Madness Canada, dedicated to the history of Canadian psychiatry, mental health and addiction, have established two endowment funds (formerly awarded by the Friends of the CAMH Archives). These endowments annually provide funding in memory of their late colleagues, Ms. E.M. (Lil) Hewton and Dr. John D.M. Griffin, OC.
Meet these radicals and reconsider who could be in charge of the fate of mental health. Vancouver’s pioneering group MPA was Canada’ first democratic, peer-directed mental health organization. It inverted asylum hierarchies and put former patients and sympathetic lay supporters in charge. This exhibit includes a series of biographical sketches and case studies.
Activism: resistance, transgression, opposition, collective or individual
Learn about a marriage of street smarts and scholarly skills, an impossible combination in the asylum era. Eugène Leblanc, director of an innovative Moncton support group, and Nérée St-Amand, professor of social work at the University of Ottawa, met in 1987. Sharing a savvy critique of the mental health system, they have been working together ever since.
Read what the practitioners have to say about their struggles to redefine themselves in a deinstitutionalized world. As the big psychiatric institutions closed in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the staff found work in community mental health programs. Historian Chris Dooley presents the stories of front-line prairie mental health workers and his own reflections.
Biography: lives of patients, practitioners, family, policy-makers
Call Me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement is a seminal volume on Canada’s shelf of mad publications. Editor Irit Shimrat had the perfect resume for creating this important collection. She had edited the Toronto-based psychiatric-survivor newspaper Phoenix Rising, coordinated the Ontario Psychiatric Survivors’ Alliance, trained in book editing and design, and had spent time in several psychiatric facilities in the late 1970s.
Call Me Crazy began with Irit Shimrat’s 1996 trans-Canada odyssey to gather the stories of key movement activists. Discovering that Shimrat still had the original cassette tapes from her interviews, After the Asylum had a selection of the archival recordings digitized, and asked the interviewees to share then and now photos and reflections on the current mad movement.
Established in the deinstitutionalizaton era, White Cross Centres were meant to help discharged patients build a social life and gain skills for daily living. This exhibit is a compelling illustration of the inadequacies of an underfunded and underdeveloped community mental health system.
Community Living: day to day issues, housing, work, community, programs and supports
Learn from Indigenous artists about how they understand mental health, informed by colonial legacies and the need to heal. Coming out of an important 2007 residency at Gallery Gachet, an dissident outsider arts space, the art – and the artists – speak to the experience of living in an in-between place shaded by past trauma and strengthened by cultural heritage.
Deinstitutionalization: institutional to community mental health, patient life to life in the community, trans-institutionalization
Diagnosis and Understanding: perceptions of mental wellbeing and illness – professional, patient, family, society
Acknowledge this woman’s patience, resilience, and personal courage in challenging medical and social labels of deficiency. Doreen Befus grew up in Alberta’s infamous Michener Centre, where she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent as part of the provincial eugenics program. Deinstitutionalized in the 1970s, she became a caregiver, an activist, and a writer.
Draw your own conclusions about Canada’s first experiment in mental health education. Can you reduce stigma by teaching people about mental illness? In 1951 researchers Elaine and John Cumming traveled to Indian Head, Saskatchewan, to test that idea. In a turn of unparalleled irony, the townsfolk grew hostile towards the Cummings and the mayor told them to leave.
Equity: discrimination, poverty, social and economic exclusion
Did community support for people experiencing mental health difficulties emerge only in the 1960s? Fully two decades earlier, BC provincial politician Ernest Winch established the New Vista Home for discharged female psychiatric patients. Visit this exhibit to learn about Winch’s early efforts to secure human rights for psychiatrized people, and meet four New Vista women as they struggle to make lives outside the institution.
Eve Hamilton was born in 1949 and has spent her working life helping people. Starting as a secretary at Vancouver’s MPA (Mental Patients Association) in the spring of 1973, Eve realized that she loved working directly with people and had a talent for it.
Survivor culture is not art therapy, or stories solicited for public education. It is the cultural expression of a quest for justice. Explaining that making this exhibit transformed both her understanding of mad community and her own identity, curator Tracey Mitchell argues that the personal and the political are inextricably connected in survivor culture.
Gender and Sexuality: women, men, trans, queer, feminist, gender-stereotypes, sexism
Born in England in 1935, Hugh Parfitt trained in medicine at the St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London.
Vancouver’s MPA (Mental Patients Association) was founded in 1971 as a grassroots response to deinstitutionalization and tragic gaps in community mental health. The group put former patients and lay allies in charge of its many successful social, housing, and employment projects, and in the process challenged the power of psychiatry.
Kiss Me You Mad Fool embodies the power of collective creative process.
A members Writing Group began at Toronto’s PARC (Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre) in 1988. For thirty-two years, PARC writers have gathered around a table to respond to a prompt, and write for twenty minutes.
Born in 1942 and raised in Vancouver, Lanny Beckman was a bright student who went on to study psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the early 1960s.
Law and Policy: legislation, legal structures, criminal justice system, state funding and state programs
Hosted by Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet in early 2018, Mad City presented the radical early life of MPA or the Mental Patients Association, a Kitsilano fixture in the 1970s, inviting visitors to imagine a mental health world where hierarchies were inverted and people with psychiatric diagnoses were empowered to create and run the support services they needed.
Can we use history to break down the stigma surrounding mental health? Clarissa Andrade, the Coordinator of Mental Health and Wellness Support Services at Manitoba’s Université de Saint-Boniface thinks the answer to this question is YES!
Meet a theatre crew who made their audience map out a way to humanize our broken mental health system. In 2013, Vancouver’s Theatre for Living launched Maladjusted, a production that crafted fictional scenarios from the lived experiences of cast members, using the stage as a platform to rehearse progressive changes to the current psychiatric regime.
Were people in long-stay psychiatric institutions really shut off from the world? The life of Marguerite-Marie, resident of Montreal’s Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital from age 12, shows that this was not always the case. Family letters provide a glimpse into Marguerite-Marie’s daily activities, her dreams and desires for her life outside of the asylum, and the maintenance and nurturing of familial ties.
Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum was self-published in 1885 by Mary Huestis Pengilly, a former patient in New Brunswick’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum. Although Pengilly was likely a paying patient, she still criticized the institution for poor food and harsh treatment. The volume opens with the poignant words, “They will not let me go home.”
In 1975 Vancouver photographer Gord McCann shot a series of evocative black and white images MPA members at the organization’s iconic Drop-In. Discovered in the bedroom closet of an MPA Founder in 1912, they will soon be part of our online archive.
Every Monday our Victoria BC psychiatric hospital’s 100 seat auditorium became a movie theatre to show an eclectic selection of films, carefully curated and often including guests and interactive discussions.
From the late 1970s into the 1990s, Jones was an innovator and a leader in BC’s gerontology community. She worked with elderly veterans at the George Derby Centre in Burnaby and then as director of rehabilitation services at Valleyview Hospital, a geriatric facility at Riverview Hospital, BC’s Coquitlam provincial mental health facility.
In 2010 a series of wide ranging interviews were conducted with people connected with the early Mental Patients Association (MPA). We plan to have the complete interviews available in the archives by the end of 2026.
Madness Canada is collecting and scanning early MPA publications for inclusion in our archive. Stay tuned.
The Museum of the Mind in Haarlem, the Netherlands, is a public repository of psychiatry’s past that speaks with purpose to mental health today, drawing the visitor in as an active participant and storytelling, history, art, and past-present-future paradigms to challenge current ideas and practices in mental health.
In November 2010, historian Megan Davies teamed up with mad educator, activist and former politician David Reville to present a public talk at the Parkdale Public Library on the neighbourhood’s mad history.
Patient Lives: in asylums and hospitals, day to day, institutional work, relationships, and living conditions, abuse
Patty Gozzola was born Patty Abbot in Fort McLeod, Alberta in 1947 and raised in Lethbridge. Married at 17, she became Patty Servant – as she was known during her years at MPA – and had her first son at 18 and a second two years later.
This brave Canadian magazine was born in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, fueled by the determination of psychiatric survivors and activists Carla McKague and Don Weitz. Over it’s decade of existence, the resolutely political publication focused a critical eye on a shifting spectrum of mad issues.
Practitioners: physicians, nurses, social workers, care givers, psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists in the act of doing their practice work
Psychiatry and psychology: ideology, culture, knowledge-base, careers, practice, status, education
The 1988 publication of Shrink Resistant was a milestone in English Canadian survivor culture, the first collective representation of the experiences of women and men who had been patients in psychiatric institutions. Produced by the Vancouver alternative publisher, New Star Press, Shrink Resistant was deeply and deliberately political.
Shrink Resistant, recalls a time when there was a zeitgeist to make the hidden public, and for the disempowered to unit and take political action. Edited by Torontonians Bonnie Burstow and Don Weitz, the book was published in 1988 by New Star, Vancouver’s venerable left wing press. This was English Canada’s first collective representation of psychiatric survivors.
Part memoir/ part art catalogue/ part essay, Still Sane was inspired by the searing 1984 sculpture exhibit of the same name that told the story of Gilhooly’s psychiatric incarceration for being a lesbian.
Imagine encountering an exhibit of female figures, whose faces and bodies were inscribed with tales of psychiatric torture? This was Still Sane and the year was 1984. Fast forward twelve months, and Vancouver’s Press Gang publishers produced the book, taking the show’s feminist, lesbian and mad politics to a much wider audience.
This collection is being prepared for listening.
The Asylum Project, the idea that neurodiverse people were sick and needed long term residential care, was an optimistic idea that ended in far-reaching failure. Visit architect Arthur Allen’s careful examination of the sites, buildings, and grounds of Western Canadian asylums and the lives of patients who lived there.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum is a 36-minute historical documentary about the MPA (Mental Patients Association), Vancouver’s most radical and successful mental health group. A compilation of interviews clips, animation, vintage footage, and original music, this provocative, passionate and engaging film speaks to social justice, community-building and mental health today.
Transporting the asylum into the deinstitutionalization era, this exhibit walks you through the dissolving walls of thirteen large Canadian psychiatric hospitals. These institutions once represented the hopes of psychiatry and the state to rehabilitate citizens deemed mentally ill, serving as patient residences, staff workplaces, and sites of medical experimentation.
This exhibit takes you inside the unique experiment that is PARC, Toronto’s Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre. Born in 1980 as a drop-in centre offering basic services to former psychiatric patients, PARC evolved to provide employment, to advocate on issues of poverty, mental health and homelessness, and to become a vital neighbourhood institution.
In the spring of 2009, historian Megan Davies partnered with secondary student and videographer Willie Willis to interview a number of Toronto activists. Their oral histories set out the serious obstacles former patients faced as they moved from institution to community
Treatment: biomedical, alternative, cultural, self-healing
I’m Not Mad I’m Angry, the popular name for this historic publication, is an early feminist critique of the practice of psychiatry and how it contributed to the oppression of women. The first title put out by the newly formed feminist Press Gang Publishers of Vancouver, the book grew out of a 1973 University of British Columbia lecture series “Madness in Society” where Dorothy Smith (a sociologist) and Meredith Kimball (a psychologist) presented a strong political analysis of the negative encounters women had with psychiatry.
Art and Culture: creativity, art, craft, the process of creating
Institutions: asylums, hospitals, group homes, residential care facilities, treatment sites
Race: ethnicity, immigration, racism, cultural aspects
