– Archives
David Reville was born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1943. He studied history at the University of Toronto and went on to law school. In 1965, he was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and spent two years in and out of mental hospitals.
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.
From the late 1970s into the 1990s, Jones was an innovator and a leader in BC’s gerontology community. She worked with elderly veterans at the George Derby Centre in Burnaby and then as director of rehabilitation services at Valleyview Hospital, a geriatric facility at Riverview Hospital, BC’s Coquitlam provincial mental health facility.
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.
This brave Canadian magazine was born in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, fueled by the determination of psychiatric survivors and activists Carla McKague and Don Weitz. Over it’s decade of existence, the resolutely political publication focused a critical eye on a shifting spectrum of mad issues.
In the spring of 2009, historian Megan Davies partnered with secondary student and videographer Willie Willis to interview a number of Toronto activists. Their oral histories set out the serious obstacles former patients faced as they moved from institution to community
