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.
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!
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.
