Louis Charland: 1958–2021

A professor of philosophy at Western University in Ontario, with joint appointments in Philosophy and the School of Health Studies, Louis Charland unexpectedly passed away on May 9, 2021. In addition to Western, he taught at the Universities of Toronto, McGill, and Concordia. He had visiting appointments at Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion in Perth, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Beyond his teaching and research, he also undertook consulting work for several hospitals and governmental and social service agencies.

Louis was the son of a diplomat and was raised as a citizen of the world, with Paris in particular being his psychological hometown. When in Canada as a child, he often resided in Montreal where his grandparents lived and he learned to shift between either a Parisian accent or a Québécois accent, depending on the person with whom he was conversing. A vivid personage, Louis dressed in elegant scarves and distinctive hats right out of a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph, with a matching cosmopolitan air and refined European sensibilities. An artist at heart, Louis was a chef, a poet, and—before chronic dystonia robbed him of the use of one hand—an accomplished classical guitar player. He was a warm and courteous person who maintained his many connections with attentive ness and flair. Perhaps reflecting both his parents' lives in the world of diplomacy, Louis had a genial and conciliatory personality, sometimes ruffled in his dress, but always unruffled by disagreement.

Charland's philosophical work can be loosely divided up into four research areas: Bioethics and more specifically decision-making capacity related to informed consent, particularly as applied to addiction, anorexia, and depression; The Philosophy of Affect, in every aspect, including the history of emotion and the concept of the passions; the History of Psychiatry, especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers such as Pinel, Crichton, Esquirol, and Ribot, and the Philosophy of Psychiatry, including the history of moral treatment and a critique of overmedicalization.

Much of his work pertaining to psychiatry involved the concept of the passions. As opposed to more transient emotional states, passions represent long-term states that can become organizing principles in behavior. Similar to the intellectualist notion of fixed ideas (except that the affective dimension is emphasized), he recognized that passions can involve a loss of control and become maladaptive. In recent research, Charland argued that anorexia nervosa is best conceptualized and treated as a passion. Proposed in collaboration with three psychiatrist colleagues, "the passion theory of anorexia" offered an alternative to traditional cognitive behavioral approaches and engendered a debate among clinicians who specialize in the treatment of eating disorders. Charland's interest in and knowledge of the history of French psychiatry, with emphasis on such figures as Pinel, and English Quaker practices of moral treatment, served to expand North American understanding of non-German traditions.