Me and The Mental

A one-industry town

I was in the library the other day when I had a disturbing encounter with a clearly unstable woman.  There is no need to describe the moment, but clearly, she was suffering, deep into some form of mental illness.  For everyone else in the building there was  a wide range of reactions from frustration to anger and helplessness.

My reaction was simply…why wasn’t she in the bakery?

Let me explain.  I grew up in a one industry town.  There was no mining, manufacturing or natural resource extraction in my hometown. Battleford, Saskatchewan had one industry…mental illness.  We were home to the first provincial mental hospital in our province.

In the fifties us kids just called it The Mental.  I am fully aware that the term would not be correct today, but please know that it was never meant to be derogatory, just shorthand.  We actually kind of loved the place.  Hundreds of local folks worked there.  Some of my best friends actually lived there.  We were all clearly connected to The Mental.  It was just another, somewhat larger, neighbourhood business in our community.

We hung out there, we played there and often had the run of the curling rink and nine-hole golf course.  We biked through the grounds on our way to fish for goldeye at the Forks (the confluence of the North Saskatchewan and Battle rivers), stealing an apple or two at the orchard.

My mom played piano regularly out there, and my dad fixed his share of the ancient plumbing.

But in those days, they did not need a raft of outside workers to get things done.  The prevailing institutional philosophy, much like the “back to the landers” soon to come, was to do it yourself, plant your own garden.  They were a solid community  out there, in the belief that no matter your gifts, you could make a contribution.

The patients did it all…

·      They ran the bakery.

·      They grew and harvested the crops.

·      They raised the beef and turned it into roasts.

·      They ran the diary.

·      They processed the eggs.

·      They market gardened and built root cellars for the winter.

·      They were the greenskeepers at the golf course.

·      They ran the movies and the dances.

·      I heard there was one old fella who set up a shack in the bush and repaired shoes.

·      There were tailors, barbers and even mattress makers.

·      There were lay workers in the chapel.

They were a self-sufficient lot and I daresay, a work proud bunch of mentally ill folks.

Ok…that was the good stuff…outside the walls. 

Inside the walls, not so great. 

Well-meaning doctors and researchers stuck weird stuff into them, wired them up and generally just Cuckoo Nested the hell out of them.  Progressive outside the walls and regressive inside, I guess.  As a kid all I saw was the outside stuff,  the river valley, the turn of the century classic brick architecture, the park like grounds and gardens, the hand-crafted stone fences and lots of people working, walking and watching.

So, from 1914 till the 60’s, it seems no one complained or complimented. 

It just was.

Perhaps it was the 1975 Cuckoo’s Nest movie or just a reaction to the emerging hippie commune culture but for some reason self-sufficiency and growing a garden was hip for the young but definitely out of favour for the policy makers for the mentally ill.

I was horrified by the movie and what I imagined was happening inside those buildings.  However, as a young educated man, I just assumed they would work harder at their research and start fixing that nasty inside stuff. Continuous improvement, that’s what every other industry was doing. Perhaps better therapies, better drugs and generally better mental health approaches would be good for folks even in something called a mental hospital.

So, I was not prepared for what they decided to do…

They tore down the barns, closed the shops, boarded up the bakery and so on.  I guess someone felt that having something to actually do like cut someone’s hair or prune a beautiful orchard, was not an appropriate activity for someone with a mental illness. 

I guess it also did not appeal to the free market economy folks who probably saw this whole self-sufficient thing as just another Tommy Douglas socialist plot to prevent them from selling potatoes, chickens and haircuts to a very large group of people with no say in their lives.

So, the dismantling continued, including, I suppose, that little entrepreneur shoemaker in the bush.

Nothing left but to walk around and try out those new drugs. 

It was soon not the place I remembered as a kid. 

We were lucky youngsters, in that our close relationship with The Mental perhaps gave us access to a better understanding and empathy for mental illness.  We got to know people with mental illness by their names.  Mike sold me golf balls.  We met them and hung out with them on the golf course and in the curling rink.

True story…

My mother sends us kids off to school one morning and either sick or 1950’s depressed, she crawled back into bed and fell asleep.  An hour later she is awakened by a presence in the room.  She blinks and sees a huge man, dressed in denim coveralls and cap standing at the foot of her bed.

Clearly a visitor in her bedroom, from The Mental…

Instead of screaming, like one may expect, she collects her wits and asks him politely what he might want. “Would you care to buy a package of strawberries,” he asks equally politely.

She does.

To this day, we all believe that this little story pretty much expresses our family’s and our neighbours’ relationship with The Mental.  They were just another part of our community.

And so, it went…

The work goes away…nothing to do.

The spirit goes away…nothing to be proud of. 

The public service model goes away…public institutions are bad so let’s privatize. 

Soon the grounds are getting empty and, in our town, the local dirt basements are soon full of a new source of rental income. Let’s put a cot down there and get ourselves a mental patient to help with the mortgage.

And then finally, the basements empty and even in our little town we see something new…the homeless. It did not take too long for that loose wheel to roll down the hill.

Let me introduce my father…

He just passed at 96, five decades of plumbing under his belt and no claimed knowledge of the mental illness business.  He spent his last years at The Mental in a repurposed irrigation farm building now turned into a care home.  He was very comfortable and quite happy there.

I recall him coming home years ago, both sad and furious when he saw that they had chopped down the apple and plum trees turning the beautiful orchard back into prairie.

I also recall him coming home and telling me about a big Cree guy whom he found living in a converted coal bin in an old lady’s basement, where she tossed stale buns down the stairs to him. They had finally moved folks from the institution to the community.

Dad was furious.

Every time I went home, Dad and I would take a ride through our favorite spots and every time we ended up at The Mental.  The last spring before he died, we grabbed a lunch and headed over there.  It was not a great lunch. 

They were tearing down the beautiful old brick Main Building.  We did not stick around to see if the Chapel and iconic tall smokestack were going to be next.  Ironically, we were parked on the same turf where we used to play the ninth hole.

I can’t get that woman in the libray out of my mind.  Her life on the streets, her anger and even her crazed behaviour and I know…I know, it’s a modern world and what do I know about mental illness.  Still, I can’t help but wonder if she might even today, be somewhat better off living on the banks of the Saskatchewan River, going to work in the bakery every morning, enjoying a cool drink in one of those Adirondack chairs by the garden, and then crawling into a warm bed instead of a cardboard box.

She would have been quite at home, not homeless, in The Mental.