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Controversial psychiatrist and radio host Pierre (Doc) Mailloux dies at 74

Pierre Mailloux speaks into a microphone in a radio studio
Pierre Mailloux in 2005. Montreal Gazette files

Pierre (Doc) Mailloux, a Quebec psychiatrist who repeatedly found himself in the hot seat with his professional order, and was known for racist and sexist public statements, died Friday, two days before his 75th birthday.

The news was announced late in the morning on X (formerly Twitter) by the podcast he co-hosted, Doc Mailloux & Josey.

According to a message from his family it relayed, Mailloux died “peacefully following an incurable illness.” The family thanked the public for their support, but said they wanted to grieve in privacy.

In recent weeks, the show’s page claimed the co-host was suffering from a “flu” and a “tough infection.”

The man better known as “Doc Mailloux” began practicing psychiatry at the end of the 1970s, after studying at Université Laval and McGill University.

At the beginning of his career, Mailloux testified as an expert at the trial of Denis Lortie, accused of a 1984 shooting at the National Assembly.

In 1995, he began hosting a radio show — initially with the title Un psy à l’écoute — on radio station CKAC. After CKAC shut down in 2007, Mailloux appeared on Quebec City radio stations Radio X and FM93.

But it was his escapades and his disagreements with Quebec’s College of Physicians that attracted the attention of the media. The order suspended Mailloux several times during his career for acts such as prescribing “megadoses” of antipsychotic drugs and making on-air diagnoses of patients he had not examined.

Among Mailloux’s controversial statements was “Blacks were born less intelligent than whites, and that accounts for their poverty and high unemployment rate.”

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This story was originally published January 12, 2024, 12:14 PM.

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