduce the crises leading to hospitalizations.
However, until further notice, sick people will continue to present themselves, often against their will, in these units. They will be admitted there in a state of crisis such that this reception environment will be fatally harmful to them.
In the early 1960s appeared The madmen are crying out for help. Testimony of a former patient of Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, a story that details the atrocities that its author experienced while being interned in the asylum. The Dr Camille Laurin signed the preface to this text by Jean-Charles Pagé, which urged decision-makers to change things, and quickly. The controversy caused by the release of the book would lead to the establishment of a commission of inquiry. This will give birth to a report that will inaugurate a paradigm shift in psychiatric care.
While Mental Health Week is in full swing, we have to admit that we are still in front of such a historic junction. As was the case 60 years ago, together with network employees who also want more humane conditions, the model of psychiatric units must be reviewed from top to bottom by giving users a voice. Only they know what pitfalls we must avoid in order to successfully treat them rather than make them live a nightmare.