Horror has struck in a psychiatric ward at the Albert-Prévost Mental Health Hospital.
In the hours that followed, one patient ran away, and one signed a treatment refusal. Another requested euthanasia because, in her psychotic depression, the elderly lady is convinced that everything is her fault. Other patients sink deeper into their psychosis exacerbated by screams, blood, and terror. Three members of the regular healthcare staff are still at work. The others are all off on leave.
This event of unforgettable violence is just another of a long list of aggressions of all types, always traumatic, in a hospital setting. Nurses, patient-care attendants, emergency physicians, general practitioners and specialists, social workers, occupational therapists, psychologists, and security agents are victims each year. They are on the front lines, in a system that has been patched up and cut, throughout successive reforms bypassing ministers. A system that we have to make work, no matter what, despite outdated spaces that do not respect basic security rules, with insufficient and untrained personnel to face the worst.
The hospital must absorb everything, take everything, heal everything, regulate everything. It’s not an ordinary public place. This is the suffering place where requests are unlimited.
