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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
