Recipients
Erika Dyck
Twentieth century psychiatric services, mental health research and community care in the Souris Valley health region centred around the Provincial Mental Hospital at Weyburn. Dr. Erika Dyck is examining newly deposited records and collecting timely memories of staff, patients and bureaucrats.
Only a decade after it was built in 1921, the Provincial Mental Hospital was cited by the Canadian Committee for Mental Hygiene as one of the worst facilities in the country, due largely to extreme overcrowding. In the 1950s, Weyburn again attracted international attention for engaging in controversial therapeutic interventions, including treatments using LSD. Superintendent Humphry Osmond coined the term psychedelic in 1957 while working at this facility. By the 1960s, as sweeping healthcare reforms took hold in the province, mental health institutions underwent dramatic changes as they began transferring patients into communities. Some claimed that Saskatchewan did so faster than any other jurisdiction, and with calamitous results. With the shrinking of the patient and staff population, the once palatial building fell into disrepair, the expansive farmland went out of cultivation, and mental health services folded into a complicated web of social and correctional services. As late as the 1990s, parts of the building functioned as a seniors’ nursing facility and in 2008, what remained of the now empty institution was leveled.
By collecting new information and incorporating existing data, Dr. Dyck’s historical examination will comprise a sophisticated case study of the Weyburn facility as a window into the changing nature of mental health services over the twentieth century
