– Exhibits
Childhood Madness: Compassionate Portraits of Children in Canadian Insane Asylums, 1900-1930 By Kira A. Smith Between 1900 and 1930, kids across Canada entered insane asylums designed for adults. Care was rarely offered. Children were subject to incarceration, eugenics, and institutional abuse. Asylum environments were often scary for children. The experiences of children are at the …
Did community support for people experiencing mental health difficulties emerge only in the 1960s? Fully two decades earlier, BC provincial politician Ernest Winch established the New Vista Home for discharged female psychiatric patients. Visit this exhibit to learn about Winch’s early efforts to secure human rights for psychiatrized people, and meet four New Vista women as they struggle to make lives outside the institution.
Acknowledge this woman’s patience, resilience, and personal courage in challenging medical and social labels of deficiency. Doreen Befus grew up in Alberta’s infamous Michener Centre, where she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent as part of the provincial eugenics program. Deinstitutionalized in the 1970s, she became a caregiver, an activist, and a writer.
