– Archives
Eve Hamilton was born in 1949 and has spent her working life helping people. Starting as a secretary at Vancouver’s MPA (Mental Patients Association) in the spring of 1973, Eve realized that she loved working directly with people and had a talent for it.
Born in England in 1935, Hugh Parfitt trained in medicine at the St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London.
Vancouver’s MPA (Mental Patients Association) was founded in 1971 as a grassroots response to deinstitutionalization and tragic gaps in community mental health. The group put former patients and lay allies in charge of its many successful social, housing, and employment projects, and in the process challenged the power of psychiatry.
Born in 1942 and raised in Vancouver, Lanny Beckman was a bright student who went on to study psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the early 1960s.
In 1975 Vancouver photographer Gord McCann shot a series of evocative black and white images MPA members at the organization’s iconic Drop-In. Discovered in the bedroom closet of an MPA Founder in 1912, they will soon be part of our online archive.
In 2010 a series of wide ranging interviews were conducted with people connected with the early Mental Patients Association (MPA). We plan to have the complete interviews available in the archives by the end of 2026.
Patty Gozzola was born Patty Abbot in Fort McLeod, Alberta in 1947 and raised in Lethbridge. Married at 17, she became Patty Servant – as she was known during her years at MPA – and had her first son at 18 and a second two years later.
