Archive on the History of Madness in British Columbia
Robert Menzies and Chris Atchison
Introduction
This exhibition features a collection of original documents, writings and images bearing on the history of madness and psychiatry in the province of British Columbia, Canada.
The provincial government’s involvement in the segregative confinement of persons deemed ‘mentally ill’ dates back to 1872, just one year after BC’s entry into Confederation, with the opening of the ramshackle Victoria Lunatic Asylum (a former ‘pesthouse’) on expropriated Songhees First Nations lands on the north shore of the capital city’s inner harbour.
Six years later, the Victoria Asylum patients found themselves relocated to the New Westminster Asylum which operated for more than a century, overlooking the Fraser River within the boundaries of what was, in 1878, mainland British Columbia’s largest city.
With the province’s population burgeoning in the midst of Canada’s dynamic immigration boom of the early 1900s, the patient rolls of the Asylum in New Westminster (re-christened the Public Hospital for the Insane (PHI)) swelled and a second hospital, the Provincial Mental Hospital, Essondale, opened on 1 April 1913 on a thousand acres of hillside land in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam. By 1924, Essondale had assumed its position as the administrative fulcrum of the province’s public psychiatric system.
For its part, the PHI served exclusively as an institution for women between 1913 and 1930. From 1932 onward the New Westminster facility concentrated on ministering to the cognitively disabled, particularly children (and by the 1950s it was correspondingly renamed as the Woodlands School).
The third major cog in British Columbia’s psychiatric apparatus was the Provincial Mental Home, Colquitz (featured in one of the collections in this exhibit), which opened its doors in 1919 and functioned until 1964 as a containment facility for men who were considered ‘criminally insane,’ or who were characterized as either too dangerous to house in the mainland psychiatric institutions, or too disordered to be interned in the federal or provincial prison systems.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century—until the era of ‘community mental health’ and ‘deinstitutionalization’ began to take hold in the 1960s and 1970s—British Columbia’s mental health infrastructure, labour force and state bureaucracy steadily expanded, and patient numbers grew in lockstep until by mid-century more than 5000 people inhabited the wards as inpatients of the province’s three main psychiatric institutions.
We are assembling this archive with the aim of opening a window into the social and institutional experience of madness history in one Canadian province. The story of public psychiatry in British Columbia—of the myriad encounters that have transpired through the decades between citizens deemed ‘insane’ and the managers, professionals, ideas and edifices implicated in their treatment and control—is a rich and potent storehouse of understanding about our nation, our society and our selves. These asylums for the ‘insane’ were, and remain, repositories of human experience that reveal much about our collective preoccupations, hopes and fears as a species and culture.
For their part, the lives of institutionalized ‘madpeople’ typically unfolded in deeply affecting, and unsettling, parallels to those of their counterparts dwelling outside the asylum walls. Their history is at once poignant, compelling, tragic and uplifting. And the institutions themselves—like their professional, lay and patient occupants—were intricately latticed to the society they inhabited, and that they ostensibly served.
By breathing life back into these histories of madness—histories which have for the most part remained buried away, and mired in prejudice and myth—we stand to learn much about our collective inheritance as a people. Rippling through the contents of these documents, artifacts, images and writings are untold truths about the nature of our past, and about our present-day values and preoccupations on the eternally vexing questions of sanity and madness, health and illness, good and evil, freedom and constraint, security and danger, and much more besides.
The Archival Contents
At this early stage in the development of the History of Madness in Canada website, we are introducing the collection with four exhibits on the subject of BC psychiatric history:
- A comprehensive archive of documents and images on the 45-year history of the above-mentioned Provincial Mental Home, Colquitz (further details on the Colquitz exhibit, along with acknowledgments, are provided in the introduction to that exhibit);
- A collection of institutional Annual Reports for the asylums and mental hospitals of British Columbia, as contained in the Sessional Papers of the BC Legislature (BCSP);
- An extensive photographic collection that includes both on-line images (these, too, derive from the RBCA) and digitized renderings of donated hard copy photos
Use the left-hand menu to navigate to the archival item of your choice.
Thanks go out to all the website project team members, collaborators, donors, and research assistants who have been involved in nurturing the early stages of this project; and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Associated Medical Services Inc., and the SFU Institute for the Humanities for their funding and administrative support.
Future Contributions
As the collection builds momentum over the next few years, we aim to devote much of its future content toward charting the lives, experiences and perspectives of those tens of thousands of British Columbians who, as inmates, inhabited the province’s mental health system since the province’s founding of public psychiatry in 1872. This patient-centred material will include first-person accounts, de-identified life histories and other biographical detail. Further, as noted above we will produce a comprehensive inventory of institutional Annual Reports and other BC Sessional Paper content of relevance to the mental health system. Published papers and monographs, past and present, will comprise an additional section of the archives—as will unrestricted government documents and reports; maps and other graphics; and newspaper clippings and related media accounts. Separate sections will ensue on such topics as the history of the eugenics movement and sexual sterilization in British Columbia; the role of race, ethnicity, social class and gender in shaping the province’s encounter with institutional psychiatry; and the deinstitutionalization movement of the latter twentieth century.
