Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability by Madeline C. Burghardt (review)

Madeline Burghardt's gripping account of the intertwined histories of intellectual disability and institutionalization in Ontario begins with a death. Prior to starting her research for this project, the author attended the funeral of a man who had spent the majority of his life institutionalized at the Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia, a large residential facility for people with intellectual disabilities that operated from 1876 to 2009. Her reflections on the presence of his family at the funeral led Burghardt to her guiding questions: how did institutionalization shape the lives of, and relationships between, those who were institutionalized and their family members? Ultimately, she argues that familial networks were structured and restructured around the emerging and shifting boundaries of what constituted intellectual disability, with ramifications for the decision-making process of institutionalizing a family member.

Broken is divided into an introduction and three parts, comprising eight chapters in total. The book begins with a contextualization of how difference has been constructed over varying historical, political, and social moments. These contexts, in turn, inform how power has been wielded over marginalized groups. Burghardt first provides readers with a survey of historical themes that shaped attitudes towards difference and disability, ranging from an increase in "charitable" responses to those with disabilities to the legacies of market capitalism and the standardization of scientific classification. Readers are then introduced to the history of institutionalization in the province of Ontario, with Burghardt attending primarily to the institution originally known as the Orillia Asylum for Idiots (later, the Huronia Regional Centre). Burghardt argues that the Orillia Asylum reflected the then centrality of institutionalization as a means of providing care for those with disabilities, while also manifesting more pernicious residential problems seen elsewhere, such as overcrowding and the use of patient labour. Burghardt's third chapter explores intersecting themes of the Cold War that resonated in the lives of her subjects, including increased expectations for families to conform to the stereotypes of the suburban, North American family. Such expectations fuelled discriminatory practices of "Othering" (69) those individuals who failed to reflect postwar expectations of the able-bodied nuclear family.

The second part of Burghardt's book is the most analytically and narratively rich. Over the course of four chapters, she delves into the lived experiences and perspectives of those who were most gravely impacted by institutionalization: disability rights advocates, former institutional staff members, parents and siblings of the institutionalized, and survivors. In total, Burghardt conducted thirty-six interviews and spoke with at least one family member from across twenty families between 2012 and 2013. She foregrounds the voices of survivors, drawing on the experiences of five men and four women who were institutionalized in Ontario sometime between 1948 and 1973. While Burghardt teases apart the range of experiences of these survivors, she observes that they all reflected on their institutionalization as a "time of sadness, confusion, and loss" (85). Indeed, the stories that these survivors shared with Burghardt are sobering, with their residential experiences in the institution characterized by acts of dehumanization and cases of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse that were often justified by administrators under the guise of maintaining order. Maintaining order, or minimizing chaos, and cultivating an image of normalcy was, according to the siblings of the institutionalized, one of the reasons why parents chose to institutionalize a child. Intriguingly, some siblings did express a sense of relief when a sibling was institutionalized, especially if their home had been marked by instability. However, nearly all of the sisters and brothers interviewed by Burghardt emphasized feelings of resentment towards their parents' decision for institutionalizing a sibling. By contrast, some parents felt that these institutions benefited their (other) children and the family unit itself. Sensing a lack of community resources and support, parents articulated a belief that institutions provided care when and where families could not. While some survivors were able to reconnect...