After the Asylum in Canada: Surviving Deinstitutionalisation and Revising History

Abstract

Psychiatric deinstitutionalisation began in Canada in earnest during the 1960s and continues today. The downsizing and closure of custodial mental hospitals did not occur uniformly across the country, and regional variations in government, healthcare staff and community care policies profoundly shaped the process. The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn, the last asylum built in the Victorian style in the British Commonwealth, was the first to shut its doors, which it did dramatically in 1963. Others closed in stages, emptying wings and transitioning into outpatient care facilities or, as was the case in Alberta, repurposing the buildings for brain injured patients requiring shorter-term stays. Some facilities remained open with a reduced patient population and abandoned sections of the hospital that no longer conformed to the standards for privacy or health and safety regulations. Eastern Canadian provinces like Nova Scotia had not subscribed to large-scale custodial institutions in the first place, and while deinstitutionalisation from cottage-style facilities also occurred, the pace and impact of that change was profoundly different for staff, communities and ex-patients. Several Ontario-based institutions centralised their services, closing some and enlarging others. British Columbia’s iconic Riverview mental hospital continued to exist partially until 2012, looming large in cultural memory, as did many of these other monuments to what soon became a bygone era of psychiatric care. This regional variation in service delivery has in part characterised deinstitutionalisation in Canada, and also helps to underscore how patients from place to place may have encountered very different circumstances as they moved out of institutional care.