Tracing paths: the social historical organization of mental illness in Ontario.

Abstract

This thesis employs a critical ethnographic and social historical lens to make visible the experiences of people from within Ontario’s mental health system. Social historical analysis of texts that governed Ontario’s psychiatric hospital system from the end of the nineteenth century to the present mental health system provide context to 30 ethnographic interviews with 15 people who identified as consumers/survivors and 15 people who identified as stakeholders or service provider/caregivers in northern Ontario. Contextualized from below and within and from the past to the present, this interrogation of the mental health and psychiatric system adds to the body of literature on mental illness by adding voices of knowledge and experiences of mental illness. It raises important questions about the shifting landscape of the mad subject. The thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which present mental health consumers, survivors, service/providers, caregivers and stakeholders navigate through the system. It concludes with a discussion of the absence and necessity of first person accounts of madness and the mental health system.