But what sounds like medieval cruelty is, in fact, the reality now confirmed by official investigation.
For this is a psychiatric facility in modern-day New Brunswick—one of many where patients are forced to endure an Inquisition-like living-death for one crime only: seeking “help.”
And a blistering 66-page report released by Marie-France Pelletier, the Canadian province’s ombudsman, exposes a psychiatric apparatus steeped in abuse, secrecy and neglect, as revealed through nearly 950 hours of surveillance footage and thousands of pages of internal records.
The “system,” in short, was nothing more than a framework built for deliberate neglect. No oversight. No safeguards. No humanity.
What began in May 2021 as a probe into the Restigouche Hospital Centre (RHC) widened in 2023 to include every psychiatric unit overseen by New Brunswick’s two Regional Health Authorities (RHAs): Vitalité Health Network, which manages RHC and other facilities in the province’s northern and southeastern regions, and Horizon Health Network, which operates facilities in the rest of the province—with investigators laying bare what they called “systemic” failures across New Brunswick’s adult psychiatric facilities.
The report opens with a photo of a patient in solitary confinement holding a handwritten note to the security camera, a single word scrawled across it—“HELP!”—the title of the report itself.
The web of unrelenting cruelty it details includes:
- Patients locked in isolation for hours or days on end—some in seclusion for up to 285 consecutive hours, others strapped down for as long as 58 hours straight.
- Human beings left to sit in their own urine and feces, one for nearly a full day, another for a total of 60 hours.
- Basic human needs—water, food, access to a toilet—routinely denied.
- At least one patient sexually assaulted by staff while physically restrained—an attack confirmed by video and turned over to police. But no charges were ever filed.
The investigation also revealed a horrific lack of accountability. The RHAs had no mechanism whatsoever to monitor or track restraint use, beyond a token report to the Canadian Institute for Health Information noting how many patients were restrained in the first 72 hours of admission. The “system,” in short, was nothing more than a framework built for deliberate neglect. No oversight. No safeguards. No humanity.
The Ombudsman issued 21 urgent recommendations, calling for nothing short of a complete overhaul of New Brunswick’s psychiatric regime—from its laws and oversight mechanisms to the daily practices that enable abuse.
From the opening, “A Caution to Readers”—“For those who have received psychiatric treatment, or their families and friends, the content of this report may evoke memories of traumatic personal experiences or those of loved ones”—to the concluding plea, “there is a fundamental need to take stock of the mental health care system as a whole”—“HELP!” is less a report than a requiem for the human dignity lost in the name of psychiatry.
As Ombudsman Pelletier put it: “Any person who finds themselves in a psychiatric facility is someone’s child, sibling, parent, family member, partner or friend. Any one of us could be one traumatic experience away from finding ourselves in need of care in one of these facilities.”
