Tumgik
#colquitz mental home
if-you-fan-a-fire · 8 years
Text
“These documents are extraordinarily profound historical reservoirs of data. But they are also creations of authorities who harbored their own agendae, professional privileges, and ideological understandings of the people and society around them. ... "[clase histories are narratives and stories of experience taken by medical personnel. They are summaries-a distilling of a life, or part of a life-and can never be assumed to represent fully that life." In recruiting case records as biographical material, the psychiatric historian must sensitize herself to the (re)constructed properties of these files, along with the interests that they signify and the professional discourses in which they are couched. As such their contents must be eternally subject to skeptical reading, analytic decoding, and deconstruction.
But because they are also sites of contention and contestation, these historical psychiatric files are simultaneously bursting with the thoughts, words, and deeds of patients, their families, and numerous other allies and acquaintances dwelling outside the institutional walls. The power of human expression is such that it transcends even the most concentrated professional efforts to pathologize and pacify. It is precisely at this interpretive juncture at the reflexive meeting point between regulation and resistance, compliance and resistance-that the psychiatric case file resides as a potent if ultimately imperfect source of historical knowledge about segregative institutions for the mental disordered. 
...I chronicle the experiences of patients at the Provincial Mental Home, Colquitz, a segregative institution for "criminally insane" and other "recalcitrant" patients operating in British Columbia between 1919 and 1964. As a special security institution housing both civil and criminal patients, Colquitz was a hybrid facility, representing both therapeutic and carceral ideas and practices. On the one hand, Colquitz fell squarely within the jurisdiction of the provincial mental health establishment; its clientele were primarily drawn from other psychiatric settings; and its organizational and cultural life, as recounted throughout this paper, in many respects resembled the institutional milieus of "general" asylums and hospitals depicted in other historical research. On the other hand, the prison-like built environment, the relentless preoccupation with security, the all-male population, and the presence of disproportionate concentrations of "criminally insane," penitentiary inmates, and assorted "unmanageable" patients combined to confer specific properties that were unique to this medico-legal context.
By mobilizing the medical records of 100 patients admitted within the first 14 years of the facility's opening, and integrating them with a variety of other primary and secondary sources, I attempt to reconstruct the organizational and human environment of Colquitz. I chronicle the stultifying tedium of daily existence, the routine patterns of labor and leisure, and the periodic explosions of conflict and violence that transpired inside Colquitz during these first few years of the establishment's existence. In so doing I chart the diverse modes of discipline through which officials sought to maintain the institutional regimen, and I document the efforts undertaken by patients to resist authority, transcend their surroundings, and seek redemption and hope both inside and beyond the Colquitz walls.
This article is primarily about power, and its myriad operations, limitations, and oppositions, as it is actuated in facilities like Colquitz. My main thesis, paralleling other such historical work on the internal regimes of mental hospitals,' is that the reflexive interplay of regulation and resistance permeates every aspect of Colquitz and comparable institutions elsewhere. Only by revisiting these worlds, and undertaking grounded ethnographic social histories of daily life as it was experienced by the human inhabitants themselves, can we begin to comprehend the dynamics and meanings of the social forces that infused institutional existence in all its facets and forms. However refracted and incomplete the ultimate historical portrayals may be, these methods and approaches are absolutely integral to an understanding of how people's lives were ordered in places like Colquitz, and how that order was contested.”
- Robert Menzies, “"I Do Not Care for a Lunatic's Role": Modes of Regulation and Resistance Inside the Colquitz Mental Home, British Columbia, 1919-33.”  Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Volume 16: 1999. pp. 183-184   
2 notes · View notes
if-you-fan-a-fire · 7 years
Text
LIFE INSIDE An evocative portrait of the Colquitz internal culture emerges from the surviving accounts of Granby Farrant, his institutional staff, medical and provincial authorities, media observers, patients, family, and friends. As argued above, the overarching feature of life at Colquitz was the unrelenting presence of regulatory forces in virtually every detail of daily existence. In what follows I sketch out some of the main features of the Colquitz social order, showing how expressions of medico-legal power infused the entirety of patients' experience, from the seemingly banal routines of food and dress, activity and sleep, leisure and labor, to the most conspicuous displays of raw compulsion. I also assert, however, that institutional regulation and its resistance were immanently complex and contradictory phenomena, an understanding of which can be achieved only by penetrating beyond the surface manifestations of discourse and action. 
At Colquitz, much energy was devoted in the early years to humanizing the institution and furnishing inmates with a few precious amenities and amusements. But these worthy efforts aside, confinement at Colquitz was clearly a corrosive and austere existence. In the main it comprised a numbing repetition of institutional routines, punctuated by the periodic turbulence of staff-patient conflict, intermittent shifts in the organizational regimen, the occasional intervention of outsiders, visitations by delegations of bureaucrats and medical authorities, and outbursts of inmate aggression, dissent, and escape. Mostly, though, there was just monotony, inertia, and the ineluctable passage of time.  After the first few entries, the number of remarks recorded by Farrant in the ward notations for any given patient typically ebbed to a trickle, usually stabilizing at one or two annually, unless exceptional events interceded. 
 Both patients and attendants dwelled in close, claustrophobic quarters. The cells of segregated inmates were spartan and confined. For those living under congregate conditions on wards, virtually all facets of life unfolded in the company of others, with privacy at a premium. Unanticipated hazards could erupt at any time. The cries and imaginary conversations of floridly psychotic patients filled the nights in the tiers of locked cages. Many inmates were simply consigned to their "rooms" for months, years or decades on end, deteriorating with the elapse of time, too debilitated to participate in the institutional culture or too alienated to care.
Examples abound. W. D.'s father signed him into the Public Hospital for the Insane from a Vancouver Island community in 1921 after the son had vandalized the father's car and attempted to plunder his team of horses. After an escape attempt officials shipped W. D. to Colquitz four months later, where he languished for the next 42 years. A typical ward notation from Farrant observed that:
[tlhis patient remains in his room, sullen and morose, refused to stay on ward, stating that patients interfere with him, becomes aggressive when compelled to do so.. . he assists with some of the Ward activities and spends the rest of the time playing with bits of paper in his room. He will not enter into conversation although occasionally he will answer in monosyllables."
A middle-aged Chinese immigrant admitted from Victoria in March 1913, C. D. had been "wandering from one town to another throughout British Columbia and the North West Territories.. . believing. . . that he owns a railroad & intends to marry a princess." Describing him as hostile and aggressive towards doctors and attendants, authorities removed C. D. first to Essondale, then to Colquitz in early July 1919. l There, according to Farrant, he "does not come in contact with other patients except at meals, is clean and tidy in his habits, he understands anything said to him and readily obeys but will not speak. . . whenever he sees me he becomes excited, shakes his fist at me and makes grimaces." This life of dismal solitude continued until February 1935 when officials deported him to China. J. R., a farmer certified from New Westminster in 1917 at age 44, proceeded to Colquitz two years later. There he refused to leave the ward for two years, convinced that his enemies would shoot him on sight. Finally he began tending to the institution's pig population, although "he is continually talking to imaginary persons, frequently hides behind some obstacle, as though to get out of the line of fire." By 1923 J. R. began to deteriorate further mentally, "does not take as much interest in his work, wanders away from it." He developed tubercular ulcers later that year. J. R. lingered until 1928, when, "restless and destructive" to the end, he expired of tuberculosis on 15 May.
The severities and indignities of life at Colquitz were everywhere in evidence throughout the medical files of these 100 men. For some, the bonds of humanity and hope seemed to evaporate inside the institutional walls. M. A., an Austria-bom strikebreaker sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1914 for attempting to dynamite a Nanaimo labor hall, landed in Colquitz five years later where he "refuses to lie in bed, says he must be let out, they are killing him with electricity that he can feel it tickling all over his body." Contracting tuberculosis in the early 1950s, he too returned to Essondale only to die in that hospital's infirmary. 
Perhaps more so than any other, the case of G. S. exemplified the depths of debasement to which the Colquitz patients could at times descend. A Doukhobor man who had wandered away from his community in the British Columbia interior, G. S. was homeless and alone when police arrested him in Bumaby in April 1929 for throwing stones at a group of taunting boys. Verbally abusive to the judge, he landed in Essondale under the Mental Health Act, then in Colquitz on 27 April 1929. By mid-August of that year, Granby Farrant was depicting him in the following terms: "Patient is in a condition nearing an animal more than any human being I have seen, if not closely watched, he will mix his food with his excretion, smear it all over the floor, then gather it up and devour it, he is becoming very emaciated physically, it is impossible to keep clothing on him, other than a heavy canvas lined blanket." On 31 October another ward note read: "There is not any change in patient's condition, he is still confined to his room, spoon fed, bathed two and three times a day as he is most filthy, smears himself with excretion, urinates anywhere, spits all over the room, he is noisy, incessantly crying 'let me out.' " Three days later, the patrolling night attendant found I G. S. dead in his west ward cell. The attending physician attributed his death to exhaustion from dementia.
Yet amid all this squalor and despond, there were also expressions of generosity and compassion. Corresponding with his sister in 1929, C. F. reported that "I have met quite a number of real men here, both the staff and among the patients." He requested that she send along "some Imperial smoking mixture and a roll of snuff to give to some Swede boys here." Farrant described in 1924 how W. C., a chronic dementia case first admitted to the PHI in 1905, "in the afternoons leads patient M. W. about grounds, who is totally blind, he is very attentive to him." D. M. petitioned British Columbia Attorney-General Gordon Sloan (without success) to undertake an inquiry into a fatal assault on a fellow patient by attendants that D. M. claimed to have witnessed in 1932. W. J. H., an Order-in-Council patient found NGRI after attempting to shoot a friend while in a trance-like state, managed to elope from Colquitz in September 1926. Two months later, having eluded recapture, he authored a poignant plea to Farrant on behalf of a less favored patient:
Dear Friend-I write you a line in case you are busy and I would not want to bother you anyhow I guess you are bothered enough by others with out me. What I would like to ask you is to give P.S. a little consideration by allowing him if not out on parole, to at least allow him [to] sleep in the room there where I [was] as there is an extra bed and let him have the priviage of spending the evenings in the pool room, I believe if he got a chance that he isn't a bad sort of a chap and I have know him now about a year, being he has German blood in him I believe he feels that, that is held against him and when one feels that the world is against him it is pretty hard to help one of that sort.. . . I fully relisize the responsibility of your situtation and I know you would only be glad to help anyone who you figured would be on the square with you; you no doubt could tell me of cases where ungratefulness was given in return for kindness as some of the attendants over the way have told me but P. seems to have no one to speak for him and I trust if you will give this matter you kindest consideration, and that good results will be obtained no doubt you will agree with me that it seems a pity to see a fine young chap in such a place and now Xmas approaching the change would bring a little cheer into his life.
Attendants, like patients, were profoundly affected by the institutional ecology of Colquitz. For employees, who were typically unskilled and considered fortunate to have secured one of the coveted provincial public service positions (all the more so as the Great Depression descended, and the number of applications far exceeded available placements), life at Colquitz was characterized by austerity, a near-military regimen, and a grinding routine: "[the staff at this period lived on the premises. . . in bed at 10:30, lights out and front door locked at 10:30 pm, no smoking in hours of duty, taking drilling by the chief attendant, rising on signal at 5:40 am. Married staff with families residing in the hospital vicinity received all-night permits on alternate evenings only." The work at Colquitz was more onerous than at the mainland institutions, owing to "construction of the building.. . lack of opportunity for promotion as compared with Essondale [and] higher cost of living on the land." Hours were long (there were two daily 12-hour shifts); remuneration was low relative to wages available elsewhere; and earnings were further undermined by the 1931 restraint program. In 1933, following a 2% wage cut two years earlier)46 under-attendants were earning $1,080 annually, with night men receiving five dollars extra per month. The supervisor, in comparison, enjoyed a yearly salary of $2,700. 
Some staff were not above pilfering hospital provisions to make ends meet. Farrant unceremoniously dismissed night attendant R. in February 1933 when he surprised the latter at 5:00 am in the act of purloining food from the hospital pantry. Farrant dispatched another employee after the latter was "recognized by some of the patients as having served with them in the Penitentiary. This is not conducive to good discipline, though I hate to kick a man when he is down." Attendants could be fired on a whim, or because they transgressed the Supervisor's political principles. They usually bore the brunt of blame for inmate escapes, they frequently became embroiled in scuffles with patients, and were sometimes the subjects of unprovoked assaults. 
At least one attendant died on duty when in 1927 he was buried by a gravel pit cave-in. In response, the Workmen's Compensation Board awarded his mother $100 to cover funeral expenses, and Granby Farrant conveyed to her a letter of commiseration: "Our acquaintance with H. was but brief," wrote Farrant, "yet we had time to appreciate his many good qualities, my hopes for his future were cruelly shattered, nevertheless we must give way uncomplainingly to the One who sees all things for the best. I am enclosing Cheque #4916 for $67.95, being November salary, less 5 days W.C.B." Judging from the contents of her letter delivered to Farrant the following spring after the WCB had rendered its judgment, the mother was less than impressed.
At the same time, during a period when public service employees were often recruited as much for their political as their vocational suitability, at least a proportion of attendants were plainly deficient and unsympathetic to the suffering of inmates. While it is difficult to estimate the prevalence of physical and psychological abuse, some incidents did come to Farrant's attention. Attendant G., for example, was dismissed in October of 1921 after having severely flogged one of the patients. Medical Superintendent H. C. Steeves expressed astonishment that one of the institution's personnel might be capable of such conduct. "I feel very much distressed," he remarked to Farrant, "that any man in our employ should have so very little humanity in him as to treat any patient in this manner, particularly an unfortunate case of dementia, whose mentality has become so low that he is unable to know right from wrong, or to protect himself."
In responding to attendant violence Farrant seemed as preoccupied with institutional legitimacy as with the safety of inmates. After attendant H. had attacked patient C. in 1928, fracturing the latter's jaw, Farrant declined to summon police. "I would have put him under arrest," he explained to A. L. Crease, "had it not been, for worrying patients' friends, when they saw the case in court." On other occasions staff held patients directly accountable for their own victimization: "[Attendant D.] wilfully kicked the patient's hand," reported Farrant, 
to cause the patient to release his hold on the bars, this inflicted several abrasions of the skin. The patient was visited by a friend within an hour of the occurrence, Mrs G. of Vancouver [the patient's wife] may possibly call upon you for an explanation, it will be quite in order for you to say that the patient has not been seriously injured, his mental condition is unimproved, that he is giving a fair amount of trouble, he is exceedingly annoying to both patients and staff.
Perhaps not surprisingly, no further mention of this incident appears in the case file.”
- Robert Menzies, “"I Do Not Care for a Lunatic’s Role": Modes of Regulation and Resistance Inside the Colquitz Mental Home, British Columbia, 1919-33.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Volume 16: 1999. pp. 187-194
1 note · View note
if-you-fan-a-fire · 8 years
Text
“The Provincial Mental Home, Colquitz opened its doors to British Columbia's "male criminal insane” inmates on 25 March 1919. Situated on farmland 10 kilometres northwest of Victoria, the institution's physical plant was the creation of local architect Colonel William Ridgway Wilson (1863-1957). Workers constructed the central building during 1912 and 1913 out of red brick, terra cotta, and reinforced concrete in "high Victorian Gothic revival style" at a cost of $240,000. Originally comprising 144 steel-barred cells arranged in two wings of four and two tiers apiece, Colquitz operated from 1914 to 1917 as the Saanich Prison Farm, then for the duration of World War I as a detention facility for prisoners of war and military offenders under the Naval Discipline Act. Following two years of agricultural use (as a pheasant farm), the grounds fell under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Secretariat and in 1919 became the second establishment for "criminal lunatics" in Canadian history. Over the first decade of its operation, the main structure's east wing was converted into two large dormitories (the Top East and Lower East Wards), while the West Ward remained a cell block accommodating refractory inmates. With the 1929 transfer of 20 resident employees to a Staff House the Colquitz patient population reached a capacity of about 285, which remained relatively stable until the facility began to depopulate prior to its decommissioning and reassignment to the British Columbia Corrections Branch in early 1964. A total of 778 men entered the Colquitz Mental Home from the province's courts, prisons, and hospitals during its 46 years of existence The building became a heritage site in 1979 and underwent extensive renovations in the mid-1980s. It continues to function as the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre (better known as the Wilkinson Road Jail).
Colquitz was one component of an immense provincial psychiatric enterprise that had its origins in the Victoria Lunatic Asylum (1872-78), and rapidly expanded with the opening of New Westminster's Public Hospital for the Insane (PHI) in 1878, followed by the inauguration of the Provincial Mental Hospital, Essondale, in Coquitlam on 1 April 1913. Along with various satellite institutions operating at different times in Vemon, Terrace, Kamloops, and the Lower Mainland, the PHI, Essondale, and Colquitz were the three flagships of British Columbia's mental health apparatus for the better part of five decades. Between 1872 and Colquitz's closure in 1964, 68,430 people passed through the doors of these establishment.
Farrant was a former psychiatric patient himself. Shortly after he had arrive& in late 1898, from his home in Essex, England at the age of 21, police found Farrant drifting through the bush near Nelson, British Columbia. Physicians certified him to the Public Hospital for the Insane (PHI) in New Westminster, where he spent nearly three months in detention with a diagnosis of melancholia. The experience evidently had an enduring effect. Following his discharge in 1899, Farrant entered the provincial mental health service as an employee, working under Medical Superintendents G. F. Bodington, G. H. Manchester, and C. E. Doherty. With the exception of one brief stint with the New Westminster Club, Farrant rose systematically through the asylum ranks from under-attendant to supervisor of the branch asylum at Vernon to assistant bursar at the Provincial Mental Hospital at Essondale. Upon their both returning from overseas service after World War I, Superintendent Doherty appointed Farrant to the newly created position of Colquitz Supervisor. Farrant held the post until his death from complications of diabetes on 6 November 1933.
While he possessed no medical credentials and was formally subordinate to officials in Victoria and psychiatric authorities on the mainland, Farrant was nonetheless a dominant force in the organizational life of the Colquitz Mental Home. Residing on the property and responsible for both administration and security, he was ubiquitous in virtually every facet of the facility's operation:
It was Farrant who oversaw the maintenance of the building and surrounding grounds and farmland, who hired and fired attendants, who assigned patients to dormitories and "rooms," who determined work assignments, who controlled the regulatory system of rewards and sanctions, who received visitors and corresponded with outsiders, and who generally represented the institution and fashioned its external image and internal regimen.
The operation of Colquitz during these early years was both a reflection of contemporary preoccupations about mental disorder and criminality, and a projection of Farrant's own indomitable personality. Farrant and the senior medical staff considered Colquitz a prototypical facility, which simultaneously could service a specialized clientele of male "criminal insane" and other "difficult" inmates, and relieve the grave overcrowding that forever plagued the mainland institution. Moreover, it would represent the highest ideals of moral management and modern science. However disordered and dangerous, all patients would benefit from the wisdom and benevolence of their overseers in a context where "no arms are permitted to be carried.. . and kindness takes the place of force."
There is little doubt about Farrant's sincerity of conviction. As his 1923 New Year message to Medical Superintendent Harold Chapman Steeves intoned, 
"we will carry on in the same indefatigable way to promote the conditions of those who are less fortunate than us, who live in a world that is almost unknown to others except ourselves."
Five years later, his annual report was replete with the many benefits that he had bestowed during the prior 12 months upon the patient population: 
Ample amusements have been afforded the patients, we had a number of excellent concerts, given by our own orchestra, supplemented by outside talent, there were many friends of the Institution, who gladly rendered their services, to make these concerts a success. Films have been regularly screened during the Winter months. Radio has been installed in each Ward, which is tuned in daily, the building has been wired from the Main. Reading matter has been supplied by the Times Office, Salvation Army, Y.M.C.A. and others. The patients' spiritual welfare, has been cared for, by the Protestant and Catholic Churches also the Salvation Army.
Such affirmative images of Colquitz's philanthropic mission were also evident in various public depictions of the facility. In one such portrayal, entitled "Making Life Worthwhile for Insane. Humane Methods Lighten Suffering of World's Unfortunates," a tour of Colquitz inspired a local newspaper columnist to wax eloquent about the good works being undertaken by Farrant and his staff: 
Mr Farrant's secret of success in running a mental home might be sized up in two words--"congenial work." Where it is possible every patient is profitably employed in the grounds or in the main building and the result of their work is shown in thirty acres of well-kept grounds and farm lands, greenhouses, gardens, buildings and furniture. Every bit of the work the superintendent points out, with justifiable pride, has been done by the labor of the patients. . . . Instead of looking upon those under his charge as men who have been sent to him because of some insane tendency [and] should not be free to take their place in the word as ordinary citizens, he looks upon them as men to be put to work under conditions as much like those of outside workers as possible." 
As I argue..., however, Granby Farrant's rendition of life in his I establishment represented only one of many alternative versions of institutional reality. For a multitude of medico-legal, administrative, philosophical, and personal reasons, discourse and practice did not always coincide in the everyday operation of the Colquitz Mental Home. The interplay of power and resistance within the institutional walls generated a far more complex milieu than these positive accounts would allow. In what follows I enlist the clinical and organizational records to penetrate beyond these public representations. I attempt to assemble a portrait of Colquitz that reflects not only the perspective of Farrant and other authorities, but also the rich and poignant experience of those many men who inhabited the dormitories, wards and cells of this imposing structure.”    
- Robert Menzies, “"I Do Not Care for a Lunatic’s Role": Modes of Regulation and Resistance Inside the Colquitz Mental Home, British Columbia, 1919-33.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Volume 16: 1999. pp. 185-186   
1 note · View note
if-you-fan-a-fire · 7 years
Text
THE COLQUITZ PATIENTS 
This sample of 100 Colquitz patients comprised 26.7% of the 375 men who were transferred to the Saanich institution from its inception in March 1919 to the death of Granby Farrant in November 1933. They represented a proportionate sampling by year of Colquitz admissions recorded in the facility's transfer registry housed at the BCARS. After identifying the 100 men I located, selectively transcribed, and analyzed their clinical files, 71 of which resided at the BCARS, and the other 29 at the East Lawn Clinical Records Service of Riverview Hospital. 
Like comparable patient populations studied in other historical contexts, these men comprised a marginal, disenfranchised, highly institutionalized, and deeply troubled cohort. Of the 100 individuals, 92 had been born outside of British Columbia, and 77 originated beyond the Canadian borders. The inmates were also dispersed widely across the province at the time of hospitalization or arrest, with just 37 residing in the Vancouver, New Westminster, or Victoria areas. Eight were already in mental or carceral institutions. Only 27 were married. Their mean age at entry was 37 years. The most common form of occupation was general laboring (37 men), followed by farming (14), and mining (8). The sample included merely two professionals (a police chief and a lawyer). Six men were classified as vagrants. Eighty-five of 92 patients for whom information was available had received more than an elementary school education, and just two had gone to college. A wide diversity of psychiatric disorders were manifest, the most frequent being dementia praecox or schizophrenia (32 cases) and paranoia (31 cases). There were also six instances of manic depression, five cases of "mental defect," four of alcoholism or toxic psychosis, and one each of Parkinson's syndrome, cerebral syphilis, psychopathic inferiority, moral delinquency, senile dementia, and post-traumatic cerebral deterioration. 
Among the 100 male Colquitz inmates, 80 had entered the psychiatric system under civil rather than criminal legislation. These men had been l first certified indefinitely to the PHI (up to 1924) or Essondale (thereafter) by two physicians through the provincial Mental Hospitals Act (MHA)?' then transferred to Colquitz for reasons of security or because they were deemed dangerous to themselves or others. Precisely one half of these 80 commitment cases originated from an encounter with the police, and in 11 instances authorities had initially laid criminal charges before invoking hospitalization. In addition to this civil population, there were three prisoners who had arrived from the provincial Oakalla Prison Farm (in Burnaby) and six from the federal British Columbia Penitentiary (in New Westminster) under, respectively, the Criminal Code of Canada or the Penitentiary Act. Eight patients had been found unfit to stand trial, and another three were judged not guilty by reason of insanity, at trial before a judge or jury. These 11 "Order-in-Council" men were subject to indeterminate hospitalization under Warrants of the Lieutenant-Governor (WLGS). Among the 20 "criminally insane" cases and the 11 MHA commitments which had triggered an arrest or conviction, there were 11 murder charges, 10 other violent crimes, four property transgressions, three vagrancy offences, two desertions from the Armed Forces, and one case of carnal knowledge. 
With a few exceptions, the mental incarceration of these psychiatric inmates was a protracted affair. The average length of Colquitz internment among the 100 sampled patients was 14.0 years. Eleven men were at Saanich for less than one 36 were confined from 1 to 9 years, and the remainder for 10 or more years. Thirty-one men were in the facility for more than two decades, and four spent at least 40 years each inside the Colquitz walls. The mean total time spent institutionalized in the British Columbia mental health system, other facilities included, was 17.2 years. Twelve of the men were in hospitals for over 40 years, and one endured 64 years of psychiatric containment.” 
- Robert Menzies, “"I Do Not Care for a Lunatic’s Role”: Modes of Regulation and Resistance Inside the Colquitz Mental Home, British Columbia, 1919-33.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Volume 16: 1999. pp. 188-89.
0 notes