The day Luc Vigneault started washing again

Luc Vigneault received an honorary doctorate on Wednesday.

Luke’s sister disagrees with the psychiatrist’s verdict. “She told them: ‘It’s not true that there’s nothing to do. I know him, I know he can get through this. In fact, schizophrenia manifested itself at the age of 16, 17. “I heard voices telling me I’m not smart, I’m worthless, shadows chasing me. I saw. I was afraid.”

Because of his own prejudices about mental health, he acted as if nothing had happened. “I was embarrassed. I knew if I talked about it, people would think I was crazy.

So he wanted many people to experience this, and he drugged himself with alcohol and drugs. “I used it, I sold it, I did everything. Between the ages of 21 and 28, it was a total slide. That’s when I experienced psychiatry, I was in the emergency room, with six on me, I call them my football team, I ball…”

He is still its symbol. “It’s traumatized me for the rest of my life, that’s for sure.” Like that time, that Christmas Eve when he was crying and told him to stop because he was bothering others. “They tell you, if you want to dress up, you have to take your pills, that’s not really a free choice. However, there are approaches that don’t hurt people.

So, in order for Luke to have another chance and a new team to come after him, it’s important that his sister stays put. “They were younger, and it was different. There was no threat, the drugs were explained to me. Then one day, a woman asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I told her: “I want to go into politics, or be a political consultant,” she said. She asked me, I asked me questions about the party…”

Luke didn’t know it yet, but by his early thirties, he was starting to get on the road to recovery. “That was clearly the turning point, someone believed in me and I took action. They took me to assemblies and I asked why people were running away from me because they told me I didn’t smell good. I started washing again, taking care of myself, my To take care of one and a half, I made myself a blonde, the more you earn, the less you want to lose them…”

That was the beginning of the beginning. “Before I went there, people said I was a bad patient. There I was a good patient. Before, I cried my pain.

Same boy, same disease.

“After that, I started reading and researching. This is not a life sentence, and you should stop thinking that taking a pill will fix everything. Take the tablet down from its pedestal and look at other aspects like the housing. People need doses for functioning, memory, and thinking. I have friends in the hospital who are frozen like a bullet and have a hard time talking. But what is it? Who recommends this?

Luck takes the medicine, that’s out of the question. “I have been an intern at the Order of Pharmacists for a year, explaining to them how to build a therapeutic alliance with their patients. If there are undesirable effects, the person will not take the medicine. We need to listen and find a common solution.

This is the basic, the person has to join the program. He insists, “The patient must be functional,” not in a neurotic-vegetative state.

Without it, it is bound to fail.

Luc Vigneault has been shouting it from all the rooftops and all the stands for many moons. Everyone is talking about it In 2013 he came forward to talk about his amazing recovery. “I was the first in a research group, the first paid fellow. I was also a lecturer in pharmacology…”

He has seen progress for four or five years.

He has trained hundreds of people this year alone. “I trained 300 judges on cognitive bias. If the person opposite is poorly dressed and smells bad, they are in a very bad position. I told them that I am that person…remedial prescriptions don’t work, you need to think about life plans. This is not to brag, but I received a standing compliment, and some who came to see me said, “I will never have the same opinion of a badly dressed person as I did before.”

This is important.

This is how the system can change.

Now a “lost cause” in a psychiatrist’s office some thirty years ago, he received nothing more than an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Laval University. For Luke, it was a real outrage to everyone who only saw him as a disease.

Jokingly, he imagines sending a letter to DPJ, who refuses, ignoring the doctors’ advice, saying that he and his partner can adopt a child. “I will sign, inappropriately yours, Dr. Vigneault!”

It remains a sad “it won’t close”.

In his acceptance speech, Luke addressed future pharmacists, “Your primary objective should not be fidelity to treatments, but rather the balance between therapeutic effects and adverse effects. To do this, the patient is the only expert on the drug’s effects on his life and you are the only expert on drug therapy. And drugs, if poorly adjusted, Harmful: Don’t forget it!”

He is an example of how things can be done differently. “This recognition is more than my own effort. It represents a victory over an organization that condemned me to immobility, inactivity. An organization that prevented me from working, unable to adopt a child, based on the simple fact of having a mental health file.

It happens more often.

Even then, in his speech, he summed up all the progress he had made in one sentence. “From someone who heard voices, I became a spokesperson for recovery!”

At 62, Lou has no intention of stopping. And his ambitions are big. “I want us to excel in mental health as much as we do in cancer, nothing less. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t strive for excellence. We need to reinvent ourselves in treatment approaches.”

This includes restraint and seclusion for adults and youth. “Locking up a child is abuse and we tolerate it! There’s the WHO (World Health Organization), which has ruled that the restriction is torture, and I can’t wait for it to stop. This is my struggle to stop these abuses. Stop punishing mental illness. Instead of isolated rooms, multisensory rooms can be created. There are solutions.”

Even in a sometimes inhumane healthcare system, she continues to fight against the prejudice against mental illness. “When a woman with cancer comes back, we don’t greet her: “Not you again!”

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