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Jean Delay (14 November 1907, Bayonne – 29 May 1987, Paris) was a French psychiatrist, neurologist, writer, and a member of the Académie française (Chair 17).
His assistant Pierre Deniker conducted a test of chlorpromazine on the male mental ward where Delay worked, and the two published their findings (quickly, with what has been called academic gamesmanship) in 1952. Chlorpromazine turned out to be the first effective drug treatment for mental illness and it had a profound effect on the mentally ill and mental asylums.
In 1968–1970, student Revolutionary attacked his offices, and Delay was forced into retirement from medicine. In later life, he lived as a writer.
Jean Delay was the father of Florence Delay, of the Académie française (Seat 10), and of Claude Delay, novelist and psychoanalyst.
Delay twice served as president of the WPA (1950 and 1957), and also as president of the French language Congress of Neurology and Psychiatry (1954), the Society Medico-Psychologique (1960), the International Congress of Psychosomatic Medicine (1960), and the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum (CINP) (1966). He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1955.
He and the Soviet delegation examined Rudolf Hess during the Nuremberg trials, and found hysterical amnesia but not insanity in the strict sense.
During his scientific career, Delay published more than 700 articles and over 40 books. In 1957, he developed with his assistant Pierre Deniker a classification of pharmacological and recreational drugs that was validated by the World Congress of Psychiatry in 1961.
Delay's team studied isoniazid (INH) and its effect on depression, around 1952.
Delay discovered, jointly with J. M. Harl and Pierre Deniker, who was Delay's co-worker and also a psychiatrist, that chlorpromazine, the first neuroleptic, produced a considerable reduction in the agitation and aggression of those patients with symptoms of schizophrenia.Kandel, E. R. (2007). In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. W. W. Norton & Co. See also A review in Spanish about Kandel's book Known first as a "ganglio-plegic", he first called the drug "neuroplégique" then finally a "neuroleptic". Deniker, with Harl and Delay, published the success with chlorpromazine in May 1952. Chlorpromazine reached common use by 1957 worldwide, except in the United States where medications were then still considered less useful than psychodynamic therapy. While this was not his most important scientific contribution, it became the most famous.
It was, however, Deniker who shared the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Henri Laborit (who first recognized the drug's applications in psychiatry) and Heinz Lehmann in 1957. As explained in the American Journal of Psychiatry and elsewhere, no one won a Nobel Prize for the discovery.
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