By Gordon Lambie
Sherbrooke’s suicide prevention service, JEVI announced on Tuesday morning that it has cut its telephone intervention line in a bid to maintain priority services despite a significant drop in staff.
“We can no longer hope to offer the same level of service,” said Tania Boilar, the organization’s Executive Director, calling the decision a heartbreaking last resort.
Boilar said that the decision is linked to a issue of chronic underfunding.
“For years now the recurrent funding has not been at the level of what we need for daily tasks,” she said, sharing that the workload has only increased in recent years and particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the natural response in that case would be to hire more staff, Boilar said that there just hasn’t been enough money and, as a result, the organization has lost five employees over the last year, leaving them with a third of what they had at full capacity.
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