Yes, I saw some of these patients, and my colleagues always talk about these patients who improve. Often, they don't understand why. Often, it's a relationship, a life event or a change in therapeutics.
I have an example. As a psychiatrist, I also follow cancer patients when they're depressed. I had a patient like that who had a severe borderline personality disorder and depression. She had been suicidal for decades and was always in the emergency room, like some patients you saw, maybe. Then suddenly she had metastatic cancer and she stopped being suicidal. She told me, “Before I had cancer, I always wanted to die when I couldn't, and now I could die and I want to live.” She had five years of very productive and fertile happiness. You see that all the time with our colleagues. It's very tough to predict.
What I also wanted to add is that we always forget that now there are new treatments. I'm the chairman of the department of psychiatry at Laval University, and my job is to recruit young physicians with new techniques and new procedures. They train all over the world and come back to our centre in Quebec City. They go into different kinds of psychotherapy, such as neuromodulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation. There are new treatments that are very promising, such as ketamine treatment or psilocybin. You have all these new treatments that could be game-changers. We sometimes forget to talk about these new treatments that could really give hope and change the course of the illness.
Thank you.