by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Imagine you got high, started feeling a little melancholy, then called up one of those sympathy chat phone lines to talk only to have your conversation lead you to handcuffs.

Michel Blais can tell you about it. Six months ago Blais, 43, went out with a buddy and drank a beer or "maybe about 24," sniffed some blow and returned to his Pointe-aux-Trembles home where he phoned the Tel-Aide listening line. "I don't remember much," he says. "I had a lot to drink. Sometimes I call just to chat. I sometimes get discouraged. I'm on welfare and have trouble paying my bills. I'm often depressed."

Tel-Aide was closed and a recording recommended certain callers dial another phone line, which turned out to be Suicide Action Montreal. Blais was too hammered to understand the difference and dialled it up. Apparently the booze led Blais to give the wrong impression and after a few minutes an operator told him, "Somebody will knock on your door in five minutes."

Blais was incredulous. "How's that? I'm okay, don't send anybody. I'm glad you're concerned but I'm perfectly healthy, I won't die." But they replied, "We can't do anything, we've already made the call."

Blais went outside to wave the ambulance off. It rolled up along with a police cruiser. "I told them that I'm tired and that I want to sleep but the cop said, ‘There's no point in resisting.' I told him, ‘You have no business with me and you don't have the right to take me by force,'" says Blais.

Alas, wrong. Blais, who reports neither criminal nor psychiatric history, says police allowed him to lock his apartment door but wouldn't permit him to fetch his jacket or call a lawyer. The ambulance hauled him to the Santa Cabrini Hospital in St-Leonard, where he spent the next 15 hours waiting on a cot in the hallway.

Eventually Blais unplugged his IV, dressed and scooted. Two security guards gave chase but he dashed away.

"When I got home the phone rang. It was the police. They said, ‘Mr. Blais, you didn't have the right to escape the hospital.' I said, ‘What's your problem? Are you crazy?' I hung up and 15 minutes later there was loud knocking on the door. I said, ‘I won't open and you don't have an arrest warrant.' They replied that they don't need a warrant."

The fuzz entered, removed him from a closet where he had sought refuge, handcuffed and carted him off in front of 15 patrol cars and countless neighbours. "It was humiliating," he says. He was brought to the Louis-H Lafontaine mental hospital, examined and quickly released.

Blais's subsequent complaint to the police ethics committee was rejected. As of 1994, police have the right to take you away if you're deemed a danger to yourself.

According to Suicide Action coordinator Michel Presseault, every day three Montrealers who contact the hotline (some transferred via 911) get hauled off for an unrequested psychiatric evaluation.

You don't even have to dial. I'm told of a stripper from Cleopatra's whose boyfriend sent an ambulance for her following a downcast phone conversation. The episode cost her $150 in ambulance fees and a day's work. She dumped her beau.

I couldn't get the dancer on the blower to confirm, but if a third party reports you as suicidal, you must convince two ambulance technicians that you're not planning to off yourself. The ambulance staff doesn't have a formal script or formula to evaluate one's risk of suicide but, says André Champagne, a rep for Urgences Santé, "If there's any doubt they'll transport the patient. They make the safe bet."

Suicide Action dispatches ambulances depending on how you answer questions like, "Are you suicidal?" and "Do you have the means to commit suicide?" says Presseault, who reports a "few complaints" as well as "a bulletin board full of notes from people thanking us for saving their lives."

Blais insists that he never claimed to be suicidal, but there's no taped recording to check. "They had no business coming to my house. I didn't ask for anything," he says.

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