To understand how to best connect climate justice and abolition, we present a case study of organizing for psychiatric abolition. The conversation around deinstitutionalization in so-called “British Columbia” has been largely centered on Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, commonly referred to as Riverview.
As you read, consider:
- What tactics used in psychiatric abolitionist organizing may be relevant to current campaigns or climate justice initiatives?
- How do asylums and other medical institutions perpetuate carceral (prison-like) harms?
- How do we carry this type of reasoning in our own organizing/practices, and how can we disrupt it?
Quick Facts about Riverview:
- Riverview was opened as an asylum in 1913.
- It originally called the Hospital for the Mind, then renamed Essondale, and once again renamed to Riverview in 1965.
- the closure of Riverview was advocated for by groups such as the Mental Patients Association (MPA), a Kitsilano-based grassroots anti-psychiatry organization who also critiqued the establishment of community-based mental health services as an alternative to centralized psychiatric treatment. The group organized protests at Riverview in the 1970s to speak out against the institution and its practices, including lobotomies, physical restraint, and overmedication.
- Plans to transfer patients from Riverview to more local mental health treatment, and living in the community, first started in 1987. However, Riverview continued to operate and use violent practices such as electroshock therapy into the 2000s. The Hospital finally closed in 2012.
- The site has continued to house mental health facilities, including həy̓χʷət kʷθə šxʷhəliʔ leləm (Healing Spirit House), which houses The Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre and Provincial Assessment Centre.
At the time of writing this report, the Riverview lands are currently being redeveloped through a reconciliation-based partnership between Kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem First Nation) and BC Housing, renamed səmiq̓ʷəʔelə, meaning Place of the Great Blue Heron in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓. The site, within the ancestral lands of Kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, will continue to operate mental health services (Cheung, 2021).
Image Description: A black and white, grainy film photo of Riverview Hospital. The Hospital is a very large, symmetrical building with cold architecture, giving the impression that it's an institution.
Questions to consider about psychiatric institutions and mental health:
- Are mental health facilities simply being renamed and rebranded while continuing to inflict trauma? What do we need to do in order to abolish psychiatric institutions and create alternative systems of care that don't involve incarceration?
- Are spaces rooted in transformative justice principles, including healing, care, and accountability?
- How are broader systems of oppression – including capitalism, colonialism, and ableism – creating disability in locally, how do these systems intersect, and how do we dismantle them?
- How can care systems address root causes rather than aiming to treat and correct individuals?
Sources Referenced