“dangerous madmen”: flight over a cuckoo’s nest | M6 | 66 minutes

In 2004, Romain Dupuy, a disturbed young man, returned to the hospital in Pau where he had been admitted and cut the throats of two nurses. He believed one of them was a member of the living-dead. Last winter, in Grenoble, a student was stabbed to death by a schizophrenic who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Schizophrenia is an incurable disease that strikes fear, because the sufferers are by definition unpredictable. Some of them can become dangerous, even though they may be only a minority among the 635,000 people suffering from the disease. But these recent headlines have reopened the debate: Are we safe? Should we shut them up for life as some politicians demand? When medicine takes the place of justice, who decides whether to lock up the patients or to leave them at liberty? Fits of rage, attempted escapes, attacks of paranoia. A crew from 66 Minutes shared the daily lives of the patients and the nursing staff in the Saint Jean de Dieu psychiatric hospital in Lyon. The aim of the medical staff is to prepare patients for discharge. We also present rare footage shot in Avignon in a unit for patients who are considered dangerous and where all the patients have already committed violent acts of aggression.