– Exhibits
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.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum is a 36-minute historical documentary about the MPA (Mental Patients Association), Vancouver’s most radical and successful mental health group. A compilation of interviews clips, animation, vintage footage, and original music, this provocative, passionate and engaging film speaks to social justice, community-building and mental health today.
Hosted by Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet in early 2018, Mad City presented the radical early life of MPA or the Mental Patients Association, a Kitsilano fixture in the 1970s, inviting visitors to imagine a mental health world where hierarchies were inverted and people with psychiatric diagnoses were empowered to create and run the support services they needed.
This exhibit takes you inside the unique experiment that is PARC, Toronto’s Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre. Born in 1980 as a drop-in centre offering basic services to former psychiatric patients, PARC evolved to provide employment, to advocate on issues of poverty, mental health and homelessness, and to become a vital neighbourhood institution.
Meet a theatre crew who made their audience map out a way to humanize our broken mental health system. In 2013, Vancouver’s Theatre for Living launched Maladjusted, a production that crafted fictional scenarios from the lived experiences of cast members, using the stage as a platform to rehearse progressive changes to the current psychiatric regime.
Learn from Indigenous artists about how they understand mental health, informed by colonial legacies and the need to heal. Coming out of an important 2007 residency at Gallery Gachet, an dissident outsider arts space, the art – and the artists – speak to the experience of living in an in-between place shaded by past trauma and strengthened by cultural heritage.
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.
Imagine encountering an exhibit of female figures, whose faces and bodies were inscribed with tales of psychiatric torture? This was Still Sane and the year was 1984. Fast forward twelve months, and Vancouver’s Press Gang publishers produced the book, taking the show’s feminist, lesbian and mad politics to a much wider audience.
Survivor culture is not art therapy, or stories solicited for public education. It is the cultural expression of a quest for justice. Explaining that making this exhibit transformed both her understanding of mad community and her own identity, curator Tracey Mitchell argues that the personal and the political are inextricably connected in survivor culture.
Meet these radicals and reconsider who could be in charge of the fate of mental health. Vancouver’s pioneering group MPA was Canada’ first democratic, peer-directed mental health organization. It inverted asylum hierarchies and put former patients and sympathetic lay supporters in charge. This exhibit includes a series of biographical sketches and case studies.
Learn about a marriage of street smarts and scholarly skills, an impossible combination in the asylum era. Eugène Leblanc, director of an innovative Moncton support group, and Nérée St-Amand, professor of social work at the University of Ottawa, met in 1987. Sharing a savvy critique of the mental health system, they have been working together ever since.
