– Exhibits
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.
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.
