Less than 40 years ago, Ottawa residents who needed support for mental health problems would not have found a number in the phone book.
That’s because until the 1970s, Ottawa did not have its own mental health treatment centre – patients in need of treatment had to travel an hour south to Brockville. The Royal Ottawa Hospital opened as a tuberculosis sanatorium in 1910, but it was another 60 years before its focus became caring for the mentally ill.
In 1976, the Sisters of Charity of Ottawa opened the Marguerite House on Cathcart Street. Devoted to mental health rehabilitation, it housed young women and girls who needed extra care on their way out of hospitals.
One of the girls who stayed there was Sue Clark.
Clark says when she got electroconvulsive therapy for the first time in 1974, the room was white, the doctor and nurses were white, and she was white with terror. They carried her down a hall as she kicked and screamed for someone to help her.
She says she received five shock treatments in all. They ended only after her heart stopped.
Clark, like many others, was treated in Brockville in the 1970s, before the mental health services we now take for granted became available. She says she underwent shock therapy against her will following a suicide attempt when she was 17.
“My father signed the paper. He was the controller of the family, and I was the black sheep,” says Clark, who sits in a motorized wheelchair that has two tall orange flags on each side that waver as she drives.
She has filled a binder with articles written about her struggle to end inhumane psychiatric treatments such as the one she received 35 years ago.
Now 52, she lives on a disability pension and suffers from long-term memory loss. She can’t read a newspaper article without forgetting much of what she just read.
Because of her experience, Clark founded the Psychiatric Survivors of Ottawa in 1991, which now has 200 members.
Renée Ouimet worked in a long-term psychiatric hospital during the 1970s.
“In the past if you talked about mental health you were different therefore you were shunned, you were ostracized,” Ouimet says.
Now the director of education for the Canadian Mental Health Association in Ottawa, Ouimet says that care has evolved to focus on wellness, recovery, and a holistic approach, not just medication or use of restraints.
But more extreme treatments, like shock therapy, still exist.
Many health professionals argue that the continued use of shock treatment can help patients in extreme situations recover, and they say the treatments themselves are better than they were 40 years ago. But Clark says her experience in 1974, which she describes as “torture,” proves shock treatment should be banned.
“I was tortured in my own country,” she says. “What they did to me was torture and I say that without reservation.”
In September, the United Nations recognized forced psychiatric treatment such as non-consensual electroshock as torture. Clark welcomes the acknowledgement of her suffering, but says she will continue to tell her story.