Daughter seeks answers after 'very suicidal' father denied hospital bed and takes life

A Bouctouche woman whose father took his own life nine days after being denied a hospital bed, despite his suicidal thoughts, says the New Brunswick health care system repeatedly failed a man who was desperate.

Melissa Thébeau says her 62-year-old father, Rhéo Cormier, hanged himself April 29 in the special care home where he'd been on suicide watch.

The Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont hospital in Moncton had turned him away on April 20.

He is at his worst. He is extremely suicidal.- Francine Arseneault,  Foyer, Cote D'Or home

The night before Thébeau​'s father died, a special care home nurse wrote an urgent note to the next shift.

Cormier needed close monitoring and hourly checks and had to be watched taking his medication, Francine Arseneault said in the detailed message she left after working her shift April 28 at the Foyer, Cote D'Or special care home in Cocagne.

Cormier's longtime mental health nurse "had never seen him this depressed before," Arseneault reported.

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"He is at his worst. He is extremely suicidal," she wrote, underlining the words "very" and "suicidal" multiple times.

Police later told Thébeau that a resident found her father at around 10:45 a.m. the next day.

Hard-working roofer

Thébeau said her father had been a hard-working man with his own roofing company in Moncton. He started experiencing mild depression about 27 years ago, but it turned severe about seven years ago. He had to stop working because of his medications.

Thébeau doesn't blame the special care home staff for his suicide. Cormier had only been transferred there the day before.

Thébeau​ had tried to care for her father in her own home, but he attempted suicide, and she realized she couldn't risk having him under the same roof as her teenage children.

Her father really started to deteriorate about four months ago, just before the Dumont hospital turned him away a first time, on Feb. 11.

Looking for clues to tragedy

Thébeau has had difficulty piecing together everything that happened after that, but there are clues in her correspondence with people who knew her father or cared for him.

Recently, she got an email from Cory Thibodeau, program manager at TJ Maillet Residences, a special care home in Cocagne, where her father was living on April 20.

'Mental illnesses can sometimes be very difficult to diagnose since they cannot be clearly seen as, for example, a fracture can be.'- Rino Lang, Vitalité mental health director

​Thibodeau explained that on that date, two staff members became so worried about Cormier's mental health, they took him to the hospital.

Her father was assessed by a doctor, and although one home staffer insisted Cormier was in a crisis, he was not admitted, Thibodeau wrote.

Instead, Cormier was given a referral to a psychologist and released back into the care of the home, wrote Thibodeau, who did not return calls from CBC News.

Rino Lang, mental health director at Vitalité Health Network, said in an emailed statement that patients who arrive at the emergency room showing "severe signs" of mental illness are immediately referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist decides whether to keep a patient under observation or make a referral to another service.

"Mental illnesses can sometimes be very difficult to diagnose since they cannot be clearly seen as, for example, a fracture can be," Lang wrote. "We work hard every day to ensure the best services to patients and have their safety at the top of our priority list, thus giving us a better chance to save lives".

Changes in behaviour

​Thébeau said her father's non-admission to the hospital on April 20 is especially confounding, given her letter of complaint she wrote after he was not admitted on Feb. 11.

Thébeau didn't even know he wasn't admitted until she called the psychiatric ward to check on him. The hospital could not tell her where her father went after he was denied admission.

She couldn't get answers from the office of Dr. Marc Vautour, the psychiatrist she was told discharged her father, so she called the RCMP to report her father missing.

Police found her father, who told Thébeau he'd been in a "crisis centre."

​Letters of complaint

On Feb. 27, Thébeau wrote a letter of complaint to the hospital, saying "I just feel that something went terribly wrong."

 She got a letter back from Dieppe psychiatrist  Dr. Louis Theriault, dated March 23.

"As you are aware, your father was clearly invited to attend an appointment with me and yourself to clarify several of the issues raised in your letter of concern to the hospital," wrote Theriault, who went on to say that Cormier had decided not to attend the session.

Thébeau said she never even knew about the appointment and wondered why a psychiatrist would rely on her father, the patient, to keep her in the loop.

In her letter of Feb. 27, Thébeau made it clear she wanted the Dumont hospital to admit her father for psychiatric care "because he is severely ill, he's a danger to himself and to others."

No one at the hospital responded, and about two months later, her father was turned away from the hospital again. He was dead within two weeks.

Although still frustrated by a lack of information, Thébeau said she's had some time to reflect on her father's tragedy and felt compelled to speak out.

She believes there's an opportunity for the health-care system to review what happened, so it can do better.