In 2007 the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) funded a five-year pan-Canadian project on the history of deinstitutionalization in the latter half of the twentieth century. Open Doors / Closed Ranks: Locating Mental Health after the Asylum draws together efforts of sixteen academics from across Canada, the United States and Britain. Deinstitutionalization involved the relocation of thousands of individuals deemed “mentally ill”, the reshaping of therapeutic and professional contours of care, the creation of new kinds of patient networks, and the transformation of the social landscape of Canadian communities. Documents gathered through this project are the basis for the comprehensive set of educational material contained in Caring Minds.
Open Doors / Closed Ranks is a part of the innovative History of Madness in Canada / Histoire de la folie au Canada website. A pioneering initiative organized around the fusion of technology and research, the website simultaneously acts as a venue for interactive communication, a medium for task-oriented networking, a context for data storage, and most importantly, a facility for education, research and dissemination of information to the public. Run by a collective which includes scholars from across the social sciences, the site welcomes national and international involvement from educators, researchers, mental health providers and psychiatric survivors.
Housed at University of Victoria’s Centre for Youth & Society, the Health Youth Survey interviewed Victoria youth in 2003, 2005 and again in 2007. Healthy Youth in a Healthy Society. A community university alliance for the prevention of injuries in children and youth was an interdisciplinary research project funded through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) “Community Alliance for Health Research” program. The Healthy Youth study joined teams of university-based researchers from several disciplines (sociology, psychology, child and youth care, education, and nursing) with targeted members of the non-university community (e. g. policy makers, police, service providers, teachers, parents and children or youth themselves) to address the complex social determinants of youth heath concerns that may lead to injuries. The study was comprised of seven “target projects” investigating different aspects of youth health. One of these target projects was the Healthy Youth Survey which was conducted with Victoria area youth in 2003, 2005, and again in 2007. This was a large scale survey of a normative population sample of 664 youth from the greater Victoria area (initially ages 12 to 18 in 2003) that provided background data on vulnerable children and youth. Data from several items on the 2005 survey relating to mental health are part of Lesson 2 in the Unit I Understanding, Experiencing and Equity.