{"id":23843,"date":"2019-05-23T15:58:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T19:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23843"},"modified":"2019-05-30T17:12:17","modified_gmt":"2019-05-30T21:12:17","slug":"historical-society-explores-deep-roots-of-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/historical-society-explores-deep-roots-of-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical Society explores deep roots of mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A museum is a place to learn about the past, but in\nlearning about where we\u2019ve been, we can spark a conversation about where we\u2019re\ngoing in the future, according to the Aurora Historical Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are conversations the Aurora Historical Society\n(AHS) is hoping to inspire in their new exhibition \u201cMental Health: A History,\u201d\nwhich is set to open at Hillary House National Historic Site this Saturday, May\n24 in conjunction with the Canadian Mental Health Association \u2013 York &\nSouth Simcoe Chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hillary House, home also to the Koffler Museum of\nMedicine, has a storied medical legacy locally and curator Erika Baird says\ntheir efforts will look at the treatment of mental health in the nineteenth and\ntwentieth centuries, including the rise of institutions, various treatments,\nlife as a patient, and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith the rising awareness of mental health, thanks to\ninitiatives like Bell Let\u2019s Talk and celebrity spokespeople like Clara Hughes,\nit\u2019s easy for one to think that this is a modern problem,\u201d says Ms. Baird. \u201cThe\ntruth is that mental illness has plagued the human race for millennia; it just\nwent by different terms than we use today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is clearly evidenced in some of the Victorian\nmedical books in the Koffler collection, which outline debunked methods and\ntheories that were seen as cutting-edge at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Baird\u2019s own interest in the history of mental health\nbegan before she arrived at the Aurora Historical Society while on an\ninternship that had her looking at the history of the former Provincial Lunatic\nAsylum in Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This early spark was stoked into a flame as she delved\ndeeper into Hillary House\u2019s collection and she began with a broad idea of the\nhistory of mental health; a broad topic to be sure, but one that was distilled\ndown to something much more manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to talk about how our terminology has changed\nover the years,\u201d says Ms. Baird. \u201c\u2019Lunatic\u2019 is not a term we would use today,\nalong with \u2018crazy and \u2018insane\u2019, and how we have come to today where we have\nmore scientific and medical terms for different disorders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition goes on to explore different treatments,\nincluding \u201cmoral therapy,\u201d which was based on the idea that living a \u201cmoral and\nupright life\u201d would result in a mental \u201cshift\u201d back to what was seen as an\nideal. Music therapy, bibliotherapy (reading), and water therapy (cold water\nbaths and douching) are also explored, as are treatments carried out in asylums\nthat seem barbaric by today\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese asylums were always very crowded and, with the\nlack of supervision, they ended up being akin to forced labour as the men would\ngo and physically build the walls for the site, the women would do a lot of the\ngardening and sewing, and all for no pay, but it would upkeep their\nmaintenance. That was supposed to correct their minds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through her research, Ms. Baird found local stories to\nbring these treatments to life, including that of Frank T. Deville, who served\nas Mayor of Aurora in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century.\nPrior to his election, in 1888, he was a business leader who owned the Beaver\nTannery on Yonge Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, Deville was a patient at the Provincial\nLunatic Asylum. Although Ms. Baird was denied access to files to flesh out just\nwhat his diagnosis was at the time, what she found \u201cinteresting and uplifting\u201d\nabout his story was a surprising lack of stigma in the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere wasn\u2019t a lot of evidence in the Town that that is\nwhere he was,\u201d Ms. Baird explains. \u201cHis business partners took over for him,\nthey sympathized with him for being ill and, when he got back, he took up the\nreins of the business and later even became the Mayor of Aurora. A lot of times\nwith the stigma of that age and the ideas against mental illness, for him to\nhave been able to get down to that facility, seek the treatment he needed and\nnot only come home but be successful after and continue to be a leader of the\ncommunity, really shows some of the strength and generosity in spirit that you\ndon\u2019t always find in that area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More contemporary accounts can be found surrounding Pine\nRidge, a Provincially-run mental health facility for men that was, until its\nclosure in 1985, located in the Provincial building on the northwest corner of\nYonge Street and Bloomington Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo hear people\u2019s thoughts before and after the closure\nwas particularly eye-opening,\u201d says Ms. Baird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the exhibition runs through the end of September, the\nAurora Historical Society is brainstorming different ways to bring their\nmessage out into the community, including workshops slated to take place at\nHillary House on September 28 to coincide with Culture Days, the theme of which\nthis year happens to be mental health, and summertime activities like yoga on\nthe lawn to explore the link between mental and physical health. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want people to get a better sense of what people with\nmental issues have gone through in history, not only how far we\u2019ve come, but\nhow far we have yet to go,\u201d says Ms. Baird. \u201cPart of the reason to do an\nexhibit like this is to make it relevant to people today. A museum should not\nbe just purveyors of times gone by, but stimulating conversation of modern\nissues and be an education space because if we\u2019re not relating to our community\nand making a difference, then what\u2019s the point?\u201d <\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A museum is a place to learn about the past, but in learning about where we\u2019ve been, we can spark a conversation about where we\u2019re going in the future, according to the Aurora Historical Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":23835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/2019-05-23-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-6cz","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-25 06:56:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}