, . . Office at the University of Toronto Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. And I'm Charmaine, your instructor for the course, The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness. What we're going to be doing over the next six weeks is learning about how the social environment affects people's ability to live with mental illness and recover from it. How it effects the way that we understand mental health and illness, and how it affects the way that are mental health care systems work. I'm really looking forward to this experience with you. I worked in the mental healthcare system for many years, and one of the things that I was always impressed by was that although we know that illnesses have a trajectory that has to do with the biological aspects of them, the way that people are able to live with those illnesses, mental illnesses, is definitely affected by the social environment. It's affected by things like how they understand the mental illness and what they've learned about that through their life. It's affected by. Looks like their families and how they're able to support them through that experience. It's affected by our neighborhoods and our, our communities and how we affect people, how we support people with mental illnesses. And, of course, one of the things that is a significant factor in terms of mental health and illness is also the stigma that exists in so many of our communities. And that definitely has an effect on how people are able to live with the diagnosis of a mental disorder. So my hope is that by learning more about both the history of mental. Will help an illness and also our contemporary understandings of it. That we all become more able to contribute to our own mental health as well as the mental health of the people around us. And that's one of the things that I'm hoping will be the outcome of your learning experience in this course. , . So, there's going to be a lot of things happening in this course. we will sometimes will be doing lectures like this where you see me talking into the camera. Sometimes there'll be Powerpoint presentations going on and you have my voice over that. But we're also on the Internet and it seems silly not to take advantage of the fact that the web has so much material available to we are going to looking at readings that are available, on the Internet. There's lots of great documentary footage and interviews and things like that. And that's also going to be part of what we use to. Integrate, our learning experience here in the course. I also hope that maybe you will also be contributing to the course. A really important part of the learning here, I think, is that we're going to have homework assignments that will give you the opportunity to apply what we're discussing in lectures to what's going on in your own life, your own community. But, also the discussion forums are going to be a great place for us to learn about each other and what's going on in different parts of the world. One of the great things about being online is that you can be participating in this course in Canada where I am. In the US, in Europe, in Asia, Africa, I mean really anywhere and I know that I'm really hoping that one of the things that I'm going to learn about, as we're going through this process is how things are done in other places and also how things are the same or different to what I've experienced. So I'm really looking forward to over the next six weeks, getting to know what's going on where you are and getting to know what brings you to a course like this, why don't we get started? So I want to thank I really want to thank Liz Johnson for giving me permission to link her documentary to the course so that you could take a look at it. And at some point you may want to watch the entire hour of the documentary. It's, it's a very interesting piece of work that focuses on the experiences that adolescents have had in various types of treatment centers. Now, there's no question that this documentary has a very specific point of view and you know, it's almost as interesting. Watching the documentary as looking at the comments below it. Because you can see that there are people that have very strong feelings in many directions. Some people who definitely endorse the documentary's point of view that there can be abuses in the mental health care system. That people are, placed in that system, without, a real opportunity to be empowered in that experience or to express their self determination in that experience. And then also, people of the other end, who really think that the. these systems and these centers are very helpful and that these people are representing either a very minority experience, or that they're just simply misrepresenting the experience. So, there are very strong feelings on both sides, and I think that you're going to find as we go along, and you've probably already experienced that there are very strong feelings about mental health care. the one thing that I think everybody seems to agree on is that the asylum era was problematic, and there seems to be a very universal idea that. Asylums were bad and bad things happened in them. And I, I think that that's. A logical reason for us to start there, because that's where a lot of people start. And, you'll see that I say that in the next segment as well. So, what I wanted to do is contrast the, what you've seen in Liz Johnson's documentary with what what I saw when I went to see the Mimico, the former site of the Mimico Lunatic Asylum here in Toronto. You may remember if you viewed the the promotional video for this course, that I showed some pictures of the redeveloped site for the. Former Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto. believe it or not we actually have two asylum sites in Toronto. Which is really interesting. They were both, they were both built pretty close together in the late 1800's. And I looked it up and at the time the city only had a population of just over 200.000. And even if you consider that people were coming from from outer regions into these centres. It's, it's strange to think that we needed two lunatic asylums at that time. But it seems we did. So I decided to go out to the, former site of the Mimico Lunatic asylum. Which is now, a college. And, and I wanted to show you what that site looks like now. So that you could get some perspective on what it is that was going on back during that time.
