Forward House: Housing schizophrenics in Montreal

   Chris MacFadden has run Forward House since early 1970s and remains a powerful advocate for the life conditions of the mentally ill. I popped over to his office a few weeks ago and had a nice long chat with him. I delayed posting this because I wanted to get a photo. I shall try to find one eventually.
   Forward House was founded in 1957 by former psychiatric patients to meet and discuss their lives. It was supported by the Pythian Sisters of Quebec and was initially based on Bishop Street prior to heading over to Girouard just south of Sherbrooke.

  These are some MacFaddens thoughts about his career in this very challenging role:

When I started, I was very young and very idealistic and very left wing, so I was anti-meds. I believed that they were chemical straitjackets, for people who had flipped out because they couldn’t handle the bourgeois capitalist society. So as a front line worker in 1972 here in the evening program I started to convince clients to stop taking their medications. You’ve got remember back then the medications were not nearly as refined as the stuff we’ve got now we had largactil, siloscene with the nasty side effects. And so for the first couple of months that I was here that’s what I did and then I saw people get really strange and get very sick and very disturbed and very frightened and I stopped doing that conversation and I started to study. I went to the library and started to research the thing a little bit to see what I was really dealing with because I had no idea what the fuck I was dealing with and I realized that what I was doing was wrong. So I stopped doing that altogether. I researched alternative methods like megavitamin therapy and found it wishful thinking and so I started encouraging people go to back on their medications even though they are what we now call dirty meds because of the high degree of side effects. Now the type of medications we have available are - before it was like taking a chemical shotgun blast to somebody’s brain to put out a little fire this big but now we’ve got a sniper rifle but we’re still making big holes when we only need a little tiny hole.
Here in Quebec we’re about 20 years behind everybody else in mental health. If anything, Quebec will continue down the same path and it’ll be a cost-cutting measure that will further reduce inpatient beds further fuck up emergency and further fuck up the lives and families of the clients that are involved. Based on their track record in the past – why would they start it now?
It breaks down into roughly thirds. There’s a third of clients who have a psychotic break once or twice in their life and it never reappears. Some of that is drug induced. They’ve taken a couple of tabs of LSD, done some ecstasy or smoked too much pot or something that could cause a psychosis. Some of it just happens, that’s all. We don’t see those folks they go on and I don’t know what happens to them but I imagine they life pretty regular lives. Then there’s the third that the medications, sort of, kind of work but they end up in the hospital and so on and so forth. Those are the ones that come to us and then there’s another about a quarter or third that the meds don’t work and they stay in the hospital.

The rest of the interview can be read here.