Hugh Parfitt Papers
Born in England in 1935, Hugh Parfitt trained in medicine at the St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London.
In A Nutshell Collection, 1971-1981
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.
Moyra Jones at Valleyview Project
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.
MPA History Project
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.
Phoenix Rising, 1980-1990
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.