The patient found in Toulouse had run away from La Candélie on Sunday
The Departmental Hospital Center of Candélie located in Pont-du-Casse, through the voice of its director Richard Campmas, confirms that the patient found in Toulouse on Monday in a hotel room near the Matabiau station, has indeed thwarted the monitoring. La Candélie asked to be transferred to a more secure unit.
“He withdrew on Sunday during a transfer, taking advantage of the arrival of a new hospitalization in the unit which welcomes him”, justifies Richard Campmas. The director of the CHD affirms that the gendarmerie was immediately informed of the facts and that usually, when patients escape, they are recovered within the perimeter of the Candélie site, but not this time. We had to push the search further to Toulouse where he was discovered on Monday by the police.
Known since 2017 for regular stays
This 31-year-old man, hospitalized under duress since December 21, has already committed two previous runaways from the psychiatric hospital, still indicates the head of the CHD, but he could be caught quickly.
The person concerned has been making regular stays at Candélie since 2017, but in the absence of a crisis, he lives the rest of the time in an open environment.
The management of this patient would be complicated, conceded the director, without deflowering his psychiatric profile. However, it stipulates that it is potentially aggressive, without further details on the pathology that the person concerned would present, so as not to lift medical secrecy.
The unit in which this thirty-year-old is interned is a general psychiatry unit, explains Richard Campmas, with movement between patients who have received care under duress and those who have access to free care. This unit in a closed environment is therefore not completely hermetic from the point of view of surveillance, due to the comings and goings of patients, supposed “we must add the shortage of personnel from which the psychiatric sector suffers in general. We cannot put a nurse behind each patient”, underlines the director.
The Candélie units have secure access, but people under duress coexist with patients in free care who can benefit from leave permission outside the site, which was not the case on Sunday with the patient who managed to sneak up and run away. But that explains the difficulty of exercising infallible surveillance when there are traffic flows within the same pavilion.
However, even if the personality depicted as violent of the runaway subject raises questions, especially in the light of the recent mediatized miscellaneous cases, the director explains that each patient who was able to escape momentarily in the past from the enclosure of La Candélie, “is not, very fortunately, systematically aggressive” in the passage to the act or a phenomenon of decompensation. “Often they are likely to endanger themselves. These audiences should not be brought to shame.”
A request for transfer to USIP
The case of this patient found in Toulouse and who has since returned to his pavilion at La Candélie, should be the subject of a transfer request by the hospital management, within an USIP (Intensive Care Unit in Psychiatry) in another department, perhaps in the Dordogne which has this type of closed and secure structure. A more suitable intermediate structure, specifies the director between the general psychiatry unit and the UMD (Unit for difficult diseases). These USIPs are intended to provide a framework containing patients with major behavioral disorders that cannot be treated under satisfactory conditions in general psychiatry departments.
“Until recently, we could implement isolation measures, but a law now opposes it,” explains Richard Campmas, who makes no secret of the coercion between the legal framework surrounding psychiatry and staff far away. to be overcrowded.
If necessary, put an end to the legal vagueness for the tenuous and confused border between internment and prison-type confinement that this measure would maintain without however being struck by a real court decision, when these patients benefit from the clearest time of criminal irresponsibility. Indeed in 2020, the Constitutional Council ruled unconstitutional the provisions of Article L. 3222-5-1 of the Public Health Code, which since 2016 had regulated the use of isolation and restraint within establishments responsible for to provide psychiatric care without consent. And this decision took effect on January 1, 2022 to limit these exceptional isolation measures to 48 hours.