Spaced-out in Saskatchewan: modernism, anti-psychiatry, and deinstitutionalization, 1950-1968.
Bulletin of the history of medicine 2010 DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2010.0041 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that a group of professionals used LSD to critique psychiatry while seeking a middle path, but their hospital designs failed to prevent the postwar transformation of mental health care due to paradigm shifts, fiscal constraints, and political pressure. |
Abstract
On the eve of deinstitutionalization, a group of professionals, including an architect, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, joined together in pursuit of a middle ground between outright closure of long-stay hospitals and the introduction of out-patient services in general hospitals. Augmented by the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, these men produced a trenchant critique of modern psychiatry and the changing mental health system without subscribing to antipsychiatry. Caught among shifting psychiatric paradigms, fiscal constraints, and political pressure to situate mental health within an encroaching system of publicly funded health care reforms, their proposed mental hospital designs failed to stem the tidal wave of post-World War II changes in mental health care.