Cognitive-behavioral therapy at the Pavillon Albert-Prévost’s specialized outpatient clinics during the last 50 years: innovations and evolution
The Pavillon Albert-Prévost (PAP) has played a leading role in the development of modern psychiatry in the province of Québec. It has also been, in the francophone milieu, the teaching hospital that was the most deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theories. The arrival of somatic approaches, particularly biofeedback and relaxation, in the Psychosomatic medicine and consultation-liaison service, as introduced by Dr. Jacques Monday in the 1970s, was initially greeted with great scepticism by the majority of his colleagues at PAP. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Camille Laurin, then head of the department, invited Dr. Louis Chaloult to offer a clinical supervision seminar to mental health professionals. Drs. Chaloult and Monday trained generations of clinicians in cognitive behavior therapy and relaxation therapy as, over time, these approaches both practical, efficient and effective became more widely practiced and recommended by practice guidelines in psychiatry. Dr. Chaloult with the help of Dr. Jean Goulet developed a CBT teaching curriculum for residents in psychiatry and other health care professionals, wrote an influential textbook on CBT, co-developped a widely consulted website www.tccmontreal.com providing CBT practice guides for clinicians and patients alike, became one of the first psychiatrists acting as a psychiatre répondant in CLSCs (teaching CBT to other members of the team in order to provide CBT in primary care), co-developed the Centre de Psychothérapie at the PAP to promote cross theoretical training in psychotherapy for residents in psychiatry and interns of other mental healthcare disciplines. In this spirit, Dre. Thanh-Lan Ngô contributed to these endeavors and co-created with Dr. Jean Leblanc and Dre. Magalie Lussier-Valade another website www.psychopap.com dedicated to the transfer of knowledge in CBT as well as other forms of psychotherapy in order to celebrate 100 years of teaching in psychiatry at the PAP. Following the creation of specialised outpatient clinics in 1994, CBT was more widely offered and developed as a standard of care. These influential programs include those of three psychologists Dr Michel Dugas’ Generalised anxiety disorder model, Pascale Brillon’s teaching of trauma focussed CBT (with three books on the subject, Dr Richard Fleet’s research on emergency room presentation of panic disorder. This collaborative teaching and research program included Dre. Julie Turcotte and Dr. Pierre Savard, both specialised in CBT and instrumental in training generations of psychiatrists in evidence-based treatments for severe refractory disorders. At the Early psychosis clinic, an innovative program of CBT modules adapted to the functional and symptomatic impairment level of the heterogeneous clientele was developed by Pierre Fortier and Dr. Jean-Pierre Mottard. At the Readaptation for Psychosis program, France Bérubé and Jocelyne St-Onge, offered auditory hallucinations group, metacognitive therapy, the integrated psychotherapy programme. At the Personality disorder clinic, dialectical behavior therapy groups were offered by Julie Jomphe who trained many cohorts of residents, offered adaptations to families (Family connections), adolescents, and children (in schools). At the Psychosomatic service Donald Bouthillier treated somatisation disorders with affective-cognitive behavioral therapy for somatization disorder. And finally, at the Mood disorder clinic, Drs. Ngô, Bernard Gauthier, Léon Maurice Larouche, Anne-Sophie Boulanger along with Manon Quesnel, Renée Leblanc and colleagues offered a sequential program of CBT approaches to treat severe and refractory mood disorders.