Mad Children: Stories of Youth in Canadian Insane Asylums, 1880-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mad Children stories the lived experiences of youth who were placed in Canadian insane asylums from 1880 to 1930. The author uses archival materials and creative writing to move away from the medical model of understanding mad histories towards a focus on the children institutionalized across Canada. The author begins with an interrogation of the land the asylums were built on to engage with the settler colonial foundations of Canadian insane asylums. This chapter immediately situates the history of asylums within the displacement of Indigenous people and colonization. Additionally, this archival project is situated in a decades long call to do mad histories differently in a way that centres the experiences of the people held within the institutional walls. In situating the historiography and archival materials related to mad history, the author positions the use of blended writing to tell different kinds of stories. The stories that make up the bulk of the chapters come from archival records of children from British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island. Each chapter focuses on different elements that influence the lives of children within these facilities. The first story situates the reader in the development of eugenics, child psychiatry and wellbeing, and moral therapy. From there, the author details two different encounters with the forces that deported asylum inmates, the influence of anti-Asian rhetoric, the impact of settler colonialism, the interconnection with juvenile delinquency, what children thought of their surroundings, and the formulation of girlhood in the context of empire. In telling specific stories in their wider context, the author weaves in moments of discussion about other children who share similarities to the stories. Ultimately, the author reveals the consequences of systems that placed children in asylums and imagines what these encounters may have looked like for different inmates. As she moves through the stories, the author reveals not only how kids resisted and complied with colonial treatments of madness, but also, she argues that institutionalization is never the appropriate choice when considering how to care for people, especially children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".