After careful investigation of other Canadian centres, the Boeckh family chose McGill because of the synergy between McGill's Department of Psychiatry, the Douglas Hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute and the Montreal Neurological Institute's brain imaging centre and because of the University's international tradition of excellence in research. When McGill's Department of Psychiatry celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1993, visiting speaker Dr. Fuller Torrey, warned that Canada should act swiftly to avoid the tremendous social challenges associated with untreated and misunderstood mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. Stressing that serious mental illness must be treated seriously, he called for Canada to step up its research funding in order to seize new opportunities for study and treatment. This translates into approximately 50,000 Quebecers. In fact, schizophrenia leads to more hospital admissions than any other mental illness.
Doctors estimate the direct and indirect social costs to be in the billions of dollars.
Dean of Medicine Abraham Fuks has warmly welcomed the Graham Boeckh Foundation gift as a tremendously exciting initiative in scientific efforts to find a cure for schizophrenia. Over the last few decades, researchers all over the world have been actively pursuing this question, and we are privileged at McGill to have an extraordinary group of psychiatrists and brain scientists working together to understand such fundamental biological aspects as the mechanisms for genetic transmission of schizophrenia, abnormalities in brain structure and function, and changes in brain chemistry associated with the disease. With this splendid donation, the new McGill chair in schizophrenia research presents a unique opening to help us solve the precise mystery of how the brain becomes vulnerable. Once the causes of schizophrenia are better known, we can develop better means to prevent it. The new chair will be called the Graham Boeckh Chair in Schizophrenia Studies.