Hi. This is Shermane Williams, and I am out at the former site of Mimico Lunatic
Asylum. Those are the pictures that you saw just
before this segment started. those of you who saw the promotion for
the course will remember that I did a little bit of a segment on, on the
Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which is now currently the Center for Addiction and
Mental Health and and has become surrounded by the city although it was
originally a very isolated location. This site here, the Mimico Lunatic
Asylum, Similarly was once isolated.
It was actually originally set up as the satellite of the Queen Street, sorry, as
the satellite of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum.
the Provincial Lunatic Asylum was getting overcrouded so they built the Mimico
Asylum starting in 1888 as a site to take overflow patients.
And specifically, they wanted the more incurable patients to come here because
they wanted to preserve the Queen Street site for patients that had a better
chance of recovery. As I look around me I can see.
I can get a sense for how the environment that these asylums were in were supposed
to be part of the healing process because you're surrounded by beautiful trees,
wide spaces. the lake is just beyond the trees here.
But just like at the other site this site has become surrounded by the city as
well. So probably while I'm doing this
recording, you'll hear the rumble of the Queen Street streetcar going by.
And there are houses just over here. Houses on the other.
Inside and this site now is an, is a college.
So, some of the things I wanted you to know while we were out here is that as I
said, it was, they started building the site in 1888, and it was patients who
built, who helped to build it. and just like at the at many asylums at
the time patients labored here as a part of their therapy, and of course, as part
of making the whole system run efficiently.
So at. One time, this site would have had the
cottages that you see back here. But also would have had farm land and
bakeries and all that sort of thing that patients worked in.
And and ofcourse the day to day of laundry cooking all that sort of thing
was done by the patients as well. So this site just like the Queen Street
site has gone through several name changes.
That in their way reflect changing attitudes about mental illness and also
changing understandings of what caused it and how it could be.
Treated. So in 1888 it was opened as the Mimico
Lunatic Asylum. But in 1894 there was already a change in
name to the Mimico Insane Asylum. And at that point it was an independent
treatment centre. No longer a satellite of the Provincial
Lunatic Asylum. In 1911 it was called the Mimico Hospital
for the Insane. In 1918 it became the Ontario Hospital.
And in 1961 was its final name change to The Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital.
The Lakeshore's like. The psychiatric hospital changed.
Sorry, the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital closed in 1979.
And it's interesting, I've lived in this city for over twenty years and I knew
people who worked at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital because I worked in
the mental health care system here for a long time.
But I actually had no idea that the site here still looked as similar to the
original design as it does. And what I'll do is I'll slip something
in here where you can go to a website and take a look at some pictures of what the
site looked like back around 1910. And you'll.
Me there's actually very little difference.
And that's partly because the college that moved in here is restoring the
buildings. So, I don't think they're all done yet.
but, but for the most part, they took the shells of the original buildings,
probably because they're considered heritage sites now, and restored them.
And now these are, these are classrooms. Another interesting thing about the
Mimico site is that it had a graveyard that we can still find.
So there's a cemetery not too far from here that has I believe about 1500 people
buried in it. Some of these people are children.
So, there are people who are buried, adults who were hospitalized here that
were buried. But also children who were born in this
site. And, I think the understanding is that
most of the children that are there were stillborn and they're buried there as
well and. There is a volunteer organization in the
city of Toronto that is restoring that cemetery as well, trying to find out
who's buried there so that they can erect headstones, and, and no longer have those
graves unmarked. So, we start at the asylum because the
asylum seems to loom so large when we talk about the history of mental health
treatment. And, although I call this segment of the
course'A Brief History of Madness', it's not so much about a history of mental
illness, as it is about our somewhat. Mad attempts to deal with it over the
years. The asylum was really our first large
institutional effort in North America. To find a way to manage.
And at that time, they thought they could cure mental illness.
And it continues to endure in our memories.
Partly because many of the sites still exist.
And also because it's been taken up so fully in both social science and the
arts. So I'm sure many of you can think of
examples. Of movies, usually horror movies, that
feature the asylum as a site, or an old asylum as a site.
And if you have an interest in this topic, you are probably aware of some of
the major works that have been done by various social scientists around this so,
one that people readily think of is Michel Foucault, who wrote Madness and
civilization, Goffman, Erving Goffman also wrote about the asylum.
And maybe a little less well known but still very influential was a writing by
Frantz Fanon, about revolutionary psychiatry and how.
And how asylums could be different in the context of colonization.
So I'm starting at the asylum, because it's where a lot of people will start.
And, although, it is largely portrayed as a place where harmful practices happened,
I think it's, it's important for us to try to balance out that story by talking
about and learning about why they were first created.
And what people's hopes were for the contribution they would make to our.
Really be to help people who had mental disorders.
Even as I say that, we have to remember that many of the practices that we think
of as best practices in one moment can become regretted practices in another
moment. So, in the next segment what I'll be
doing is taking you into a little bit more detail about the history of the
asylums and where they came from and why they eventually ended up being closed
down. And then we will take it from there.
