Pichot, Pierre

   (1918–)

   Responsible for the introduction of quantitative techniques into French psychopharmacology, Pichot was born in the Vendée department, gaining his M.D. in Paris in 1948. He was a psychiatry intern and resident at the Salpêtrière hospice and Ste.-Anne mental hospital under Jean Delay, then from * Bickel was later professor of pediatrics at Heidelberg. 1949 on Delay’s assistant at Ste.-Anne. In 1964, he received a personal chair in medical psychology. As early as 1948, Pichot began publishing on psychological tests in psychiatry; this was a time, he, said, "when clinical psychiatrists in France scorned any appeal to quantification and statistics" (Shepherd, Psychiatrists on Psychiatry, p. 126). In 1955, his book on the Rorschach as a projective test appeared simultaneously with his work on Clinical Psychometric Methods (Méthodes psychométriques en clinique), a pioneering study of quantitative analysis. From 1972 to 1986, he was Delay’s successor as head of the department of clinical psychiatry of the University of Paris. Just as Pierre Deniker was responsible for developing chlorpromazine at Ste.-Anne, a few years later Pichot undertook early trials of the antipsychotic drug haloperidol. In 1983, he wrote a major history of psychiatry, A Century of Psychiatry, demonstrating a better understanding than any previous historian that psychopharmacology is a method of discerning the nature of mental illness and not just a therapy.