Founded in 1881 by Alfred Perry and a group of Protestant clergy and Montréal citizens, the Douglas Hospital was named the “Protestant Hospital for the Insane” and was intended to be the most progressive mental health institution in Quebec.

Since its debut, the Hospital has had to continually depend on the community’s support to secure its development. Because it was not administered by a religious organization, as was the case for most French hospitals, it had to depend even more on public generosity and on volunteers. This culture of openness and partnership with the community has allowed us to successfully implement various community reintegration initiatives.

In 1946, the Hospital became affiliated with McGill University. Its training programs are recognized and continue to welcome increasing numbers of students in all disciplines related to mental health: psychiatry, nursing, psychology, occupational therapy etc.

In the 1950s, a revolutionary breakthrough in mental health treatment and research was made by Douglas psychiatrist, Heinz Lehmann, MD, who introduced antipsychotic medications to North America. Thanks to these medications, many patients, until then considered incurable, were able to regain an active life in society. This development also gave rise to the creation of less restrictive approaches and triggered deinstitutionalization in the mid-1960s.

In 1965, the Hospital was named the Douglas Hospital in honour of James Douglas, MD, a major figure in psychiatry, and his family, who made generous donations to the Hospital during its fiscally-challenging early years.

In 1967, the Douglas Hospital became the first psychiatric institution in Canada to receive accreditation by the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation, in recognition of the quality of its services. During that period, the Hospital became increasingly committed to understanding the brain’s biological mechanisms, in order to explain the causes of major mental illnesses. A leader in the field of mental health research, the Douglas Hospital Research Centre was officially created in 1979 and now has an increasingly international reputation. It became a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in 1982.

Today, the Douglas is a world-class mental health university institute that treats and offers hope and recovery to people who suffer from mental illnesses. Its teams of specialists, clinicians and researchers strive to constantly advance scientific knowledge, integrating it into patient care and sharing it with the community to raise awareness and reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Timeline