System failed man with nowhere else to go
Inquest into Boucher suicide focuses on mental health, lack of treatment
From the day she met him, Johanna Duprey knew Mario-Nelson Boucher was going to require a lot of help, but something about him convinced her he was worth it.
Duprey, a social worker employed by the NAHA Centre, a residence for homeless men trying to transition to more stable lifestyles, was in charge of screening applicants for the centre’s 19 apartments. Boucher was coming there from nearly 23 years spent in prison.
Meeting in her office in late 2015, Boucher told Duprey he was motivated to turn his life around. He wanted to re-establish a relationship with his 19-year-old son and find work in a kitchen. He had been to Narcotics Anonymous meetings to fight his addictions and said he was ready to stay sober.
But there was something bothering him: he had been told he would leave prison with a pillbox and his prescribed antidepressants, but he didn’t have it. He wasn’t sure what to do, and it was making him anxious. His health insurance card was about to expire. He had no family doctor. It now fell on the shelter to find him the help he needed.
Seven months later, while going to his room with a Videotron employee to fix his cable connection, Duprey found Boucher hanging behind his door. He was 44.
Boucher’s mental health, and the difficulties in getting him the treatment he needed were the focus of a Quebec coroner’s inquest into his death on Tuesday.
“Every time we referred someone to the competent health services, we never knew what would happen,” an emotional and frustrated Duprey, who never returned to work at the centre after finding Boucher, testified. “It happened often — residents became unstable and we referred them to services, yet they came back to us the next day. It was the same problem (every time).”
The centre started the process to find Boucher a doctor immediately, Duprey said, but requests often got lost in the shuffle.
Her file from the centre is loaded with mentions of trying to get Boucher the mental health services he needed.
The only diagnosis in Boucher’s file from prison was an attention deficit disorder, but he often experienced mental health breakdowns.
About a week after arriving at the centre, he was found in “comatose state” in the street with his hands and feet bloodied from smashing a window. He told people he saw his sister on the other side and wanted to save her.
In February, police were called to the centre when Boucher was having paranoid thoughts, including thinking his body was covered with ants and his neighbours were making holes in his walls. He became threatening toward staff and other residents.
Another mental health crisis required police intervention in May, a month before Boucher died by suicide.
On top of whatever mental health issues Boucher was experiencing, the transition from prison to a residence, after 23 years in detention, continued to weigh on him.
The simple fact of needing to be responsible for a set of keys, Duprey said, overwhelmed him. At times, he would make a bed in his closet and sleep there instead. He cleaned his clothes in a bucket in his room and would be messy when eating or using the bathroom, annoying other residents. He would get frustrated when trying to send an email, something he had never learned how to do.
And he often spoke of missing his life in prison, where he said he had a job as a cook, friends and hobbies. Outside he had nothing. His mental health crises compounded everything.
Marie-Claude Naud, who worked closely with Boucher at the NAHA Centre, described him as a man who fell between the cracks in the system for too long. Now no one knew what to do with him.
“Mario was like a baseball,” Naud said. “We would send him to the hospital, then they would send him right back to us.”
In the end, she said, Boucher probably needed more supervision than the centre could offer. But what were they supposed to do?
“Put him out in the street? Who would have taken him in?” she asked. “He shouldn’t have been with us. But then the question became, ‘where was he supposed to be?’”
The inquest continues Wednesday.