Posted by Jay on February 26, 2007, at 19:09:26
From `inmates' to `clients'
TheStar.com - News -Toronto.
February 25, 2007
It's a Sunday in 1860, and a mother wearing a broad-brimmed hat passes sandwiches to her husband and three children as they sit on a picnic blanket. The boy is wearing a sailor suit. The father points out a patient named Mary. Her hair is dishevelled; her arms hang slack as she shuffles past. She relieves herself in a flowerbed. And the father roars with laughter.This scene is from the early years of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, precursor to the 1001 Queen St. W. branch of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. "They had come here for entertainment," wrote Dr. Joseph Workman, an enlightened humanitarian who was head of the asylum from 1853 until 1875.
"To them, these unfortunates were freaks in some country fair sideshow – to be gawked at, shuddered at, laughed at and forgotten. At no time did the parents wonder if Mary had been a little girl like their daughters or if she had a husband or a son. She was sub-human ...
"Then they left. To go to church."
Since 1850, the site has been home to people who were variously referred as lunatics, idiots, the insane, inmates and patients. The term used at CAMH today is "clients."
Over the years they endured treatments such as immersion in ice-water baths, insulin-induced comas and lobotomies – procedures that would not be tolerated now.
The patients also endured the outside world's fear and contempt. Mothers told children to hold their breath when they passed the hospital, fearing they'd be infected with madness. Some taxis refused to pick up passengers there. Children were told to smarten up or they'd be sent to "999," the shorthand name for the hospital until its street number was changed to 1001 in 1979 in order to evade such ridicule.
Before the asylum was built, people who showed signs of mental illness, including senility, and could not be cared for at home ended up in dank jail cells. Their heads were shaved, their bodies scarred from bloodletting; some were held in leg irons. When the hospital was built, Workman promoted kindness and patience instead.
Inspired by London's National Gallery, architect John Howard's neoclassical structure was one of the most impressive buildings in Upper Canada. It had hot and cold running water, central heating and indoor washrooms.
Three miles from the city centre, it was to provide clean air, healthy food and a protective wall. Soon, however, flaws in the hospital's design became apparent. The much-vaunted ventilation system turned out to be useless, and the building smelled like a cesspool. The stench became a hallmark of the institution.
Within decades, the asylum was overcrowded. It became a dumping ground for the poor and the senile because, as Workman observed, the province made no provision for support of "the destitute and very harmless people."
Freedom was limited. Men were expected to work, unpaid, on the adjoining farm or in workshops, while women toiled in the laundry or did sewing.
"These places were so institutional they were like prisons," says Geoffrey Reaume, an assistant professor of history at York University, and a former psychiatric patient. "It was warehousing of mad people, and it was not a therapeutic environment."
Reaume cites the hospital's walls, built by patients in two stages, in the 1860s and 1880s, as a testament to their capabilities. (The current renovation accommodate the preservation of the remaining east, south and west walls.) "It's very important to fight the discrimination that exists today – that people with psychiatric history are not capable of meaningful work," says Reaume, author of a book about the institution, Remembrance of Patients Past.
By the 1880s, the city that had once seemed so distant engulfed the asylum. The walls, rather than seeming protective, made the hospital seem like a jail.
The environment changed little over the next 70 years. Then, in 1956, a grey, featureless, faintly Soviet-style administrative building was erected in front of the asylum. Twenty years later, the old building was torn down – despite public protests and plans for its reuse by architect Jack Diamond. In its place were constructed the smaller, campus-style buildings, which will in turn be demolished as part of the redevelopment.
Reaume has mixed feelings about the makeover, arguing that what really needs to be renovated is people's attitudes toward the mentally ill. "We have to make sure they are part of the community and not shunned," he says. "It's their community, and for people not to welcome them shows a profound disrespect and ignorance of their long history."
Leslie Scrivener
poster:Jay
thread:736569
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070224/msgs/736569.html