Bruno Debruille

Dr. Debruille is an Associate Professor of clinical psychiatry in the Division of Adult Psychiatry at McGill University. He runs the Cognitive & Social Neuroscience lab, a proudly low-tech and high-audacity facility at the Douglas Hospital Research Center. The members of his team record response accuracies, reaction times, EEGs and compute event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by the presentation of meaningful stimuli, such as faces, scenes and words. They currently have three axes of research. The first derives from their discovery of the impacts of stimulus processing on ERPs of close others. It is an attempt at approaching the physical nature of conscious percepts and the mechanisms of their production in usual, illusory or hallucinatory states. The second axis focuses on the drive to play social roles and on the effects of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and of antipsychotic medications on those drives. The third axis pertains to the effect of the social context, that is, to the effect of the presence of a friend or of a stranger, on the cognitive processes induced by stimuli. In his clinical practice at the psychotic disorder program of the Douglas Institute, Dr. Debruille specializes in the rehabilitation of people suffering from schizophrenia, mainly by de-stigmatizing psychotic symptoms, boosting motivation by favouring the emergence of new social roles and by teaching how to adjust medications.