Orphans Went From Normalcy to Idiocy in 1 Day : Canada: Thousands of children were reclassified as mentally retarded so institutions could get more money from Quebec. Schooling stopped and torture began, they contend in lawsuits.

On March 17, 1955, Herve Bertrand was an ordinary 11-year-old boy attending classes at the Mt. Providence orphanage in Montreal. On March 18, he became an “idiot.”

The reason: The provincial government paid Mt. Providence, operated by Roman Catholic nuns, 75 cents a day for the care of each orphan. For mentally retarded children, it paid $2.75.

The orphanage decided on what it called a “change of vocation,” transforming itself into a mental institution and declaring its charges to be retarded.

Thousands of children in similar Quebec facilities were falsely labeled mentally retarded in the 1950s. Many of them were sent to psychiatric hospitals and put in overcrowded wards with real mental patients and only a few overworked nuns to supervise them.

The orphans say they were beaten with straps, paddles and fists, sexually and psychologically abused, restrained in straitjackets for weeks at a time, plunged into ice water, lashed to beds.

A group of about 4,000 former residents of the institutions in the 1950s and ‘60s has filed a class-action lawsuit against seven religious orders that operated a dozen orphanages or mental hospitals. It accuses them of physical, sexual and psychological abuse and seeks damages of $1.2 billion.

The complainants say 90% of those selected for the “change of vocation” were born illegitimate and were considered more shameful than other orphans. Also, the other orphans sometimes had relatives who visited them, but the illegitimate children had none, meaning institutional authorities had no one to answer to.

In addition to the civil suit, Quebec provincial police and Montreal city police are investigating scores of possible criminal cases against individuals who worked in the hospitals and orphanages.

Bertrand, a plumber now 50, remembers “change of vocation” day.

“Sister Collette Francois came in around 10 or 11 o’clock and said: ‘From today there will be no more school. Gather up your personal affairs and return to your dormitories. From today onward, you are all crazy, mentally retarded.’

“From that moment on, they began to put up fences, they put bars on the windows and they gave each orphan a job in the institution.”

Real mentally retarded people were taken from overcrowded hospitals and moved to Mt. Providence.

“Several sisters cried; they knew they had done something bad,” Bertrand said.

He and other Quebecois who suffered through those years all tell the same stories of rape, sexual molestation, beatings, straitjackets and even murder.

It was a period in Quebec some historians call the “Great Darkness,” when the French-speaking province was ruled with an iron hand by Premier Maurice Duplessis. Illegitimate children were social pariahs to be hidden away, and the only place to hide them was in church-run public institutions.

The horror was vividly brought to light by Montreal sociologist Pauline Gill in her book “Duplessis’ Children.” It is the story of Alice Quinton, a healthy girl put into a mental institution at age 7 and kept until she was 22.

The story is not new. Four earlier books were written in the 1960s, including a 1961 work by Jean-Charles Page, “The Mad Cry for Help.”

“Society was not ready for them,” Gill said of the earlier books. “They thought they were just people looking for attention.”

Commissions of inquiry in the 1960s put an end to the practice of keeping normal children in mental institutions, but did nothing to make reparations.

“Society has to recognize that these religious communities did all they could to help these children who had no means,” said Sister Gisele Fortier, a nun who is spokeswoman for the seven religious orders named in the lawsuit.

She would not speak directly to the charges of cruelty and mistreatment.

“The question is now before the courts. I can neither affirm nor deny anything,” said Sister Fortier, who worked in Catholic mental institutions at the time.

Pierre Lemarbre of the Quebec provincial police said the criminal investigations are far from completion. He said each witness interviewed leads to more names and more cases.

A judge is expected to rule on the admissibility of the class action suit in September, said Danielle Girard, one of several lawyers working on the case. She said the trial is not expected before the end of the year or sometime in 1994.

Bertrand, president of the former orphans who filed suit, was sexually abused by a guard on several occasions between 1954 and 1959.

“It was a nightmare,” he said. “All my life I have thought of all these things that I lived through. I don’t know if one day I’ll be able to erase that.”

Bertrand’s complaint to the court says he had to have rectal surgery to repair damage from sexual abuse.

Yvon-Charles Houde, 49, today a bookbinder in Montreal, said the worst thing is the file--the permanent file labeling him mentally retarded, a file that follows him through life.

“In 1962, when I was 20 years old, I went into a hospital for an ordinary complaint,” he said. “The hospital asked for my medical file, and there they discovered I was ‘mentally retarded.’ You tell people what happened and they don’t believe you.”

Yvette Gascon, 53, remembers the nuns coming into her orphanage telling the children they were going to take “a nice trip.”

“It was to be a trip of no return,” she said. “They took us to a ‘nuthouse,’ a psychiatric center called St. Julien at St. Ferdinand. I was 7 years old.

“I kept hearing children cry and I didn’t know why. It was only when punishment came that I understood why children were crying. They filled a tub full of ice water. They put us in a straitjacket, they tied our feet together and put us in. While in the bath the nun hit me and pushed me to the bottom of the bath.”

She was punished because she did not make beds very well and that was one of the jobs assigned her.

Bertrand, Houde and Gascon are lucky. They have managed to live fairly normal adult lives. One of the former “idiots,” as they were called at the time, has even earned a doctoral degree.

Others have not been so lucky. They suffer from a lack of self-esteem, chronic depression, paranoia and anxiety, said Dr. Stan van Duyse, who has examined many of the “Duplessis children.”

Sister Fortier says critics should consider the mores of the time and the context: The nuns were overworked, money was lacking, there may have been some isolated cases of short tempers.

“These children were very vulnerable,” she said. “Their suffering was so great that they are now looking for somebody to blame.”

Gill bristles at those excuses.

“When in our society was it ever permissible to tie children to a bed for weeks at a time, or give ice baths? These nuns had power. They had the power to judge these children.”

Voices of the Orphans

Yvette Gascon: In St. Julien Hospital, there were young people who killed themselves. There were young people who threw themselves from the sixth floor to kill themselves. Others hanged themselves in their cells. Never was there a police investigation.

I saw a mouse at my feet. I shouted. In the dormitory we were 54. I woke up everybody. Everybody started shouting even though they didn’t know why I was shouting. The nun came out of her room and said, “You’ll pay for that.” She took me by the hair; she took the mouse and crushed it in my face. She told me to open my mouth but I wouldn’t. She took me to the bathroom. She put me in a straitjacket. She attached my feet to the feet of the bathtub and started beating me. Then she took me to my bed, but left the straitjacket. She took the mattress off my bed and made me lie on the springs. She put a pan under my bed so when I peed it would go directly in it. I was kept in that position for a month.

I lived my entire childhood in fear.

Yvon-Charles Houde: It really bothers me to go public, but I have to purge myself of this. The church, the clergy has to know about this. If the church doesn’t want to lose its credibility, it must believe us. It can’t deny what happened during those years.

I know I’m not crazy. It’s like a black stain. It’s in my file. We lived among them. They made us believe we were crazy. What has wounded me most in my life is to have been labeled mentally retarded.

We lived in constant fear of punishment.

Herve Bertrand: They taught us Latin. We were “mentally retarded,” but they taught us Latin and sent us to Mass.

Source: Associated Press