Riverview Hospital Suitcases Finding Aid / Inventory

The Riverview Hospital Suitcases finding aid is a descriptive document detailing the condition and physical contents of suitcases previously belonging to three mid-twentieth century female psychiatric patients of the Essondale Asylum / Riverview Mental Hospital (RVH) in Coquitlam, British Columbia. The archiving of the Riverview Hospital Suitcases developed from a series of ethnographic and phenomenologically oriented scholarly projects examining the lived experiences of women working and living in the Provincial Mental Hospital in British Columbia, (BC) during the peak of the psychiatric institutionalization movement in the mid-twentieth century (Nielsen and Currie, 2008, 2010, 2012). The Riverview Hospital Story films (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) were originally designed as “art-film” teaching tools for the post-secondary level study of the history of mental health law and policy. As the architect and instructor of the Douglas College Criminology module Canadian Law and the Mentally Disordered Offender, I continued to broaden the historical legal aspects of the course to include the use of a collection of abandoned patient belongings from the same period of institutional life, subsequently referred to as The Riverview Hospital Suitcases. The Suitcase Collection was a further scholarly project whereby three collections of abandoned patient belongings were cataloged, photographed and rehoused following the closure of Riverview Hospital and its volunteer managed ad hoc museum. The academic use of the resources in total, the films and the artifacts, formed a distinctive resource for teaching and learning in psychiatric history. I recognized the pedagogics as much different than traditional teaching on the topic of law and policy, and in criminology more broadly. In making the collection accessible to students, it became apparent that exposure to the collected items had a notable effect on the constructive engagement of students in otherwise remote topics of the “long-ago” mental patient and further, their understanding of the medico-legal practices of the historical asylum hospital. This became the topic of my Doctoral thesis (University of Wales Trinity Saint David) and explored the influence and potential in presenting to learners of law and criminology the tangible evidence of patients as individual persons rather than a homogeneous group of the “insane”. The finding aid provides a specific accounting of the contents of the Riverview Hospital Suitcases. The suitcase collection is historically significant and has value as a research resource for understanding approaches to psychiatric care and the impacts on patients, families and the community. The artifacts are currently in storage with The City of Coquitlam, British Columbia.