Madness is Conforming to One’s Own Norms, and No Others: Psychiatry in Post-war Quebec
In the early 1950s, both the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I) and the advent of psychopharmacology – particularly the development of chlorpromazine (Thorazine – RP4650) – set the stage for models of psychiatric thought, research and practice that remain dominant today. It was during this pivotal period, in 1955, that the Département de psychiatrie de l’Université de Montréal was founded by a cohort of young researchers newly arrived from well-known universities in France and the northeastern United States. This influential group quickly became staunch critics of the province’s religion-based asylum system and lobbied for a government review that culminated into the 1962 Commission d’étude des hôpitaux psychiatriques (popularly known as the Bédard Report). What followed in Quebec between 1965 and 1975 was the secularization of psychiatric institutions and widespread deinstitutionalization. This paper illuminates cultural changes and intellectual shifts that have been overlooked in historical studies of post-war psychiatry by exploring the expansion of such “anti-psychiatry” schools of thought in Quebec in this period.