The Former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Project

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Two Different Views of Former Patients

“The hospital staff there are mainly concerned with keeping people quiet. If psychiatrists really did their jobs, they wouldn’t have jobs.”

- "Beverly", a former patient

"The people are very humane, very sympathetic. Everyone talked to me, they were all very nice... I've been to larger hospitals where they've had more elaborate facilities and more entertainment for the patients, but this one [Lakeshore] is just as good, even though it's smaller... I'm very grateful that they've tried to help me here... People have complained about this being a concentration camp. Well, they don't know what a concentration camp is."

- "G.K.", a former patient

The cases of two patients, nicknamed Beverly and G.K. to protect their privacy, were presented through an interview in Etobicoke Guardian on January 20,1972. It was a part of a larger investigation entitled “Two Different Views of Mental Health Treatment.” The title is self-explanatory. The former patients were interviewed by the news editor, Roger White. While it presented both sides of the story, the two patients were treated for different disorders: Beverly for addiction and G.K. for a “manic-depressive state,” commonly known as bipolar disorder. Beverly grew up in the Lakeshore area. She was addicted to heroin and first started experimenting when she was fifteen and stopped at twenty-two. During that time, she travelled around Canada and the United States, touring such cities as San Francisco and Boston. Beverly explained that “[Addiction] became a second nature to me. It does to a lot of people. For a while, I was high all the time.” In 1969, while in Boston, she took the drug every day for three months. After that, she decided to quit. She came back to Toronto and got in touch with a psychiatrist at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. Beverly was admitted in summer of 1969, having stayed there for a month and a half. As a patient, she stated, “I don’t think that they were used to anyone in there with heroin habit. They looked at me like some sort of freak as if I were there just to get high on the treatment drugs.” During the treatment, she was prescribed a drug called methadone. Beverly claimed that she was given too little medication to help her recover. In general, the “screwed up” methods of therapy did not cure her. On the day of her discharge, she started all over again. After a month, she quit on her own.

Beverly applied to Humber College, but they demanded a letter of recommendation from her psychiatrist, which she refused to do. “I made the big mistake of telling them my story,” she admitted in the interview. Discouraged, she came back to Lakeshore Psychiatric, where she remained for five whole months. Beverly became involved in the recreational program, but left it shortly, since she believed that she was not good enough and could not accomplish anything. During her treatment, she was given tranquilizers and sleeping pills and felt that she received no support from the staff. Beverly concluded the interview with saying that there is a heavy social stigma attached to the former and (then) current patients: “People with a problem are treated as insane.”

G.K., on the other hand, had a completely different, more pleasant experiences at Lakeshore. He was a Holocaust survivor and he had been in a concentration camp during World War II, where his entire family had been murdered. After the war ended, he immigrated to Israel, but left soon afterwards due to the conflict with Palestinians, and came to Canada with his fifteen-year-old daughter.

Prior to having been referred to Lakeshore Psych, he had been treated at various mental health hospital all over Ontario for fifteen years. He described himself as having been born with extreme mood changes.

He was treated with both insulin treatment and electroshock, but as he got older, they became less and less effective. The interview does not mention how long he had been at Lakeshore and what type of therapy he had been given, but at the end, he had "nothing but praise for the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital."

It appears difficult to compare the patients' views since they were treated for different disorders. In Beverly's case, it is possible that the hospital staff did not have much experience addiction treatment, while G.K.'s illness was quite common. Furthermore, both patients were of extremely different backgrounds and had different expectations of a psychiatric hospital might be. Therefore, their experiences turned out to be different not because they were in one hospital, but because they were in different wards and required completely a different kind of treatment.

Reference:

White, Rodger. "Two Different Views of Mental Health Treatment." Etobicoke Guardian, January 20, 1972: 7. Retrieved from the Archives of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, January 30, 2005.