Depression and psychiatry look at each other with empathy, this evening on Canal + (critic)

A new Canadian series that dares to speak without detour of mental health. Between drama and humanity, Florence Longpré and Thomas Ngijol deliver striking performances in a universe where caregivers and patients each fight in their own way.

“To judge is not to understand”.

This quote from André Malraux takes on its full meaning with empathy. This is even the raison d’être of this new Quebec series, which arrives in France this evening on Canal +, after being crowned from the Grand Prix of the Public at the last Festival Séries Mania.

This powerful drama takes us to the heart of the Mont-Royal psychiatric institute, we follow the first steps of Suzanne, a criminologist who became a psychiatrist, who tries to help her patients while facing her own flaws. For the most part, the patients in question are condemned deemed unfit, locked up here to be sidelined by society. But Suzanne seeks to understand and rehabilitate these desperate cases, dismissed from the world.

Florence Longpré created this character of psychiatrist whom she herself embodies with great strength. A woman plagued by depression as soon as she returns home, and who knows too well how much mental disorders are a disease that eats away from the inside. This is the whole point of empathy: to put light with accuracy and humanity on the realities of mental illness. The gesture is obviously sincere and the result does not fail to touch, even if the series sometimes struggles to find its tone, ostensibly refusing the melodrama which nevertheless imposes itself on it episode after episode.

Alongside Florence Longpré, it is Thomas Ngijol who is there to bring a little sweetness. The former Jamel Comedy Club embodies a disillusioned agent who brings a real nuance to this difficult exploration of the psychiatric. Unexpected in this register, he surprises by offering a perfect counterweight to Florence Longpré. A tender dynamic is born which allows the series to be always in empathy, without artificially dramatizing madness, while giving it its humanity.

Empathy in 10 episodes will be seen from Monday, September 1 on Canal +.