Life

Hospital for the Mind

Memories of Coquitlam's 'insane asylum.'

By Stephen Osborne, 12 Nov 2007, Geist Magazine

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Essondale's dormitory, pharmacy, 1913.

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A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I "might know what to do with it." Inside, glued one to a page, are 24 photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in Coquitlam, B.C., taken around the time that Essondale opened in 1913.

When I was a kid, Essondale and insane asylum were synonyms that when spoken aloud in a whisper or a hiss could elicit shivers of terror in the schoolyard. Essondale we knew to exist in a dark vortex beyond the city limits, where also could be found the penitentiary, and a place called Crease Clinic -- where mental patients were subject to brain-creasing operations or, according to another theory, had grooves of varying depths cut into their brains by a tool like the router we were learning to use in Industrial Arts class.

Raid on Essondale

I have seen Essondale only once in daylight, on an afternoon in 1973 or 1974, six decades after the pictures in the album were taken, when I drove out there with a couple of friends. We were intent on rescuing a poet who had been admitted to Essondale by legal process and was now scheduled for electroshock treatment. We went in through the big doors and past caged windows and down long hallways painted a hideous shade of green and through more locked doors into a big room full of sofas and tables and chairs through which clusters of inmates in various states of undress were drifting, gliding, sleepwalking and otherwise getting through their day: here seemed to be the pure expression of the institutional madhouse described by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a book that we had all read a few years earlier.

The doctor was a fierce dark-eyed man who allowed only one civilian at a time into his locked office; one of us went in to negotiate a reprieve, but the doctor made it clear that both science and the law held sway over the unreason and soft-headedness exhibited by people like us.

We went away after arranging with our friend (who was sleepy but quite desperate) to call us from the phone booth in the lobby when he was ready to walk out, and when his call came we returned in the evening and snatched him away. We got him into a "safe house" and began looking for a lawyer and a doctor who wouldn't call the cops, and waiting for his meds to wear off, because we knew that without the meds things often became very difficult for our friend, and therefore difficult for those around him.

Good thoughts

The cover of the photo album is imprinted with the letters H and M superimposed inside a golden circle -- which (I have learned only recently) is to be read as the letter O, for when Essondale opened in 1913 it was called The Hospital for the Mind, an optimistic rubric for a positivist age. The album is evidently a souvenir prepared for politicians and senior staff (the men gathered on the front steps, perhaps) and is itself an optimistic document. In it we find the stored-up memories of ground-clearing, building and furnishing, and then the final touches: flowers on the table, the installation of telephones and shiny kitchen equipment; rows of beds aligned in large rooms, pristine under immaculate sheets not yet slept in. A man in a suit poses at a desk: is he the director? He too is optimistic as he learns to arrange himself for a bright future. All of the images in the album are addressed to that future.

There are no images of women in the album, and then we see that there are no patients either. For as always there can be no patients without women to tend them; the men are the ones doing all the big thinking. We too were men trying to do big thinking. Our friend the poet was not easy to be with; over the ensuing weeks we moved him from house to house (we expected the police to come for him at any time) and he wore out his welcome again and again. Our legal advice came from the law student who rented an office down the hall from our publishing operation and who supplied us with diet pills when we wanted to work all night. In the end we succeeded in having the electroshock treatments cancelled and in getting our friend the status of "voluntary" patient at Essondale. But we failed him by not learning how to help him ourselves. It was evident that Hospitals for the Mind are necessary places.

The fire escape at the end of our hall was occupied by a homeless security guard named Geoffrey, a man who never took off his uniform and who during the day would stand in the street staring into the sun. Geoffrey was harmless and kind; when he spoke it was in long monologues that we had grown accustomed to. One night during a violent episode in the office, our friend the poet threw a beer bottle through the window. When we had calmed him down and went to look at the damage, we could see Geoffrey below, crossing the parking lot. He had his mattress on his shoulder: he was running away.

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Sometime in the '60s, Essondale was given a new name, Riverview, as if to disguise it as a golf course, suburb or graveyard; but the old hissing name never got unstuck from it.

When Essondale as Riverview was closed for good, it had been a huge institution and many of its patients had been made to suffer the abuses of huge institutions. There was nothing to replace it, and many inmates of Essondale, including our friend the poet, became the first large homeless population (now some three or four thousand people) in Vancouver.

These days the mayor has optimistic plans to reopen Essondale (as Riverview) and to get the homeless back in there and locked up safely in time for the Olympics.

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Stephen Osborne is editor of Geist Magazine. Visit the Geist website.

8 Comments:

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  • murdock

    4 years ago

    US and THEM

    all I could think of reading this was:

    Us and Them
    And after all we're only ordinary men
    Me, and you
    God only knows it's not what we would choose to do
    Forward he cried from the rear
    and the front rank died
    And the General sat, as the lines on the map
    moved from side to side
    Black and Blue
    And who knows which is which and who is who
    Up and Down
    And in the end it's only round and round and round
    Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
    the poster bearer cried
    Listen son, said the man with the gun
    There's room for you inside
    Down and Out
    It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about
    With, without
    And who'll deny that's what the fightings all about
    Get out of the way, it's a busy day
    And I've got things on my mind
    For want of the price of tea and a slice
    The old man died

  • nightbloom

    4 years ago

    This reminiscence is

    This reminiscence is poignant and well-written.

    There's no doubt that we've come a long way - and still have a way to go - in our treatment of the mentally ill.

    I don't think anyone wants to see the return of 19th-century style asylums. But I think properly run institutions, with accountability, oversight and carefully circumscribed legal powers over the patients in their care, can work. The mentally ill have been turfed on the street, where they're easy prey for drug dealer and other bottom-feeders. They need a place were they are bathed, dressed and fed every day, where they have a warm dry bed indoors, and where they can get the medication they need, and where they can be diagnosed and guided back into an appropriate degree of interaction & functioning with mainstream society, and perhaps eased into assisted-living arrangements outside the institution.

    I'm pretty disgusted that it takes a big boondoggle like the Olypics to move Vancouver to do something about the exploding problem. Ditto for the housing issue (I'll believe it when I see it). Mean City.

  • gkam

    4 years ago

    It's time

    It is time for Western societies to face up to their responsibilities with regard to the mentally ill. What we have now in the US is just another legacy of the Reagan Revolution (the "Hardliner's Tantrum").

    Ronnie didn't want to waste money taking care of those in need, so he cut a deal with the progressives in which most State Hospitals would be closed, and local clinics would help mainstream most patients into society, giving aid, counseling and other help along the way.

    Reagan closed the hospitals, but kept the money for the clinics, and the mentally ill are still living on the streets of California.

    But we're not going to change much until we get out of that Taxes-are-bad, Guvmunt's-the-problem mentality and start working together to rebuild our country. We've had 26 years of the Reagan/Bush selfish rationalizations for the Looting of America. Our hangover from that party is about ten trillion dollars - almost every trillion was from Reagan, Bush, and Bush.

    It's time we act like grownups again, think about how to pay off the terrible debt and repair the societal damages from these hubristic and megalomanic visions of grandeur.

    We all seem to agree that it's time to clean house, dispose of the residue, and start living like a civilized society.

    Where do we start?

  • The brain

    4 years ago

    Good article

    Its interesting to see how contributers to the well beings of others don't stop through the ages, being who they are.

    There is so much that we have learned in the realm of science... but so little that we understand, as the dots (the valid ones) often remain unconnected.

    The human being has four main areas of health and this will not change: Physical, mental, emotional and finally, spiritual/beliefs. And to heal one area of the human body, almost always, there is a need to heal the primary cause, being another area entirely. How often do we see damage done to the physical human body through addictions, for example, that are caused by emotional, mental or dysfunctional belief illnesses? And while few can think straight living on coffee and cigarettes in a prolonged subclinically mal-nutritioned state, what would make a person live that way?

    There is such a thing as "conditioning", the mind stuck in an endless loop that repeats ugly thoughts that become the percursor to an anti climatic but horrific event. Whether it manifests in violence to ones self or others, this is how it happens. And there is no drug that can do anything other than temporarily scramble the brains ability to repeat an ugly pattern that seemingly won't leave.

    And while some drugs turn off the glands that were meant to produce what the drug over stimilates... and wears off to see the hormones crash and the mind go batty again... one would think Doctors would catch on. One would think that Doctors would catch on to the patients patterned thoughts that condition the mind to do what manifests next. Beyond ego and salary, how many doctors out there have been adequately trained enough to help within their own hearts, never mind their own minds? As they too, become conditioned.

    We know that there are those who come to institutions that are too physically damaged to get well again. But we also know that a great many patients come into an asylum with the physical capabilties to bouce back but by the time they leave... its either in a box or with a part of their brain missing or destroyed, with glands that can't function from the drugs. Too many, the ones that could have improved, slip through the cracks.

    Where is the love? Where is the genuine good will that is required from the supposed care giver itself? For the mind thinks in a pattern. Are we so different? What does the healthy person think about... over and over again...

    Its the same old story. Misdiagnosis, mistreatment and complete misunderstanding created, I think, by the prestige and greed certain "positions" in life feed. It is, after all, about what we put on our plates... is it not?

  • The brain

    4 years ago

    Cont.

    What we will find in time is that the brain is more than a grey lump of soft tissue sloshing around in the skull... that it can be conditioned much like a muscle with tone. The time has come to look beyond what Berkley has to say and look into what best exercizes the brain as well as nutritionally speaking, protects it from the free radicals that lead to so many neurological diseases of our day. Prevention is the cure. The model of health is the model that supercedes all others. What is the definition of "health"? Rather subjective, when it comes to the mind.... and we had better find out what that is... without the ego leading the way, or we will hear more horror stories of braggart doctors who've perfect their lobotomy and shock techniques... in record time.

    To break this chain of failure, it begins at the top for all choices are top down. It begins with our institutions of education first and foremost, but with the component of Greed and prestige, of profit from drugs and admissions, so will come the same superiority complex's in higher places (hospital staff) that now trump the inferiority complex's we see today in the patients of our mental institutions. And it has to stop if we are to see improvements from the past and present. We simply can't move forward until we correct the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, in this case, shame will come before redemption. Some of us knew better.

    Lorne Mccuaig
    Revelstoke, BC

  • biscotti

    4 years ago

    Thanks Stephen

    Lovely piece by Stephen. Although you may feel you failed your friend at one level, you did save him from electric shock.

    I hope you can post the photos at some point.

    It's heartening that in spite of the resurgence of things like electric shock and the megaprofit-driven attempts to medicate so much of the population (children are a growing market), there are now movements led by ex-patients.

    The "Heal Normality Now" poster continues to inspire me: http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/sa/2/sp001220.txt

  • Chatterbox

    4 years ago

    There's room for you inside

    The Pink Floyd lyrics come close to Stephen's lyricism, but his beautiful tale of remembrance is of a different war, one fought inside and outside... on our very own streets.

    This war, our homefront, is very close to home.

    Not inside that home, but out in the rain, the cold and wet killer, preying on the infirm of body, mind, feelings, or spirit. As Lorne points out, we indeed need the better part of all four points of health in order to secure a home on our own.

    In war, we have our platoon, a fire team, and a tent-mate. We give able-bodied soldiers care, direction, assistance, and most always protection. No one is left behind; that is the code of the army.

    Where is that code back home? These are our neighbours, maybe once schoolmates, who live next door, only outside of any door, outside of our door, on the street.

    We can do better. We can offer a home to each and every person in Canada, a "room for you inside."

    Or we shall see "for want of the price of tea and a slice / The old man died."

    Let us all built a Habitat for Humanity.

    Pssstt. Do something.

  • Trish Mau

    4 years ago

    Asylum: a long, last look at Woodlands

    This story reminds me of a photo/history project by Michael de Courcy, titled Asylum: a long, last look at Woodlands: http://www.michaeldecourcy.com/asylum.

    Over a period of 18 months, de Courcy compiled a history of the Woodlands site, and took photos of the institution and its former residents. The photos were exhibited at the New Westminster Public Library in 2003.

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