On Tuesday, June 7, I participated in the thematic public inquiry of the coroner’s office on suicide. What was my surprise to see members of my family enter the room to show me their support: my godfather Yvan, my cousin Pascal and his daughter Élodie. When my turn came, I faced the coroners and took an oath to tell them about my brother who took his own life at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute on July 11, 2018. I was confident and proud to my family, here on behalf of my brother.
When I was Élodie’s age, in Cégep, I wrote a farewell letter to my godfather and my godmother; I had decided to end it. The postal service was efficient, and shortly afterwards, in the middle of class, a psychologist came to interrupt my teacher and asked me to follow her.
It wasn’t just a psychologist who saved my life and made me want to live forever. It was the members of my family to whom I had written a goodbye and who decided that it was not a good idea. Because I had no idea how important I was to them. I thought I wasn’t important to anyone. There was a family event, and everyone made sure I would be there. My cousin took me home with his wife, and I remember she even ironed my clothes. I was jostled in my universe where everything was then explained and argued around “it doesn’t work anymore, it doesn’t tempt me anymore, it’s over, I don’t want my life anymore, everyone don’t care anyway “.
A person who loses his footing needs to find his foundations, and his story and his family can remind him of his breadcrumb trail, the one that allowed him to exist at the start.
But to hear the prejudices of caregivers and the stigmatization of patients declined in numerous examples by the witnesses heard last Tuesday, the real suicidal people do not seem, alas, not always taken seriously by these people who nevertheless say they are serious.
I am a teacher, and one day I said to a colleague, who was complaining about the fact that children write badly, that these students ask us to live up to our profession: we do not teach to be only the teacher of students who are good and who will prove us right.
My brother died in indignity. And I am revolted by the general indifference towards suicide. Moreover, what media really follows the work of this public inquiry? I am happy to see that my family took an interest in my process, and that others, like me, had the courage to tell their story. It is not as fun as a dance on TikTok, but it relates what is most human, reminding that no one is immune to moral suffering which, one day, becomes just of “too much” to the point that one begins to brood and brood over his loss.
What I experienced on Tuesday, deep in my flesh, is not my testimony. These are all the other testimonies that I have heard, and which have told… the same story as mine. Me Julie-Kim Godin, coroner in charge of this inquest, asked the last participant to share her ideas on the theme of mourning: “What would help you mourn? I would have liked to be asked the same question.
“Responsibility” is the first word that would have come to mind. Suicide generates an irrepressible feeling of guilt among relatives who have not yet pulled the trigger, not pushed the stool, not provided the barbiturates. And when, in hospitals, we put the blame on the patient, when we are told: “He would have done it anyway”, “It’s his choice”, “There was nothing to do”, we feel even more guilty since we ask ourselves: hello, is it a disease or not? Did you want to cure him, or not? What families experience with suicide is a vortex of suffering that the hospital deepens with its refusal to bear the weight of its responsibility.
The only thing that would help healing, in my opinion, is that this responsibility be named, when a hospitalized loved one dies in hospital or after receiving treatment. What would heal is the coroner’s zeal to name the part of the care that has stalled and failed. […] It is important to name him, to relieve the survivors of the weight of a fabulous responsibility and to ensure, collectively, that it will not happen again. I remind you that the coroner works in principle in the service of the public.
In the hope that this public inquiry is not just a circus to satisfy exhausted families… Because we must not hide it, giving a space of freedom of speech to the bereaved to express their distress, it is also s assured of their silence forever.
The coroner is the last bastion left to defend the dignity of the victims of the worst care and their broken survivors. By the way, hello!