INSIDE THE MENTAL
A frank look at Weyburn facility
When I was a kid in small-town, southern Saskatchewan in far less politically correct times than these, one sure way of calling out aberrant behaviour in friends or the actually mentally handicapped was to call them mental and to tell them they needed to be in the Mental. A shortcut to saying that was simply to tell them they should be in Weyburn. We all knew what that meant.
Now, longtime Saskatchewan writer, teacher, artist, registered psychiatric nurse, and one-time patient in the Weyburn Mental Hospital, Kay Parley, has written a little memoir of her time on both sides of the white coat in that institution. As you can see by the title, Inside the Mental, she has no problem calling it the very name our mothers once shushed us for using, and rightly so, but says that the loss of its community status, and the similar loss in other institutions like it, has cast a serious pall over the lives of the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped, alike. And that pall, incidentally, extends to society as a whole.
Parley’s introduction briskly tells us what to expect, with subjects ranging from “treatments available in the mental hospital at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1948 to what it was like to do psychiatric nursing in the same hospital during the enlightened fifties, to a peek at the fascinating research being done with LSD in the sixties.” Despite the siren song of LSD to certain readers, Parley’s memoir devotes most of its time to her own struggle with mental illness and, acutely, to the huge value she places on the institution that allowed her to be diagnosed, gave her time and space to heal, and then trained her to work and help others.
Parley went from small-town Saskatchewan to Toronto to enroll in and graduate from Lorne Greene’s Academy of Radio Arts. She was employed by the CBC when the voices started. She exhausted herself walking the streets of the city, unable to eat, sleep, or go to work because her internal voices wouldn’t leave her alone. Her mother brought her home and sent her to the Weyburn hospital, coincidentally the same place that had long housed both her father and her grandfather. In fact, she hadn’t seen her father since she was a child, though she knew where he was. This is part of the silence Parley signals in her subtitle.
She talks about electro-shock therapy and its debilitating effect on her, and of drugs, and how her one dose of lithium caused her to vomit 12 times in one night. That was it for drugs for her. Good old psychiatry — talk therapy and various hands-on programs — is what cured her, she says. But she doesn’t rule out pharmaceutical medication for others. For her, being allowed to stay in the intake wing where staff could take time to assess her and allow her various jobs is what saved her. She ended up in some dramatic productions and became editor of the hospital newspaper, The Torch, both things capitalizing on her strengths and training.
She eventually met her father and her grandfather, both highly esteemed men in the institution, though she got glimpses of why they were there. She eventually became strong enough, with a solid diagnosis and a means to deal with her mental illness, to take training to be a psychiatric nurse. She trumpets the times under the enlightened Douglas government that saw such men as doctors Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer completely revamp the program, trying new psychiatric techniques and even experimenting with LSD, under strictly controlled conditions, to treat schizophrenia and alcoholism, having some certain success with the latter.
Parley took LSD once, under the supervision of Francis Huxley, nephew of Aldous, author of The Doors of Perception. Francis gave her a small amount and sat with her during her entire session. That seems to have been enough for Parley, but her one very strong observation about the drug is that Timothy Leary’s taking it to the masses, providing for homemade and corrupted varieties, vilified in the public’s mind a once very useful drug. She feels the public was petrified of the idea of taking a drug and entering a state of psychosis. “Many people don’t want to be insane even temporarily. That is a fear I don’t really share. I think a temporary psychosis would do a lot of people a lot of good. They might come out of it with more insight into the real madness around us — the madness of polluting the environment, poisoning food supplies, destroying ozone layers . . . . That is psychosis, not the experience of someone on a ‘trip.’ ”
The real insight of this small book is Parley’s commitment to a healing psychiatric community that institutions such as the Weyburn Mental Hospital provided: “It had something that small units will never be able to duplicate unless and until society makes tremendous adjustments in the way it is willing to spend money. The big mental hospital had a nucleus of the professional specialists who are necessary to the best treatment of mental illness, and it had them all there in one place, available, and able to co-ordinate their use of facilities.” Late in the book she reiterates her point saying, “as soon as psychiatry demonstrated some success in rehabilitating long-term patients, governments seem to have abdicated responsibility. A few years later, a new government was simply dumping patients onto communities and families who were often ill-equipped to deal with them. I actually heard of a government order to discharge eleven patients per week, regardless of their ability to function.”
These patients are many of the people who turn up in our homeless shelters, living in a box in an alley, or making grisly headlines in the news for some horrific encounter with the police or the public. How does the government want to spend its money? Parley has seen both ways and her voice is clear. Where her book lags just a bit is in some repetition. Parley, who is 93, has stitched this memoir together from articles she’s written, notes she once took, and a general overview. Naturally, there’s some overlap, and it hasn’t been edited out. Another thing, considering Parley’s age and the probable age of many of her readers, is the small print such a small book demands. If this book was printed for 20-year-olds, no problem, but the over-55s will be squinting.
To publish a book at 93 is a major accomplishment, and Parley should be proud of her frank confessions on a sensitive topic and her still activist stance on government and societal responsibility. And her assessment of the late-60s and how the hippies outside made mental patients on the inside look is hilarious and terrifically insightful. Kudos to Kay Parley.