Penal Press: Secure Psychiatric Facilities
The Quill was a publication produced at Oak Ridge, a maximum-security psychiatric unit, operated on the grounds of the Ontario Hospital in Penetanguishene. This collection, containing five issues, is exceedingly rare and are currently the only known holding of this work. The Quill provides a unique focus on mental illness and its intersections with psychiatry and the criminal justice system.
Founded in 1933, Oak Ridge held patient-inmates from hospitals, prisons, and reformatories with mental health diagnoses on indeterminate sentences, or who were deemed unfit to stand trial, or declared not criminally responsible by the courts.
The Quill was entirely written and prepared by the patients of Oak Ridge as a part of their typing and printing department, and showcases a surprising amount of freedom for the patients to express their opinions and critiques of the facility and its prescribed treatments. Within the penal press, The Quill is unique as it is entirely written, edited, and produced by those with mental illness without outside influence or direction.
From 1965 to 1969, The Quill describes a period of great change at Oak Ridge, when the treatment of patients was completely overhauled under the direction of Dr. Elliott Barker. Under Dr. Barker, treatment at Oak Ridge underwent a dramatic shift to exhaustive, experimental, and traumatic therapies, which in 2022, was deemed by a Superior Court Justice to constitute torture and ‘unethical and degrading human experiments.’ The Quill provides first-hand accounts of these treatments and shines a light on a horrifying piece of Canadian mental health history, while amplifying and making visible patient voices, experiences, and trauma.
Image Caption: Covers from three issues of The Quill (April 1968, June 1968, October 1968).
At the Centre for Criminology Library, interested researchers can access The Quill alongside Dr. Barker’s scholarly work on these therapies, which were largely supported by the main-stream psychiatric community at the time.
For a full record of the issues the library holds pertaining to this topic, please refer to the penal press finding aid (PDF).