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.
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.
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.
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.
