50 years of the CJP
My Journal Years, 1972 to 1977—A Look Back
Frederick Lowy 1
(Can J Psychiatry 2005:50:668–670)
Personal reminiscences, like all autobiographies, offer the privileged insights of the one-who-was-there but suffer, of course, from a lack of objectivity. Memory is invariably filtered to serve the personal narrative that even the most conscientious writer has constructed over the years.
That said, I recall my relatively brief period as editor of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (then the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal) with great pleasure. After I moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 1971, the Journal’s founding editor, Dr Rhodes Chalke, invited me to become an associate editor, joining Dr Jean-Baptiste Boulanger. However, whereas Dr Boulanger was busy in Montreal with his psychoanalytic practice and his teaching at the Université de Montréal, Dr Chalke took advantage of my proximity in Ottawa to involve me in all aspects of the Journal’s activities.
I soon discovered that, despite the interest of Dr Boulanger and a 6-member Editorial Board (Harvey Alderton, Jean Delâge, GE Hobbs, Heinz Lehmann, David Lewis, and Edward Margetts), publishing the Journal had been essentially the work of 2 persons—Rhodes Chalke and Violet (Vi) Appleton.
The Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal was established by Dr Rhodes Chalke in 1955 as the scientific and professional voice of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, then still in its infancy. Vi Appleton, his secretary at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, was his strong right arm. A highly energetic, articulate, postwar English immigrant to Canada, she was well organized and efficient and gradually assumed increasing responsibility, not only for the administrative aspects of the work—managing the office and its single secretary, minding the budget, dealing with Runge Press (which put out our issues), and so on—but also for the copy-editing and correcting of grammatical faults in papers accepted for publication. By the time I became associate editor, she had quite justifiably been granted the title of managing editor.
Rhodes Chalke, editor-in-chief from 1955 to 1972, had been professor and chair of the University of Ottawa’s Department of Psychiatry and one of the founders of the Association. A gentle, kind, and forgiving person, he once told me that his most difficult professional task was writing letters rejecting unworthy papers submitted by his friends and colleagues. The Journal was all-important to Rhodes. He was determined that it become a source of pride for Canadian psychiatrists and that it earn a place among international psychiatric publications. It is to his credit that the Journal gradually gained strength until these 2 objectives were met.
In 1972, Dr Chalke decided to step down as editor-in-chief, in anticipation of the increased responsibilities he would face as incoming president of the Association, and he recommended my appointment as his successor and second editor-in-chief. My first issue—Volume 18, Number 1, January 1973—began with my editorial, coauthored with Vi Appleton and entitled “Relieve the Wheel and Look Out,” a nautical expression for a change of watch that was no doubt suggested by her husband, the naval authority and author Thomas Appleton. The editorial focused on the Journal’s origins and Dr Chalke’s leadership. An expanded Editorial Board now numbered 17: John Adamson, Harvey Alderton, James Brown, William Brown, John Cleghorn, Jean Delâge, Jean Fortin, GE Hobbs, Gordon Johnson, Heinz Lehmann, Eva Lester, David Lewis, Edward Margetts, Philip Ney, Harry Prosen, Martin Solomon, and WT Stauble. Jean-Baptiste Boulanger remained associate editor, and Vi Appleton, of course, was managing editor. The addition of an advertising manager (Helen O’Brien) and a circulation manager (Kay Montagano) strengthened the office. Some stylistic changes and a new cover design were introduced, as well as 3 new features that appeared in many of the issues for which I was responsible. These were position papers that not only summarized a field of psychiatry but usually also presented a point of view, a forum that brought together discussants with divergent ideas, and research notes, written mostly by John M Cleghorn, that summarized recent research findings not likely to be encountered by practitioners reading only a general psychiatry journal. The first position paper, written by Nathan B Epstein and Duane Bishop, was devoted to family therapy. The first forum, on schizophrenia, featured the views of Sylvano Arieti.
The Journal’s policy of prioritizing contributions by Canadian authors was retained, but the number of international papers was increased. During the 4 years of my editorship, these included articles on the following subjects: autism, by Bernard Rimland of San Diego; psychiatric diagnosis, by RE Kendell of Edinburgh; mourning and depression, by Paula Clayton of St Louis; assessing psychopathology, by David Rosenthal, Seymour Kety, and Paul H Wender of the National Institute of Mental Health; the Iowa 500, by Ming Tsuang and George Winokur; the nature of the pyschotherapeutic relationship, by Judd Marmor of Los Angeles; problems of middle childhood, by Stella Chess of New York; and l’homme et ses environements, by Henri Laboret of Paris.
A Journal feature that I particularly admired was among those retained. This was the practice, for which Vi Appleton alone deserves credit, of conducting a careful bibliographic search for an apt quotation from the general literature to accompany each article. Vi Appleton must have spent hours on this task for each issue of the Journal. Not surprisingly, the practice was largely abandoned following her retirement in 1977.
During the years of my editorship, the Journal was housed in the Canadian Psychiatric Association offices in Suite 103, 225 Lisgar Street. This was (and is) an undistinguished but serviceable apartment hotel just south of Ottawa’s main downtown business area, a short walk from Parliament Hill, and an easy 15-minute drive from my office at the Ottawa Civic Hospital where, in my day job, I was psychiatrist-in-chief. My work on the Journal was conducted in the late afternoon, during evenings, on weekends, and whenever else time permitted. Vi Appleton had ready for examination the papers submitted for publication and the books sent in for review. A decision was needed as to which members of the editorial board or which other reviewers would be asked to comment on the suitability of manuscripts or, in the case of books, to write reviews. Generally 2, and occasionally 3, reviewers provided assessments. I read carefully those papers reviewed positively by at least 1 reviewer and then either rejected or accepted them for publication, with or without revisions. From Dr Chalke I had learned, and from time to time employed, the gentle rejection phrase, “The Journal is unable to publish your paper at this time and releases it for possible publication elsewhere.”
As I now recall, during my editorship, about one-third of the papers submitted were published. As the Journal matured and the Association steadily grew, the proportion of submitted papers that were published declined appreciably. The number of books sent by publishers always greatly exceeded the number that could be reviewed; a listing of Books Received was introduced to acknowledge those not reviewed.
In my editorials and in the selection of topics for the position papers, the forums, and the research notes, I tried to reflect the major trends in Canadian psychiatry in the 1970s. This was a time when the hegemony of psychoanalysis in psychiatry was at an end and the advantages of adopting a broad biopsychosocial orientation were increasingly recognized. The promise was of a more scientific, empirical, and evidence-based psychiatry that would complement the humanistic, but more impressionistic, psychodynamic and social approaches to understanding behaviour. It seemed then that the 2 cultures (in CP Snow’s terms) might not only be harnessed but indeed better integrated, both in theory and in clinical practice, and that the extreme polarizations avoided. ZJ Lipowski, borrowing the catchy phrase coined by Leon Eisenberg at Harvard, asked “Need psychiatry be either Mindless or Brainless?” It was only later that the seemingly inevitable pendulum swings that have bedeviled our specialty moved the field to the biological extreme of the 1980s and 1990s. In my final editorial, in December 1976, I offered a brief assessment of the state of psychiatry in Canada, noting 3 developments whose “interplay provides challenges and opportunities which, confronted wisely, can lead to important progress in the field. The corollary is that failure to rise to the challenges can result in a large setback for the discipline” (1, p 505). The 3 developments discussed were the burgeoning growth of the specialty in quantity and quality; the receding of dogmatism and slavish allegiance to theoretical positions, encouraging a more flexible approach to treatment planning; and, paradoxically, an erosion of the status of psychiatrists from the pinnacle of esteem to which we had been elevated, at least in North America, in the 1950s and 1960s. I noted that, sadly, “the confidence of even the educated public in psychiatry may be waning precisely when . . . our resources are superior and our intellectual climate is far more favourable than when we could do no wrong in the eyes of so many” (1, p 506).
In the search for solutions I proposed that
the proper limits of primary psychiatric competence be defined and, in meaningful dialogue with colleagues in related professions, areas of shared expertise be delineated postgraduate training programs and certification examinations reflect these boundaries professional relationships among mental health professionals be elevated to a higher level of collaboration with respect for both the distinctive contributions that each discipline can make and the shared capacity to move forward in other areas psychiatrists find time to participate in appropriate public forums to better inform the public at large about major mental health and illness issues psychiatric resources should be redistributed “so that the relatively few citizens who can receive direct care by psychiatrists are those who need it most and can best use it”(1, p 507) psychiatric research, both basic and applied, be given higher priority
I concluded the editorial by stating that it had been a personal privilege to be associated with a strong national organization, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and with the Journal.
I had moved to Toronto in 1974, and I finally recognized by 1976 that my duties as professor and chair of the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry—Canada’s largest—and as director of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry did not leave me the time I thought the Journal deserved. Fortunately, a highly competent and well-qualified colleague, Dr Eddy Kingstone, was prepared to take over and move the Journal forward.
My memories of my period as editor are strong and overwhelmingly positive. It is with great satisfaction that I have followed the continuing improvement in the Journal’s quality and stature.
References
1. Lowy FH. The state of the specialty [editorial]. Can Psychiatr Assoc J 1976;21:505–7.
Author
1. President and Vice-Chancellor, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.
e-mail: lowyfh@vax2.concordia.ca
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