Alex Myrick
It’s an interesting time of transition for Alex Myrick, whose master’s level research is now evolving to the doctoral level.
Myrick will graduate from Saint Mary’s with a Master of Arts degree in History on February 13. The M.A. program in the History department gave him a great foundation for his next steps: he’s already working on his PhD at the University of Ottawa – remotely from his current home in Halifax – and recently received a prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
In October, Myrick successfully defended his master’s thesis, titled ‘From Isolated Asylums to the Medical Mainstream: Psychiatry's Journey Towards Normalization within Somatic Medicine, 1900-1970’. His research focuses on the once isolated practice of psychiatry and how it became more integrated into medical schools and general hospitals. Psychiatry had been separated from general medicine and was mainly practised in overcrowded asylums up until the mid-twentieth century.
Myrick first became intrigued by the topic in 2017, during a journalism project in his undergraduate years at the University of King’s College. “I wanted to know how, as a society, we got to the point of a quiet crisis in mental health care, with an overburdened system,” he shares. “What intellectual ideas have created the system we live in today? I hope to at least understand how psychiatry and mental health care have developed over the century.”
He concentrated his master’s research on the prominent 20th century psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, whose theory of psychobiology specified that the mind and body are indivisible aspects of the whole human organism. Through psychobiology, an individual’s health could be based on the premise that the body’s anatomical and physiological nervous apparatus work in conjunction with its mental activities and behaviours, and all are part of the human organism’s adaptive response to stimuli in their environment.
Meyer’s influence also extended to Nova Scotia’s medical history, which provided a case study in Myrick’s thesis. Dr. Robert O. Jones, a student of Meyer’s at John Hopkins University, developed a curriculum and post-graduate program for psychiatry at Dalhousie Medical School. Jones became an advocate for Meyerian ideas in the province while teaching the specifics of Meyer’s approaches to psychiatry and medicine. Through Jones and his work, psychiatry was established as a discipline on par with other medical specialties in Nova Scotia.
Myrick is expanding the scope of analysis for his doctoral research to include other Canadian cities that saw psychiatry integrated into their health care systems between 1900 and 1970. He will also further examine the debates among psychiatrists and “the rest of medicine” over psychiatric treatment in hospitals.
He is delighted to be the recipient of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. This will provide federal funding of $35,000 annually for three years of his PhD program.
“The funding frees up so much financial stress,” says Myrick. “The nature of the scholarships means that I can focus entirely on my research. With this funding I also hope to travel to the United States or England to visit the institutions where Meyer’s students worked.”