January 26, 2024: An emergency service operation at Jean-Talon train station leads to an interruption of operations. The STM remains tight-lipped about the exact nature of the event.
Claudia, forty, homeless, drug addict. Died when she fell in front of the subway… anonymous.
A preventable accident?
refuge
Unfortunately, subway stations have become the last refuge for homeless people. Visible homelessness is hiding there, taking refuge there because of a lack of space, yes, but above all because of a lack of suitable places and comprehensive specialist support.
Because unless we view homelessness as a condition of health, relationship health, the number of people experiencing homelessness will continue to increase and tragedies like this will repeat themselves.
Because yes, homelessness is a serious relationship health issue caused by violence and post-traumatic stress disorder that needs to be treated and cured. Homelessness is the extreme consequence of violence that hurts and traumatizes and leads to separation and exclusion. It is a chronic dissociative relational state of survival.
Suffer
The state of untreated homelessness brings with it some of the major problems of mental health, drug addiction and loss of belonging to the people – the people – who suffer. The consequences of deep and great suffering, loneliness, vulnerability and abandonment, which are often sadly carried from childhood and lead to losing everything until surviving on the streets… and hiding in the subway.
However, this extreme personal and social decline is only the symptom of relational health compromised by relational wounds that simply need to be understood, recognized, and healed. And while we wait for that care, self-medication with drugs, alcohol, and others numbs the distress associated with the trauma.
Was it a preventable accident?
A homeless, consumptive woman who had sought refuge in the Jean-Talon subway to escape the cold, loneliness, invisibility and violence died when she accidentally fell in front of the subway. In the absence of appropriate relationship maintenance.
The service interruption at the Jean-Talon metro station on January 26, 2024 was called Claudia.
“Photo provided by Léonie Couture and Ann-Gaël Whiteman.”
Léonie Couture, founding president of La rue des Femmes and Ann-Gaël Whiteman, coordinator of Maison Jacqueline