The Pharmaceutical Industry: A Guide to Historical Records

"...this book will no doubt prove an invaluable resource to researchers undertaking comparative studies of the pharmaceutical industry, the history of medicine and the retailing of medical drugs." Google Books Link

Ay-yup. Have a carrot and sit and read for a spell. Or if you would prefer carrot juice, read Dr. Andrew Saul's how-to juicing hints here.

Mad People's History: Professor Geoffrey Reaume

Disability historian explores 'mad' people's history
Not until he was 27 did Geoffrey Reaume come out of the closet. The York critical disabilities and health ethics professor, now 44, disclosed to his thesis supervisor that he had been in a psychiatric hospital during his teens. It added credence to his proposal to do a PhD on life in a Toronto asylum – from the patients’ perspective.

Until Reaume came along, historians had documented life in asylums in Canada based solely on doctors’ points of view. Doctors’ accounts of patients "were grossly stereotypical," says Reaume, who also took offence at fellow historians who dismissed patients’ accounts of their asylum experience as rambling and semi-literate, who ignored their humanity. "It was insulting to call them that when they were just trying to express themselves," says the Faculty of Health professor. "That’s why I felt it was important to tell their stories."

He applied under the Freedom of Information Act for access to patients’ records at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane between 1870 and 1940. As he combed the medical files, he began unearthing the authentic voices of "mad" patients from snatches of conversation doctors and nurses had recorded in their notes, and patients’ letters confiscated by asylum staff. Gradually, he formed a picture of what daily life in an asylum was like from patients’ points of view. It was groundbreaking research and Oxford University Press Canada published his PhD thesis as a book, Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870-1940, in 2000.

- Excerpt from article - York U.


Photo - Professor Geoffrey Reaume
Listen to an interview here
Chapter from one of his books
Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto
The Secret Handshake group (schizophrenia)
Mad Pride Week
Mad Pride Toronto

The lonely madness of Alice G

The lonely madness of Alice G
ERIN ANDERSSEN
Globe and Mail Update
June 19, 2008 at 10:04 PM EDT

Alice G was driven mad by a broken heart, so said her doctors.

At 39, the unmarried housekeeper from Belleville, Ont., walked through the doors of the Toronto Asylum for the Insane, as it was called in 1893, and never saw the outside world again.

Her mother, the commitment papers suggest, had appealed to doctors for help. Alice spoke to people who didn't exist. She claimed to be a “prophetess” under orders from Heaven, and predicted she would give birth to two babies, one silver, one gold. She was reportedly infatuated with a local doctor.

Explaining the “supposed existing cause of insanity,” the physician who committed her scrawled on her form: “disappointment in love affairs.”

Beside occupation, he wrote: “Spinster.”

By society's standards, Alice G was to be pitied: childless, poor, lovelorn and, worst of all, insane.

In the asylum, what came to be called 999 Queen Street – and is now the site for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health – Alice was crowded into a dormitory, without a private toilet, where the residents regularly complained of chills and rats.

Read the rest of the article here

Asylum Photographs by Jeremy Harris

Jeremy Harris Photography
Found at BoingBoing.

This photograph may be the most compelling image of coercion in mental health ever created.
As long as we continue to give the "mentally ill" shots and pills instead of diagnosing and correcting what is really wrong - mostly deficiencies, allergies, toxic overloads and infections - we are STILL THERE, in the asylums, and our "treatment" is a sham. Read about how to get proper diagnosis and a return to health here
Restraint and seclusion still occur today