Psychiatry in Canada

Extract

There are two episodes which remain in my mind from the first night I was on call at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Toronto in 1980. The first person I assessed in the Emergency Room was a young university student in her early twenties who had been reading “Jung” and urgently needed to discuss “archetypes and the animus”; the second incident some hours later involved a middle aged man who was manic on admission and responded rapidly to the 10 mg of haloperidol I administered intravenously in front of a silent and, as I later discovered, astonished night nurse and junior resident. The patient settled rapidly and my unorthodox treatment was a talking point for several weeks. These two vignettes alerted me to the fact that things were different here. No-one had ever used intravenous neuroleptics in Toronto at that time, and equally no-one in Newcastle on Tyne, which I had left only two weeks earlier, would consider the casualty department of the Royal Victoria Infirmary a necessary stop as they waded through Jung.