I started working in the community three years ago. I am a suicide prevention worker and I am also a worker in a shelter for homeless women.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
The workers on the ground are competent, well trained, and the community organizations are, in my humble opinion, simply invaluable resources. Let’s take the example of listening and intervention lines. These are resources that are essential because of their service, often offered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People in a suicidal crisis call us, and we can ensure their safety while intervening with them.
However, we have many callers who tell us that they have tried to obtain psychological support, but that they have not succeeded. They are referred to other services or professionals who play an important role, but who do not offer an assessment of mental disorders and psychotherapy.
Some contact us after suicide attempts and inform us that their hospitalization lasted 24 hours, and that no psychological follow-up is guaranteed to them.
It’s demoralizing and it causes problems to persist and crisis situations to repeat themselves.
We know that having access to a psychologist is often essential and that psychotherapy is protective, but it is too often inaccessible. Ideally, we would work with callers to get them to see a psychologist to address their underlying issues. We would be there to accompany them in difficult times when their psychologist is not available. It would be wrong to tell callers that they have access to plenty of resources, when in reality, we are the only one available to them at the moment. We hear their frustration, their distress in connection with the lack of access to psychologists. We live it with them too.
Working in community organizations means being confronted with mental health problems, poverty and, very often, despair and psychological suffering.
Women experiencing homelessness
As a worker in a residential centre, I deal with women who have had different life paths, but who have in common to find themselves in a situation of homelessness. Domestic violence, serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, substance abuse disorders are some of the reasons that lead a woman or a mother to end up on the street. Many of the residents have psychiatric follow-up, but the vast majority have no follow-up with a psychologist and they would have liked one. It’s something they often tell us about. They need it and ask for it. They complain about it. Psychosocial workers have an essential role in their lives, but there is a lack of access to a psychologist. Especially when you have women who are thinking about suicide, who have a personality disorder, anxiety or depressive symptoms. We are limited at that time in our interventions.
There is a clear difference between community services, which provide rapid, often short-term support and crisis management, and psychological follow-up, which allows basic psychological problems to be treated.
It becomes pretty clear that these are complementary services, which should never be considered interchangeable.
If we want to relieve human suffering, support the community environment and save lives, it is essential to offer better access to psychologists in the public network. For this reason, I wholeheartedly support the Coalition of Quebec Public Network Psychologists and their mission. Mr. Lionel Carmant, Minister for Health and Social Services, I hope that you will implement their solutions very quickly in order to improve access to psychologists in the public network. Every day that goes by without this being done is one day too many! In Quebec, three people end their lives every day.
It’s high time for that to change! Inaction is, in my view, a form of abuse.