Dérives : Une histoire sensible des parcours psychiatriques en Ontario français by Marie-Claude Thifault and Marie LeBel (review)

Reviewed by: Dérives : Une histoire sensible des parcours psychiatriques en Ontario français by Marie-Claude Thifault and Marie LeBel Erika Dyck Thifault, Marie-Claude and Marie LeBel– Dérives : Une histoire sensible des parcours psychiatriques en Ontario français. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2021. 165 p. Dérives is a stimulating concept that sits at the heart of this collection of intimate stories about people who are in many ways cut adrift. The book explores the lives of six people with psychiatric disorders who live in Ontario as they wrestle with their disorders, identities, relationships, and a looming sense of disharmony that is punctuated by linguistic and cognitive differences that generate a persistent sense of alienation. Set within the period since deinstitutionalization, or the closure of long-term custodial psychiatric hospitals, the stories reveal cracks in mental health services as their provision shifted from more comprehensive facilities under one roof to a looser set of options that mix health, wellness, and economic needs in a somewhat eclectic and, at times, outright messy array of provisions now available to people with psychiatric diagnoses. Editors Thifault and LeBel assembled this book after working with a larger group of historians interested in tracking the experiences of Franco-Ontarians who, as a linguistic minorities, were discharged into community care services. With a concentration on examples from l'Hôpital Montfort, this collection provides a very intimate portrayal of individuals whose lives were in many ways dominated by structures beyond their control. Historians of madness and psychiatry have written extensively on questions of power and control, with some of that literature focusing on the asylum or psychiatric hospital as a locus of control, and even abuse. But, in this collection, Thifault and LeBel implicitly question that assumption by showing that care in the community has produced the same result: a loss of control, alienation, or a drifting existence where, despite the rhetoric of autonomy, many people struggle for their own voices to be heard. [End Page 228] The book contains six microhistories, or examples of individual lives of four women and two men living in different parts of Ontario with psychiatric diagnoses. The cases, anonymized, provide intimate details to showcase examples of fluid, diverse, acute, and chronic cases of psychiatric illness with people who are also francophone minorities. The stories come alive through a combination of careful archival work, oral histories, and digital history—whereby authors combed through social media and digital reports to assemble a three-dimensional image of a life with psychiatric illness. Their research reveals what some historians and activists have suggested in other contexts, namely that many of the challenges are non-medical in nature. Sustaining friendships, securing employment, facing discrimination, finding safe housing, and combatting loneliness are all prescient themes that run through these stories. Despite a careful review of medical files that accompanied the cases, the emotional appeal of these stories comes to life as Thifault and LeBel explore the day-to-day activities of the six characters, underscoring how intersecting features of marginalization combine to undermine attempts at living independently or navigating their communities autonomously. The result is a variety of examples of people experiencing emotional turmoil that is only partly, if at all, attributable to an underlying diagnosis but that still generates frustration, desperation, and even despair. Each of the people whose stories are featured in the volume seem caught in a life punctuated by a search for harmony and stability. Thifault and LeBel open the book by setting the context and explaining the kinds of sources of evidence that help to bring these cases to life. Paying attention to silences in the archives and reading against the grain of medical reports proved invaluable in reconstructing the lives of people whose archival trail was largely generated by others, whether psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, or even landlords. The records themselves exist as evidence of a form of alienation from experience, but as some of the stories reveal, to do so in English created another layer of distancing from one's own experience in their own francophone language. The overarching message seems clear: deinstitutionalization and so-called care in the community has...

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