A Desperate Asylum: Crisis in a Canadian Psychiatric Hospital During Wartime

In 1945, The Standard, a Montreal newspaper, published three shocking articles that reported stories of neglect, abuse and deplorable conditions at New Brunswick's only psychiatric hospital. Within days the provincial government established a Royal Commission. This book traces the remarkable people, events and findings of the Commission. Allegations of wiretapping, missing medications, tangled relationships, clandestine nighttime treks through the hospital, a gang of predatory patients, an undercover reporter, conspiracies about government interference, a Jewish psychiatrist who fled Nazi Germany, covert links between nongovernmental agencies and the media, and a patient who seemed to orchestrate events were set against the backdrop of a hospital whose critically depleted staff were straining to provide care. The establishment of the Royal Commission formalized a scrutiny of the hospital and its operations at that time, casting light on both the darker, hidden side of the institution and some of the bright, positive efforts that were being made to improve the lives of those with a mental illness. And now, all these years later, because of the Commission, there exists an extraordinarily detailed description of the day-to-day life in the hospital and the work of its attendants, physicians and nurses during the war.