Due to a lack of places in the secure units, individuals who are incarcerated or on S files are taken care of in the admission pavilions of the Gérard-Marchant hospital in Toulouse. Some caregivers feel in danger and ask for increased security.
“We receive these detainees with a lump in their stomachs. We know that some have committed atrocious crimes”, confides Guillaume
. This experienced caregiver has worked for several years in one of the admission pavilions of the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital in Toulouse. Since the beginning of the year, every week, with his colleagues, he has taken care of people serving sentences in the prisons of Occitania: “For lack of sufficient places at the UHSA (Specially equipped hospital unit) supposed to accommodate prisoners, we receive them in our services, which are not at all designed for that. There is no guard or police presence to ensure security. When an incarcerated person comes to have an operation or treatment in a conventional hospital, there is a escort, not here.”
Guillaume believes that the risks of escape are very high: “We only find ourselves with two caregivers to accompany an inmate who smokes in the garden. It is very easy to be able to get out and it would be enough for an inmate to hit a nurse for him. take his keys and run away.”
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“Inmate pressure blows”
To support his statements, the employee recounts moments of extreme tension between the staff and the detainees: “We do not necessarily know the reason for the detention of the person. So that adds to the stress. When we enter the room , these are insults, sexist remarks… Pressure shots, like: if you don’t let me do this, it’s going to be bad. Unfortunately, we end up taking blows. Some colleagues ended up in accidents at work Unlike the sick people we usually receive, these people are used to violence and know how to hit to hurt.
Loïc Brelier, SUD union representative and caregiver at Marchant since 2011 refuses to stigmatize the detainees: “I happened to be slapped by a granny who was decompensating but never by one of them. Those who come here are in real mental pain. Some have hallucinatory seizures, others have narrowly escaped death by slitting their veins. I can understand colleagues who are afraid because they are exhausted. They are forced to fill in the holes . Thirty nurses are missing here. In some pavilions, there are no longer even doctors.”
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Religious proselytism in pavilions?
According to Guillaume, the pavilion staff must also, but more sporadically, welcome radicalized individuals, on S files. “They are left without police surveillance. to mystical delusions. They invite in particular to stop eating pork. With everything that has happened recently, inevitably, it is scary, “he is moved
Asked about the subject, the prefecture does not indicate whether such information has been sent to them but specifies how the internment of this type of public is decided: “The procedure for care without consent is a procedure which is only initiated on the basis of medical elements. In all cases, the prefect does not have the power of initiative. He is seized by the medical profession, the psychiatric establishment and the ARS for placement.”
Assumed first name