‘When they buy those drugs, it’s a loaded gun’
OTTAWA – Alain Béliveau swipes through his phone, showing photos of his daughter, Sara-Jane. In almost every photo, she looks happy.
But the image Alain can’t get out of his mind is a piercing look he caught, not on his phone but on a day they argued, when Sara-Jane said she didn’t want to live with him in his Orléans home anymore. He didn’t understand her, she shouted. She wanted to return to Montreal where her boyfriend and other friends were.
Fine, he told her, go.
And for a moment, amid the tears, the accusations and chaos, he thought he saw all the hurt, the pain, the harms, the years of anxiety scratched across her eyes. This was not what she wants, he thought.
“I think she was suffering a lot. She was crying and I saw in her an intense and huge distress. I think I saw her soul. We looked at each other and it was painful. It was pure pain.”
He backtracked. “You don’t have to go,” he told her. “You’re in no condition to drive to Montreal.”
But it was too late. Sara-Jane packed her things and left.
Alain never saw her alive again.
Sara-Jane Béliveau was outgoing and wanted to change the world. “She wanted to help people,” recalls Alain. “She was full of life.”
In her fourth year studying civil law and international affairs at University of Ottawa, the 24-year-old intended to use her education to help Indigenous groups.
Her Facebook page illustrates her progressive support of various causes, including climate change and women’s reproductive rights. Other Facebook posts, in hindsight, perhaps point to that look that her father saw that night.
Three weeks before her death, she posted a tweet by Rob Boyd at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, warning of deadly carfentanil, a powerful opioid 100 times stronger than fentanyl, in Ottawa’s drug supply. “Use supervised consumption sites,” Boyd tweeted, “do not use alone, try small amounts first, do not mix drugs (including alcohol, benzos), call 911, carry naloxone!”
On May 17, back at University of Ottawa to work at a three-day conference, Sara-Jane overdosed on heroin laced with a small amount of carfentanil.
She died alone.
She had anxiety issues since she was a youngster, and at around 20 was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Following an overdose in Montreal in 2015, she began seeing a psychiatrist, who tried to bring her anxiety under control with prescription drugs, including Ativan, a common brand name for lorazepam, a benzodiazepine medication, or “benzo.”
“The benzo crisis is the one that sits behind the opioid crisis,” says Alain, citing growing numbers of youths with anxiety issues. “You start with benzo, and then you go to other drugs.”
Sara-Jane moved in with her father in Orléans when she started at university in the fall of 2015. “She was doing OK,” says Alain, “but she found out that university was harder than she thought, and her anxiety went up.”
In March 2016, Alain recommended she consult a health professional, and a psychologist was found.
“But now and then she would have these anxiety crises, and she would go to the clinic at the University and she would get Ativan. I don’t know how much. I thought she was getting just a few pills, because that’s how it should be prescribed; a few pills at a time just to deal with your panic attacks, and then you go see a professional to solve the underlying problem.”
Each weekend, meanwhile, Sara-Jane returned to Montreal, where her friends and boyfriend were.
Her second year proved even more difficult, with more panic attacks. She started to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed different drugs, among them Seroquel and Abilify, along with the Ativan.
“By the end of the second year, I got her to see another psychologist who specialized in borderline personality,” recalls Alain.
“She started therapy for me, not for her, because I insisted. But she was the kind of person who would say ‘I need to get help,’ then she would get help and start feeling a bit better, and then she would say ‘I don’t need help now. I’m fine.’”
She dropped out of school following the first semester of her third year, and moved back to Montreal. In April, against her father’s advice, she bought a car using part of a $100,000 line of credit — $20,000 per year — that Alain says is easy for law and medical students to get. Financial worries, knowing she already owed $80,000, exacerbated her anxiety.
By the time she returned to school last year, Alain describes her emotions as a roller coaster.