Healing others’ ailments and his own words

“A doctor saves lives, a poet saves life,” writes Ovanessa Youncey in her foreword to the book. Angel’s Lab, by Philip More. The crossed portraits of the three doctors allow the poem to better hear the shadows within them as those that inhabit their patients.

The late Dominick
Press

A poet saves life, really? “My point is that poetry keeps us alive, it gives us a sense of being. And to be a caregiver, to be human, to have this feeling is still a plus,” poet and psychiatrist Onessa Youncey says in a beautifully euphemistic formula. “Everyone benefits from discovering this feeling within themselves, and art is a medium for it. »

It is surprising that a doctor should have such a double identity. Surprise is sometimes accompanied by derision. “The question I get asked the most is: ‘How do you write poetry when you’re a doctor?’ Melanie Belivenu, a family doctor in Sherbrooke who launched her first collection in August 2021, confirmed, Air in the stomachBut he has been writing since childhood.

She was surprised by the lack of recognition in her community for this success, although her collection received rave reviews. “Maybe there’s a misunderstanding or judgment about it: ‘Ah, well, she, she has time to write poetry, we’ll take care of the real business.’ »

Since childhood, Oynessa Yunsi has also been fascinated by writing. If she turns to medicine, it is to honor her good academic results and the hopes of her immigrant father. Psychiatry challenges him because it is “the discipline of the gray zone, listening, language. Psychiatry actually assumes a form of listening beyond language. Shadows must be listened to. And poetry does that too: it listens to the shadows in us”, explains to whom we owe four collections (incl. Mixed And We are not fairieswith Louis Dupre) as well as an essay, Care and love (2016), reflecting the fruitful tensions between the two poles of his existence.

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

Avoid categories

Philip More found it impossible to continue writing alongside his medical career, rather than vice versa. “Probably even illegal”, jokes one’s collection Angel’s LabIt won him the Émile-Nelligan Prize in 2010, and has recently been reissued in pocket format.

If he has always preferred the division between doctor and poet, without wanting a lab quote and disease everywhere in his poems, his is one of a generous collection of insoluble questions on the role of the doctor. Its task is to take the reader into the corridors of the hospital where he spent his days as an emergency physician.

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

To learn how to read

For our three poet doctors, this is undeniable: their literary practice is enriched by their medical practice and vice versa. To those who once blamed him for wasting time with him that – Describing poetry as an abomination – Philip More replied that he “would not have the energy to do so much as a doctor if he had to prevent this passage. [lui] Who is writing “. “Poetry allows me to give meaning to something that sometimes has none”, he sums up.

But certainly beyond these benefits in terms of personal development, the emergency physician at the Haut-Richelieu hospital found that poetry – both what he wrote and what he read – sharpened his relationship with language. At least 90% of the information that guides the diagnosis, he relies not on his stethoscope notes but on the reading he presents to his patient’s unpacking story. In short: the therapeutic relationship always begins with words.

For many years he has been interested in narrative medicine, an approach described by the American academic Rita Charon, “a medicine practiced with a narrative capacity that allows us to recognize, perceive, understand and move the stories of illness.”.

“Poetry, for me, is a place of humility,” says Onessa Youncey. The poem puts me in a place of unknowability, unpredictability. He knows the language more than I do. There are many things I don’t know about myself and the world, and I find them through writing. And that too is psychiatry. To agree to listen to others is to agree without knowing. Literature helps me stay in this uncertainty. »

There is also a paradoxical, true knowledge—“knowledge of subjectivity and emotion”—to be derived from literature. “I have a much better idea of ​​borderline personality disorder from reading border line [roman de Marie-Sissi Labrèche] Only by consulting clinical criteria. »

And the opposite movement also occurs. All the stories embodied in Melanie Beliveau shape the poet that she is. “What the patients go through, what the patients tell us, it’s very hot, very intense, she observes. We are in a very special intimacy. Wants, don’ts, we understand everything. And because I’m a sensitive person, when I come back home, it makes me inside. Moving. I often have trouble leaving it on the doormat and writing is my outlet. »

Listen to others, listen to yourself

A rare moment of fusion between his two worlds, Angel’s Lab, a collection written entirely in the second person, allowed Philip More to name the ambiguity of the doctor-patient relationship. The dilemma is that poetry knows how to translate “better than other literary forms.”

This relationship, “It is very “I am with you in the disease, but I am not completely with you, I am on the side. I am involved in your care, but above all I am a care manager. I sympathize with you, but I am not in your shoes. The challenge in medicine is that to be able to diagnose, you have to put labels on symptoms and on people, but at the same time, you never lose sight of the individuality of the condition. »

“My mentor always told me: ‘You have to find something you love to help a patient,'” Onessa Youncey recalls. But for there to be another to love, there must first be a self. Poetry allows me to hear what’s going on inside me, my weaknesses. Literature reminds me of this shared humanity, a reminder that I can be in the patient chair. »

Angel’s Lab

Philip More

Bush poets

64 pages

Air in the stomach

Melanie Belive

Works of Forges

68 pages

We are not fairies

Louise Dupre and Oynessa Youncey

Inkwell Memory

120 pages