Publications

While historiography has traditionally focused on the early 1960s, and the publication of the report by the Study Commission on Psychiatric Hospitals (1962), as the starting point for the psychiatric deinstitutionalization movement in Quebec, new research into the histo- ry of psychiatric nursing is now leading us to qualify and even question this reading. Long before the so-called “modernist” psychiatrists set out to change the organization of the mental health care system in the Canadian province, nurses, both religious and lay, had in fact deployed extensive efforts and strategies to combat overcrowding in the large asylums, on the one hand, and to develop alternative psychiatric resources, on the other. This article will look back at the careers of two exceptional nurses. In so doing, we will demonstrate that the history of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in Quebec cannot be written without the women who, in addition to constantly working alongside patients, actively contributed to changing the conditions under which they were cared for, before being deliberately side- lined by male psychiatrists and then erased from the history of Quebec psychiatry.

Klein, A. et Thifault, M.-C. (2024). Aux origines de la désinstitutionnalisation psychiatrique au Québec : le rôle oublié des infirmières laïques et religieuses. Genesis XXIII(2), 25–48.