In the first article by David Braddock, Eric Emerson, David Felce, and Roger J. Stancliffe, titled “Living circumstances of children and adults with mental retardation or developmental disabilities in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, and Australia”, the topic of mental illness in both children and adults is explored. This article was written to show how mental illness is treated in each of the the countries studied, and the differences between them. The article also explores the differences in treatment between adults and children. The authors argue that childhood mental illness was often dealt with in the home, and it was the family that cared for the children, with very few children being placed into medical institutions. Adults on the other hand, are more likely to be treated in a formal institution than in the home. The article correlates these findings and shows that the number of individuals institutionalized increases with age. The article uses various data collected and displayed in graphs to prove this.  The article also shows the growth of institutions in Canada beginning in the 1960’s as Canadians began to place a different emphasis on the care and treatment for mental illness.

          The second article, “In Search of Monkey Girl: Disability, Child Welfare, and the Freak Show in Ontario in the 1970s.” written by Jane Nicholas and Lori Chambers, tells the story of a physically disabled and mute five year old girl named Pookie, who was put on display at an Ontario Freak Show in the early 1970’s. Pookie would be brought to stage by her brother and, with her mother’s consent, crawl for the audience, this resulted in a outcry from viewers, who questioned the ethics of the performance. Nicholas and Chambers use this reaction to argue that Pookie and her role in the show helped to bring an end to Freak Shows in Canada, and gave the public a better understanding of how mental and physical disabilities should be dealt with. They argue that a subsequent shift in how child welfare was to be conducted evolved from this as well. The authors drew evidence from both Pookie’s story, as well from various legislative acts that came into place by both Canada and the United Nations to protect children, such as the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child” in 1959. The article also explored how poverty, and little government assistance, played into why children like Pookie were placed into Freak Shows, as the family had no better way of caring for the child. This again led to the public and the Canadian government trying to find better ways to protect children and their well-being, as well as treat the portion of the population that was mentally or physically disabled.

         The final article analysed was “Poverty, family process, and the mental health of immigrant children in Canada” by Morton Beiser, Feng Hou, Ilene Hyman, and Michel Tousignant. The authors argued in this article that family poverty jeopardizes a child’s mental health and productivity. They gathered information on institutionalized children and the socio-economic background they came from, and found a correlation between economic disadvantage and ineffective parenting, parental psychopathology, interfamilial hostility, and single parent families, all of which could add to a child’s mental health issues. They stated that poverty led to more emotional disorders in children, and was associated with higher levels of parental depression and family dysfunction. The authors also found that along with poverty, gender and ethnicity could also play role in a child’s mental health, with girls having less issues than boys, and those of non-european descent having less issues than those of european descent. They however found no significant relationship between immigrants and non-immigrants, even though immigrant families tended to be poorer than their native counterparts.

         Together, these three articles help us to better our understanding of the Canadian past, and how the views on child welfare and physical and mental illnesses and disabilities have evolved. These articles show a change in the 1960’s and 1970’s towards more proper care and institutions. There is a large push to ensure a child’s well being, though it is still seen that the care for a disabled child was often thought of as the families duty. Children were more likely to be cared for at home, instead of inside medical institutions, and it was the family that would have to provide for the child. However, family poverty could make this quite difficult, and as seen in the final article even increase a child’s mental health issues. This led to families turning to different, and as some might consider immoral, ways of looking after the child, such as in the case of Pookie the Monkey Girl. In Pookie’s case her mother argued that because she was a single mother with little in the way of income, the only way to ensure Pookie was cared for was to put her into the Freak Show. So poverty could lead both to furthering a child’s mental health problems, as well as their subsequent exploitation. As this came to light in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which also fell into step with the increase of formal medical care and institutions, the public’s understanding of, and attitude towards, mental and physical disabilities evolved, rising in the call for a better system to care for society’s disadvantaged. This also resulted in various ways of ensuring the health and wellbeing of children in Canada, such as government assistance. These articles help explain the positive shift seen in this period of Canadian history in the treatment and attitude of mental and physical illness and disability, especially in the case of children.  

Bibliography

Braddock, David, Eric Emerson, David Felce, and Roger J. Stancliffe. “Living circumstances of children and adults with mental retardation or developmental disabilities in the united states, canada, england and wales, and australia.” Mental Retardation & Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 7, 2001: 115-121.

Beiser, Morton, Feng Hou, Ilene Hyman, and Michel Tousignant. “Poverty, family process, and the mental health of immigrant children in Canada.” American Journal Of Public Health 92, no. 2, 2002: 220-227.

Nicholas, Jane, and Lori Chambers. “In Search of Monkey Girl: Disability, Child Welfare, and the Freak Show in Ontario in the 1970s.” Journal Of Canadian Studies 50, no. 3, 2016: 639-668.

Image: Purple Monkey Flower, taken by Katryna Barone