From the first minutes of the series EmpathyI admired the courage of the author Florence Longpré. She dared to approach, in a subtle and thoughtful way, the painful dramas linked to mental illness and penitentiary hospitalizations, both on the side of patients and that of families and relatives as well as caregivers. A huge challenge that she has taken brilliantly.
While I was practicing the profession of psychologist, from 1978 to 2006, I attended, for psychulegal expertise, prisons and psychiatric hospitals.
I met mothers accused of having killed their child, I listened to life stories that we do not forget.
I had, even if the criminal gestures committed were appalling, display a large dose of what is called, in the broad sense, empathy, that is to say the attempt to put ourselves “in the skin of another” while recognizing that one can only tend, without ever really succeeding, especially when the other seems so foreign to us.
The purpose of these expertise is neither to excuse nor even less to justify the gestures committed, but this empathy was essential to try to understand what could have led these women to commit the irreparable. These psychological evaluations, necessary to shed light on the judicial processes, obviously put my limits to tolerate the unbearable. I also often witnessed an unnamed sadness. Very depressed mothers, demanding for themselves a severe penalty. One of them committed suicide a few years later.
In the series Empathythere is also no judgment on the gestures laid. We are presented with the history, fragility and suffering of patients.
Photo provided by Bell Média
“By staging both the vulnerability of stakeholders and that of hospitalized patients, Florence Longpré confronts us with our common fragility,” writes Hélène David.
This helps to better understand the psychotic episodes, delusions, hallucinations and the paralyzing obsessions which distance these patients from reality and who brought them to these hospitalizations.
Folie is scary. But, as Nathalie Collard recently wrote, “fiction often makes it possible to better say what the test does not manage to pass. […] Through the words and the sensitivity of others, we manage to put ourselves in their shoes. We develop his empathy2 ».
The suffering of psychotic episodes, paralyzing anxious states or a disease like schizophrenia is often described by people who are affected as unbearable. Patients presented in the series Empathy carry this pain. Whether it is the uncontrollable anger of Mme Moisan and his drug use, the hallucinations of imaginary friends from Mr. Dallaire or the surprising compulsions of Mr. Vanier, all these patients had to deploy pathological mechanisms to ward off their intense difficulty in living.
By staging both the vulnerability of stakeholders and that of hospitalized patients, Florence Longpré confronts us with our common fragility. I have only admitted and respect for the caregivers embodied in this series by excellent actors.
The work and the responsibilities they assume have nothing ordinary. All of their commitment is confronting and pushes to go beyond our most human instincts: to move away from this patient, to flee the reality of the serious mental health problems. On the contrary, it is with the greatest respect that these caregivers try to restore humanity to those that everything has distant from reality.
Recently, empathy has even invited himself to political discussions, as Marc Thibodeau said in a file3. Are we for or against empathy? Is it a sign of strength or weakness? For proponents of an ultraconservative and religious wing, empathy would be a bad adviser in many areas, including those of justice, the right to abortion, gender identity and even that of our borders, in the name of a divine order. To disparage empathy in favor of politics is to fold our humanity towards its lowest instincts.
Furthermore, I strongly advise to listen to the five episodes of the series of the series Empathy. The sensitive and warm remarks of the actors as well as the psychiatrists consultants, the doctors Marie-Michèle Boulanger and Gilles Chamberland of the Philippe-Pinel Institute, are complementary to the series. The Dre Baker is often said to be said: “Ah, you work where people invent diseases!” It is a huge gift that this series gives for our patients to stage the severity of their mental health problems. »»
It’s hard to have too much empathy. It shows humans behind hospitalized people behind mental illness. Their diagnosis does not define the entirety of their personality.
The Dr Gilles Chamberland, of the Philippe-Pinel Institute
The success of this series is deserved because Florence Longpré allows us to tame the serious mental health problems which, rather rarely, cause criminal gestures. It affects, with a good dosage, viewers in their sensitivity, showing the weaknesses, both that of the caregivers and that of the caregivers, while highlighting the challenges and the sufferings of loved ones and families. Patients who are hospitalized live in an inner prison, some of which will never come out.
If only for approaching this subject, we say thank you to Florence Longpré.
And since there will be a second season, let us hope that this series continues to make a difference. Hoping, thanks to fiction, improve the detection, monitoring and even the prevention of dramatic gestures that lead people who will carry their lives in their wake.
1. Read the article ” Empathy broadcast in France in September »
2. Read the chronicle “Reading as an act of resistance”, by Nathalie Collard
3. Read the file “Empathy, a sin?” », By Marc Thibodeau
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