An emotional open letter penned by a former mental health patient questions the layoffs handed out to 20 Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region (RQHR) staff, specifically in mental health services.
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The letter, written by Indian Head, Sask. man Todd Rennebohm, recounts his experience dealing with Regina’s psychiatric ward.
According to Rennebohm, the psychiatrist on duty said he recognized Rennebohm was suicidal, but the ward was too full and too understaffed to admit him.
“To be sent home was the most dangerous thing I think that happened to me,” Rennebohm said in an interview with Global News.
The letter goes on to recount Rennebohm’s suicide attempt a year later, in which he harms his brother who was trying to stop him. He said police were called to subdue him, but in his suicidal state he continued to resist.
“Once police arrived I grabbed one of their guns to try again to kill myself only to be forcibly detained. All this in front of my wife and children who at one point fled the house,” he wrote.
Eventually Rennebohm was admitted to the psychiatric ward, but was soon asked to move out of his bed by a hospital manager.
“I could tell the manager was under stress himself and didn’t have time to deal with my problems. He had someone else coming in and needed that bed,” he said.
Rennebohm — now an owner of his own business in Indian Head and “in a good place” — said he fears the layoffs to RQHR staff in the psychiatric ward will negatively impact the province’s most vulnerable.
“My story is nothing. When I was in there an 18-year-old girl, she didn’t want to go home. She had bandages all over her wrists, old scars on her wrists… You want to take 20 more people away from a girl like that?”
The open letter has been shared widely on Facebook and was published in the Regina Leader-Post on Oct. 3. Rennebohm said he was contacted by the Saskatchewan NDP opposition leader, Trent Wotherspoon, who expressed an interest in reading the letter in the legislative assembly.
RQHR CEO Keith Dewar said in September that the layoffs would not affect patient care.