Daily MOS: Weyburn Mental Hospital

Under the grim light of historical reckoning, we can all seem like monsters. Even Canadians.

Today’s Moment of Science… Weyburn Mental Hospital.

It’s been a recent development in our history of mental health treatment that we’ve had anything that resembles, well, treatment. For much of our history, mental health disorders meant you were warehoused, medicated into a stupor, or left without your neurons tethered in any functioning manner. To say “things are better now” would ignore that we’re still largely shit at mental health, but slow progress has been charted.

When Canadians headed west in the late 1800s, parliament decreed “don’t go crazy out there.” They fucking meant it, and codified that shit into law with an “act respecting the safe keeping of dangerous lunatics in the Northwest Territories” in 1879. They followed this with an act “respecting the apprehension and detention of dangerous lunatics” in 1920.

They made laws dictating that they needed a mental health facility. The law really wasn’t too clear on things like “don’t purposefully put patients into a coma with excessive insulin” or “dropping acid at work is frowned upon.” I can see how confusion arose.

Souris Valley Mental Health Hospital, aka Weyburn Mental Hospital, opened its doors in 1921, fulfilling Saskatchewan’s lawful duty for the “detention of dangerous lunatics.” This was surely not just a cramped old facility to throw your “troubled” relative in and forget about them, no. This place was sprawling with room for a thousand, deploying new ideas and cutting edge treatments.

Your relatives were still fucked.

The facility for a thousand housed an estimated 2,500 patients at various times. Even with expansions it was consistently overcrowded. Central to therapy was putting patients to work, entertaining the notion that the physicality would calm their troubled minds.

Which is a funny way of saying ‘they used patients as an unpaid, full time labor force.’

At the beginning, 70% of staffing needs was met by patients. That increased to 90% to help cut costs. Even if this was legitimately believed to have therapeutic value, “physician heal thyself’ was never meant to be this fucking literal.

When the hard labor failed to work, as it often did because squats sure as shit don’t do much for complex PTSD, they used baths as treatments. Long baths. Particularly cold baths.

So, insulin comas.

In 1927, Viennese psychiatrist Manfred Sakel observed that when a patient went into an accidental coma, their mental clarity improved. His next thought was, “let’s do an on-purpose coma,” reasoning that it could bring that same clarity to mental health patients. It could cause seizures, continued issues with their blood sugar, and often led to weight gain. They sometimes underwent shock therapy while comatose. It was alleged to have worked, and the practice was widespread for the treatment of schizophrenia for decades.

At Weyburn, this coma therapy lasted for weeks.

Psychiatrist Harold Bourne was skeptical. In 1958, he demonstrated that patients who were knocked unconscious with barbiturates for the same treatment fared similarly to those with an insulin induced coma, suggesting the insulin had very little to do with any benefit. The practice quickly fell out of favor.

How about some acid?

Under the tutelage of Dr. Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, LSD was used as a treatment for just about goddamn everything. Alcoholism? A tab of acid will do ‘ya. Depressed? Hearing colors will fix a person right up. Voices in your head? Hallucinate up some dragons and have a conversation with them. Staff was prompted to try LSD because it was thought it would help them better understand their patients.

LSD was still thought of at the time as a psychiatric medication, so nobody looked at this and thought “they’re just doing this for funsies.” To be fair, alcoholics who were treated with LSD stayed sober for two years in 50-90% of cases, which is pretty damn good.

Look, I’m not saying we should give LSD to alcoholics medicinally.
I’m not… not saying it.

Then hippies discovered how fucking delightful the stuff was, the CIA did an MK Ultra, and it got pretty goddamn hard to get an acid trip compliments of the local asylum. It’s a shame, because we’re only now re-discovering the medical potential of LSD as a mental health treatment.

They did a full suite of ‘jesus fucking christ why would you stick that in a brain’ therapies. Maybe they seemed barbaric to some of the people who lived through them, it’s hard to tell knowing this was the best they had, and these treatments were supposed to represent hope and relief for the people who walked into Weyburn Mental Hospital. The place closed in 1971, and was bulldozed in 2009.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, patiently awaiting the day my doctor can prescribe microdosing.

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