Healing the ills of others and his own words

“The doctor saves lives, the poet saves life,” writes Ouanessa Younsi in her preface to the book. The Angels’ Lab, by Philippe More. Crossed portraits of three doctors to whom poetry allows them to better listen to the shadows within them, like those that inhabit their patients.

Dominic Late
The Press

The poet saves life, really? “What I mean is that poetry keeps us in something alive, it gives us the feeling of existing. And to be a caregiver, to be a human being, it’s still a plus to have this feeling, ”says the poet and psychiatrist Ouanessa Younsi in a pretty euphemizing formula. “Everyone benefits from finding this feeling within themselves, and art is a medium for it. »

That a doctor can thus have such a double identity nevertheless generates astonishment. A surprise sometimes even mixed with derision. “The question I get asked the most is: ‘How do you write poetry when you’re a doctor?’ “, confirms Mélanie Béliveau, family doctor in Sherbrooke, who launched her first collection in August 2021, In the belly of the windbut who had been writing since childhood.

She is surprised at the lack of recognition this success has received in her community, her collection having nevertheless garnered rave reviews. “Maybe there’s a misunderstanding or a judgment about that: ‘Ah, OK, her, she has time to write poetry, while we take care of the real business.’ »

Writing has also accompanied Ouanessa Younsi since childhood. If she turned to medicine, it was to honor her good academic results and the hopes of her immigrant father. Psychiatry will challenge him because it is “a discipline of the gray zone, of listening, of language. Psychiatry actually supposes a form of listening that goes beyond language. You have to listen to the shadows. And poetry also does that: it listens to the shadows in us”, explains the one to whom we owe four collections (including Mixed and we are not fairieswith Louise Dupré) as well as an essay, care, love (2016), rich in reflections on the fruitful tensions between the two poles of his existence.

Today, she borrows the words of Miron to describe this combination of psychiatry and poetry which makes the heart of her daily life beat like a “fighting reconciliation”, medicine necessarily limiting the time she can devote to writing.

Avoid categories

It quickly became clear to Philippe More that it would be better to continue writing alongside his medical profession, and not the opposite, which would have been impossible. “Perhaps even illegal”, jokes the one whose collection The Angels’ Labwhich won him the Émile-Nelligan prize in 2010, was recently reissued in pocket format.

If he always preferred to erect a partition between the doctor and the poet, so that one does not seek the lab coat and the disease everywhere in his verses, this generous collection of insoluble questions on the role of the doctor is the only one of his work that takes its reader into the corridors of the hospital, where he spends his days as an emergency physician.

“I have already been told that my poetry is not very political and what I answer to that is that one of the big problems of our time is this tendency that we have to lock people up into categories,” he says.

To learn how to read

For our three poet doctors, it is undeniable: their literary practice is enriched by their medical practice, and vice versa. To those who once reproached him for wasting time with that – that disdainfully designating poetry – Philippe More replies that he would not have the energy to work so much as a doctor if he had to restrain “this part of [lui] who is writing “. “Poetry allows me to give meaning to what sometimes no longer has any”, he summarizes.

But beyond these benefits in terms of strictly personal development, the emergency doctor at the Haut-Richelieu hospital notes that poetry – the one he writes as well as the one he reads – sharpens his relationship to language. At least 90% of the information guiding a diagnosis, he underlines, is based on the reading he makes of the story that his patient unpacks to him, not on what his stethoscope is reading. In short: a therapeutic relationship always begins with words.

He has also been interested for several years in narrative medicine, an approach described by the American academic Rita Charon as “a medicine practiced with a narrative competence allowing to recognize, to absorb, to interpret the stories of illness, and to be moved by them”.

“The poem, for me, is a space of humility,” says Ouanessa Younsi. The poem keeps me in a space of not knowing, of not judging. Language knows more than I do. There are many things in me and in the world that I don’t know and it is by writing that I will discover them. And that’s also psychiatry. To accept to listen to the other is to accept not knowing. Literature helps me to stay in this zone of uncertainty. »

There is also, a contrario, a real knowledge—“a knowledge of subjectivity and emotion”—to be drawn from literature. “I have a much better idea of ​​borderline personality disorder by reading Borderline [roman de Marie-Sissi Labrèche] only by consulting the clinical criteria. »

And the opposite movement also occurs. All the stories that are deposited in Mélanie Béliveau shape the poet that she is. “What the patients experience, what the patients tell us, it’s so hot, so intense, she observes. We are in a very special intimacy. Want, don’t want, we absorb all that. And as I am a sensitive person, when I come back home, it stirs me inside. I often had trouble leaving that on the doormat and writing was my outlet. »

Listen to others, listen to yourself

Rare moment of convergence between his two worlds, The Angels’ Lab, a collection entirely written in the second person, will also have allowed Philippe More to name the ambiguity of the doctor-patient relationship. An ambiguity that poetry knows how to translate “better than other literary genres”.

This relationship, “it’s a lot “I’m with you in the disease, but I’m not completely with you, I’m on the side. I am involved in your care, but above all I am the organizer of the care. I sympathize with you, but I am not in your skin”. The challenge in medicine is that to be able to make a diagnosis, you have to put labels on symptoms and on people, but at the same time, you must never forget the individuality of the situation. »

“My mentor always told me: ‘You have to find something to like in the patient in order to be able to help them,'” recalls Ouanessa Younsi. But for there to be this other to love, there must first be a self. Poetry allows me to listen to what is happening inside me, my weaknesses. Literature is for me a reminder of this shared humanity, a reminder that I could be in the patient’s chair. »

The Angels’ Lab

Philip More

Bush poets

64 pages

In the belly of the wind

Melanie Beliveau

Writings of the Forges

68 pages

we are not fairies

Louise Dupre and Ouanessa Younsi

inkwell memory

120 pages