“It’s a bit like when you have a bad dream, when you are in it, you beleive it 100 %, but when you wake up, you realize that ‘oh, it was a dream!'”
says Joseph-Antoine Echegaray while trying to explain what he himself calls an irrational experience.

Along with auditory hallucinations, during certain crises, he sees unreal things and smells odors that aren’t there. Like the time when the teaching student passed out,his senses were so altered.

“It exploded when I was in class,” he recalls. “I had the voice of a character, like that of Brad Pitt in Fight Club, who said to me: ‘If you’re a man, get up,’ but I was paralyzed. I was crying and my voice said to me: ‘You cry like a girl,’ but my body was totally paralyzed, I was unable to move.”

still in his young thirties, a visit to the doctor with his parents went wrong when he caught a healthcare professional, thinking that he threatened his family. “I heard the doctor’s voice, but this same voice told me that he wanted to remove life from my family, that they were going to take their souls to them. I had to react and intervene, as I was the only one to hear it.”

It was following this event that made him aggressive that the resident of the Ahuntsic district in Montreal decided “to bury these voices” thanks to medication.

A “Demonized” Disease

In the case mentioned earlier this week, the mother suffered from an episode of mixed mania with recent psychotic symptoms, according to the psychiatrist responsible for the file. The accused said he could at times feel invincible and imagined that his daughter’s body and mind were possessed by different entities.

“When there are acts of serious crimes, often, the only diagnosis we hear is schizophrenia, as if this disease was a bit demonized, while sometimes there are other diagnoses,” underlines Marc-André Lafond, psychosocial speaker at the Quebec Schizophrenia Society (SQS).

For Joseph-Antoine Echegaray, these various facts evoke above all sadness for sick and victims and do not help show that people get out of it.

“It saddens me as they are people in distress absorbed by their paranoia, they are not doing well. The proportion of people who take action is minimal compared to those who recover,” explains the one who is peer now helping the SQS.

It is not because you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia that you are more violent than the percentage in the population. Less than 5 % of serious crimes are committed by people who have mental disorders.

Recall that certain factors can increase dangerousness, such as substance abuse, history of violence or the feeling of persecution. “In addition, if the person has no stable treatment, has active symptoms, has no stable living environment, there, we end up with an explosive cocktail,” indicates Dr. Stéphanie Borduas-Pagé, head of the legal psychiatry service of the University Institute in Mental Health of Montreal.

Neither do you have to neglect the importance of loved ones, according to her, which are frequently enough the most likely to detect the warning signs of severe psychotic episodes.

Force to Receive Care Earlier?

The worker Marc-André Lafond hopes that these events will put “additional pressure on politicians” in order to review the law on the protection of persons whose mental state presents a danger for themselves or for others,also called the P-38 law,which allows hospitalization without consent according to the serious and imminent danger.

“In my opinion,the P-38 law protects a lot from the law to refuse treatment,but there is another symptom with schizophrenia,called anosognosia,it is the total or partial inability to recognize its illness,a lack of introspection. How can a person who cannot be sick made a fair decision on whether or not he has to take treatment?” he argues.

It is in this perspective to allow a preventive guard of a sick person that a coalition made up of police officers, psychiatrists, patients and their families reported on government last week.

“You have to be able to [give] a greater ease of treating people earlier, because it is like cancer, if it takes months before being treated, the disease progresses. It’s the same with mental illness, the more we expect, the more severe the symptoms are and difficult to treat,” estimates Dr. Allard,administrator at the Association of Psychiatrists in Quebec.

But for Joseph-Antoine Echegaray, it is clear that no one shoudl be forced to go to the hospital. “It is like obliging an alcoholic to go to detox if he is not ready to accept the disease and do the process, it is counterproductive. There must be more prevention, you can never predict that someone will go for a daycare. Once they are in their world, it is a little too late.”