– 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 …
The Museum of the Mind in Haarlem, the Netherlands, is a public repository of psychiatry’s past that speaks with purpose to mental health today, drawing the visitor in as an active participant and storytelling, history, art, and past-present-future paradigms to challenge current ideas and practices in mental health.
Call Me Crazy began with Irit Shimrat’s 1996 trans-Canada odyssey to gather the stories of key movement activists. Discovering that Shimrat still had the original cassette tapes from her interviews, After the Asylum had a selection of the archival recordings digitized, and asked the interviewees to share then and now photos and reflections on the current mad movement.
Shrink Resistant, recalls a time when there was a zeitgeist to make the hidden public, and for the disempowered to unit and take political action. Edited by Torontonians Bonnie Burstow and Don Weitz, the book was published in 1988 by New Star, Vancouver’s venerable left wing press. This was English Canada’s first collective representation of psychiatric survivors.
