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.
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.
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.
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 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.
