Spaced-Out in Saskatchewan: Modernism, Anti-Psychiatry, and Deinstitutionalization, 1950-1968

On the eve of deinstitutionalization, a group of professionals, including an architect, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, joined together in pursuit of a middle ground between outright closure of long-stay hospitals and the introduction of out-patient services in general hospitals. Augmented by the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, these men produced a trenchant critique of modern psychiatry and the changing mental health system without subscribing to antipsychiatry. Caught among shifting psychiatric paradigms, fiscal constraints, and political pressure to situate mental health within an encroaching system of publicly funded health care reforms, their proposed mental hospital designs failed to stem the tidal wave of post-World War II changes in mental health care.