Wrecked by neglect

>> Mentally ill man’s death raises more questions about curatorship

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Michel Parent can only imagine the pain his brother Claude endured while perched on his bed in his final hours at a residence in Pointe-aux-Trembles on April 17. “I spoke to him at 9 p.m. He seemed confused and said he felt bad,” says Parent, 51, a former ambulance attendant. “I noticed things didn’t seem right in his head. I knew something was happening.”

Earlier that day Claude, 46, had visited the emergency department of the Santa Cabrini Hospital with complaints of respiratory difficulties. Doctors examined and released him to the Résidence Rioux in Pointe-aux-Trembles. The next morning Claude Parent’s body was discovered at 9 a.m., dead by what initially appears to have been a massive brain hemorrhage.

“When they found his body it was all blue. It seems that his brain just exploded,” says Parent, who blames hospital and government officials for what he believes was negligence leading to an entirely preventable death.

Claude Parent had been assigned to the care of the Public Curator—the provincial body that manages the affairs of many mentally ill Quebecers—after a judge declared him mentally unfit in 1993. But Michel Parent feels that the bureaucrats failed in their duties as surrogate parents. He describes the agent assigned to his brother as “unmotivated,” and says he banged heads with her in the past over her refusal to spend Claude’s money on warm winter clothing.

“And after he died she told me I have to arrange the funeral because they’re not in charge of him when he’s dead,” Parent says. “I told her, ‘It’s no surprise, you didn’t take care of him when he was alive either.’ I tried to reach her again after but I was told that she’s gone away on vacation.”

Parent, who does advocacy for individuals fighting for government benefits, believes that had the curator been more alert, the hospital would have provided better care for his mentally ill brother. The coroner has begun an examination into the case, but Parent has already made his own conclusions about why his brother’s brain hemorrhaged so soon after the hospital gave him a clean bill of health. “A doctor at Lafontaine (Mental Hospital) had doubled his dosage of Haldol without balancing his other medications,” he says. “It could have caused spasms that stopped the air from circulating. The hospital should have given Claude some Valium and kept him under observation for 48 hours. They sent him home too fast. The type of treatment he got, c’est du fast food medicale.”

With his premature death, Claude Parent joins the likes of wards of the curatorship who died preventable deaths such as Marguerite Paquin, who died of starvation March 13, 1996, and Gino Laplante, 38, who froze to death on January 17, 2000.

Parent’s case has been taken up by Ura Greenbaum, who is spearheading the cause for reform of the Public Curator. The Parent case holds a special resonance for Greenbaum, who also recently lost a mentally ill brother in conditions that he believes point to curator negligence. Abe Greenbaum, 55, had been under curatorship since 1990 after a judge—citing a technicality—refused Greenbaum’s request to assume care of his brother. Abe, frequently homeless, psychotic and delusional, was found dead last December 20 of unknown causes. Like in the Parent case, the coroner is also examining the death to determine if administrative negligence was at play. :