Dyck Erika - Managing Madness

MANAGING madness

Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada

ERIKA DYCK AND ALEX DEIGHTON

With Hugh Lafave, John Elias, Gary Gerber, Alexander Dyck, John Mills, and Tracey Mitchell

Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada

Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton 2017

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777.

University of Manitoba Press

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Treaty 1 Territory

uofmpress.ca

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-0-88755-795-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-88755-537-4 (pdf)

ISBN 978-0-88755-535-0 (epub)

Cover design by Frank Reimer

Interior design by Jess Koroscil

Cover image: Weyburn Mental Hospital Michael Kesterton

Printed in Canada

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The University of Manitoba Press acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Sport, Culture, and Heritage, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Dedicated to everyone who has encountered madness

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE ON PHOTOGRAPHS

The images in this book are a small sampling of the hundreds of photographs depicting the Weyburn Mental Hospital and the people whose lives intersected with the institution. The photographs include some from the hospitals early days of construction and its first few decades of operation, courtesy of the Soo Line Museum. Others come from an unpublished set of photographs taken by Michael Kesteron in 1953, which he had intended to publish after visiting Weyburn on assignment from Macleans magazine. Other photographs were kept by staff working in mental health services in the 1970s and remain undated and uncatalogued. The most recent photographs depict the closing of the hospital and ultimately its destruction; we are grateful to Penny Dyck and Kam Theo for capturing these moments to help bookend the rise and fall of this important facility.

appear at the end of this book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to begin by acknowledging the Treaty 4 territory where the Weyburn Mental Hospital once stood and where this book unfolded. This book is the product of the inspiration, reflection, collaboration, and ultimately hard work of many people who have all encountered the mental health system in different ways. We all have our reasons for getting involved in writing the book, and we all have different people and experiences to thank for that motivation. What initially began as a more modest proposal from Hugh Lafave to write up a little something on the remarkable experiment(s) that unfolded in Saskatchewan gradually grew in scope, and we quickly realized that the strength of our venture multiplied as we joined with others who helped to nuance and enrich the discussion.

After several telephone calls, and a few visits to Ontario, Hugh introduced me, Erika Dyck, to Gary Gerber, and our circle widened. We started by applying to the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation for a new investigator grant to support the hiring and training of an archivist who could take the newly deposited patient admission records and enter them into a database, which we could then read, compare, and analyze to tease out patient experiences in the first half of the twentieth century.

Alex Deighton took a course on the history of madness with me and the following summer volunteered to work in the archives retracing the earlier history of the hospital. After many weeks reviewing institutional materials and government records, he began writing up his impressions, and it was clear that he was going to be an integral part of the team because of his sophisticated research and sensitive analysis. Ultimately, Alex took the lead on Chapters 1 to 3.

Alex Dyck was a medical student at the University of Saskatchewan when he approached me about doing a summer research project. We applied for funding from Associated Medical Services and received a student internship grant for Alex to compare diagnostic categories over time and through different nascent systems of classification.

Along the way, I met John Mills through correspondence and ultimately collaborated with him on a paper. John was working on his own manuscript about the history of psychiatry in Saskatchewan. Before he completed it, however, he fell ill and passed it along to the team, allowing us to use parts of it for our own purposes. Working with his widow, Ann Newdigate, and his son, Julian Mills, we have woven together parts of Johns work along with much of the passion and insight of his original manuscript.

John Elias joined us later in the process but played a critical role in locating unarchived documents, many of which were in his possession after he served many years in the Saskatchewan government and was responsible for revising the Mental Health Services Act after introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Without his organization, interest in, and passion for this subject, much of the material for the latter half of the book would not have been possible.

Tracey Mitchell and I had long shared interests in progressive Saskatchewan politics and survivor politics, but the evolving nature of this project allowed us to come together again and put our words on paper as we worked through some of our convictions about social justice and madness within a historically contingent framework.

I am deeply indebted to each of these authors for sharing his or her passion, experiences, inspiration, and ideas. I am proud that we were able to work together and make this a collaborative project, and the sum of our parts constituted a much stronger book in the end.

We have many others who helped us along the way to thank as well. We received financial support from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, the Canada Research Chair funds, Associated Medical Services, Inc., and the University of Saskatchewan. We benefited from the technical support of the Digital Research Centre and its guru, Jon Bath. My colleague Geoff Cunfer not only encouraged us to embrace Historical Geographic Information Systems methods but also introduced me to his technician, Mike St. Louis, who helped us to clean the data and prepare the charts and maps in this book. The Saskatchewan Archives Board, renamed the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan as the book neared completion, was instrumental in developing the database that allowed us to compare patient admissions across institutions. Anna Stoszek, Liam Currie, and Lisa Long were indispensable for negotiating the legal, ethical, and archival contours of creating this resource, and we hope that it will provide a rich dataset for future researchers as well. Alexandre Pelletier at the University of Ottawa joined us at our Ontario meetings and interviewed Hugh Lafave repeatedly to capture his detailed reflections.