KAMLOOPS – Vancouver is one of three sites to be studied by a 15-member research team exploring the effects of the closure of BC’s mental-health asylum, Riverview, in 2000.
Thompson Rivers University instructor and Open Learning tutor Diane Purvey has just received notice that she and 14 co-applicants from other universities in Canada, the US and the UK have garnered a grant of $24, 972 per year for a five-year period from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for a study entitled “Open Doors / Closed Ranks: Locating Mental Health after the Asylum.”
A collaborative research project which will explore a broad set of questions central to improving understanding of the deinstitutionalization of mental health care in Canada, the study will involve a multi-regional, multi-disciplinary research team of scholars drawn from history, sociology, community psychology, criminology, human geography and nursing. It builds on a previous project funded by a $39,990 Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Research Development Initiatives Grant which enabled the group to generate website infrastructure, and to digitize and design preliminary content.
The study will afford insights into contemporary challenges faced by patients, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, local residents and policy makers and will contribute to current debates about mental health service provision, providing an essential historical context for those currently working in the field.
“We plan to undertake three inter-related community studies which will focus on the experiences of deinstitutionalization in rural Saskatchewan, small-town Nova Scotia, and urban Vancouver,” said Purvey, a faculty member in TRU’s School of Education and a history tutor with the university’s Open Learning division who is involved in the Vancouver study.
Her university’s BC Interior locale may soon be involved as well, however, as Purvey recently submitted an application for funding to research a Kamloops focus.
BC, slower to implement deinstitutionalization than other Canadian provinces, introduced a new deinstitutionalization policy directive in the 1990s, and the 1998 BC Mental Health Plan called for the devolution of resources from the Riverview asylum to regional health authorities. Since 2000, approximately 600 of Riverview’s remaining occupants were relocated to cities and towns throughout BC, with continuing community effects.
According to the Correctional Service of Canada, the number of mentally ill offenders in the federal prison system has more than doubled in the last 10 years, and it is believed that between one in five and one in eight prisoners suffers from a mental illness, prompting Penny Bartlett of the Canadian Mental Health Association to state in 2005 that “prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill due to funding cuts and closures in community psychiatric facilities.”
The Vancouver study, involving nine of the researchers, will explore pathways from the asylum which took patients, professionals and policy debates into downtown Vancouver and beyond to other urban centres in the Greater Vancouver area. The group is particularly interested in investigating how new and emerging structures and policies served to replicate facets of the asylum through professional surveillance, the use of other institutions, including hospitals, group homes and shelters, and policy directives which acted to police the behaviour of psychiatric survivor/consumers.
The group hopes to host an international conference on the history of deinstitutionalization in the twentieth century in the fall of 2011, to publish the results of that conference, and to develop teaching modules based on project research findings for both secondary and post-secondary students.
This fall, team leaders will meet in Edmonton to coordinate research strategies for the project’s first phase.
For more information, please contact Diane Purvey at 250-371-5526 or by email.
