The Former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Project

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The Missing Puzzle:

Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital and the Community

“In its early years, the hospital was self-sufficient in terms of food production, services (a smithy and a fire department were on-site), and employee accommodation. This helped to isolate the facility from the surrounding Lakeshore community.”

- Peter Maybury, “Humber College, Lakeshore Campus: Farming Community-Psychiatric Hospital-Post-Secondary Academic Institution.”

One of the most interesting, yet somehow also frustrating aspects of the research was one question: what was the relationship between Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital and the nearby community?

Today, the residents of the former villages of New Toronto, Mimico, and Long Branch primarily refer to the site of the former hospital as a “nuthouse” and “loony bin”; even the official name of the hospital has been forgotten. The knowledge of the interested few does not reach beyond the urban legends. Yet, even long-time residents do not seem to recall anything important in particular, except the use of electroconvulsive shock treatment, psychiatric drugs, and lobotomy. Like the rest of the Greater Toronto Area, the Lakeshore community has experienced a steady flow of new immigrants every year and it has greatly changed since the hospital was closed down in 1979. The creation of the Metropolitan Toronto has also shown that it does not appreciate and respect the local history, however important it is for its own identity.

When the Mimico Branch Asylum was opened in 1890, it was self-sufficient and it was economically independent from the community; the patients worked on the hospital farm and grew their own crops; they also worked around the landscape. This is perhaps the reason why the institution might have been viewed as "isolated." Also, the popular idea of the mentally ill was quite negative. It was not until the early 1970's when the public eye begun to have a more enlightened and less ignorant view of the hospital, much to the effort of the hospital staff, and a very much active association of volunteers, who lobbied against the closure of the hospital, (but ultimately they were unsuccessful).

It has been twenty-six years since the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital closed it doors, and since then the former psychiatric patients and survivors and the general public have started to thoroughly question psychosurgery, electroshock, and anti-depressants. What was praised back then is now shunned upon and your friendly neighbourhood asylum does not seem to be as progressive and as modern as before.