To become a psychiatrist in Quebec in the 50s to 60s
The author is the witness of a historic period of the psychiatry in the province of Quebec in Canada, widely francophone. He describes the context, the training in psychiatry, and the care. In Quebec, in the 1950s, the psychiatry did not exist as such as speciality. There was however a discipline: the neuropsychiatry. It was managed by the neurologists who agreed to take care of cases of psychiatry, which few doctors wanted to treat at this moment. The religious and rural society in Quebec of the 1950s got ready for the “Revolution tranquille”. The latter finally burst after 1960. But the artistic environment was already in full excitement, and from 1948, it showed its opposition to the values which were current with the publication of the Refus global. Among the signatories of the latter, we find Bruno Cormier as medical student who will become, after 1950, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. To become a psychiatrist, it was necessary to be trained as an intern in a residency program in the USA, UK or in France. The residency in the United States in the 1950s represented a great adventure for the young doctors of Quebec, especially for the French speakers. At the end of 1950s, the pharmacology emerged. However, he described his own experience as an observer or an actor with ECT, Sakel cure and about the lobotomy.