Mad Children: Stories of Youth in Canadian Insane Asylums, 1880-1930

Mad Children stories the lived experiences of youth who were placed in Canadian insane asylums from 1880 to 1930. The author uses archival materials and creative writing to move away from the medical model of understanding mad histories towards a focus on the children institutionalized across Canada. The author begins with an interrogation of the land the asylums were built on to engage with the settler colonial foundations of Canadian insane asylums. This chapter immediately situates the history of asylums within the displacement of Indigenous people and colonization. Additionally, this archival project is situated in a decades long call to do mad histories differently in a way that centres the experiences of the people held within the institutional walls. In situating the historiography and archival materials related to mad history, the author positions the use of blended writing to tell different kinds of stories.

The stories that make up the bulk of the chapters come from archival records of children from British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island. Each chapter focuses on different elements that influence the lives of children within these facilities. The first story situates the reader in the development of eugenics, child psychiatry and wellbeing, and moral therapy. From there, the author details two different encounters with the forces that deported asylum inmates, the influence of anti-Asian rhetoric, the impact of settler colonialism, the interconnection with juvenile delinquency, what children thought of their surroundings, and the formulation of girlhood in the context of empire. In telling specific stories in their wider context, the author weaves in moments of discussion about other children who share similarities to the stories.

Ultimately, the author reveals the consequences of systems that placed children in asylums and imagines what these encounters may have looked like for different inmates. As she moves through the stories, the author reveals not only how kids resisted and complied with colonial treatments of madness, but also, she argues that institutionalization is never the appropriate choice when considering how to care for people, especially children.