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The Current Transcript for June 14, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Peace is the answer. Love is the answer and any Muslim worth their salt, any Muslim who believes in a loving and merciful god, loves the LGBTQ community.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The LGBTQ community across North America is reeling, expressing both grief and defiance at rallies and vigils understanding that the massacre at the Pulse gay bar in Orlando carries a brutal message of just how vulnerable they are simply because of their sexual orientation and identity. And those who are Muslims who are also in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community find themselves facing both homophobia and Islamophobia with nowhere to turn. They are at once victims, targets and even suspects. In a moment we'll hear from three people navigating all of the emotion and all the backlash. Also today Kay Parley was a psychiatric patient turned psychiatric nurse. Now at the age of 93 she has a long view on what's changed in treating mental illness.

SOUNDCLIP

The old psychiatric model pushed the patients to do things, the medical model says we’ll cure you, we’ll look after you and I think that was a bad change.

AMT: She was in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a facility at the cutting edge of experimental treatment with LSD. Kay Parley joins me in an hour. And I bet you thought this was an urban legend.

SOUNDCLIP

Could you repeat what’s going on?

There’s a freakin’ rat that crawled up our toilet drain and it’s sitting in there! I’m not letting it out.

[laughing]

It’s huge, and it’s wet!

AMT: It turns out rats can indeed show up in your toilet bowl, but the real issue is the disease they carry, from C. difficile to E. coli. As a growing number of Canadian cities report increases in rat populations we turn to a researcher and a rodentologist for insights. And yes you heard that correctly, our rodentologist in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Orlando shooting: Grieving LGBTQ Muslims brace for backlash

Guests: Lali Mohamed, May El-Abdallah, Mehammed Mack

SOUNDCLIP

This is a very dark moment in America's history. A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens. It is a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation. If we don't get tough, we're not going to have our country anymore. The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.

AMT: Well a very dark moment indeed. The feelings of shock after the weekend attack on the Orlando nightclub were still very raw yesterday when Donald Trump, the presumptive US Republican presidential candidate blasted that message. He doubled down on his politics of division, vowing to ban Muslim immigrants to the United States, deploying rhetoric seemingly designed to stoke tensions and fan ill will and suspicion. The shooter Omar Mateen was an American citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents. He killed 49 late night revellers at an LGBTQ club, many of them Latino, many of them people of color. To Muslims across North America that display of the politics of fear will by now unfortunately feel familiar. But for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Muslims there is an added emotion and even more complex set of feelings. I'm joined by three guests now for their thoughts on all of this. May El-Abdallah is a lawyer and queer Muslim woman, Lali Mohamed is a community activist, they both join me in our Toronto studio and Mehammed Mack is an assistant professor of French studies and the study of women in gender at Smith College. He's in Northampton, Massachusetts, hello and welcome to all of you.

GUESTS: Good morning. Good morning, thanks for having me. Hello.

AMT: Mehammed Mack let's start with you, what was your reaction when you heard about the shooting? What have you been thinking about since then?

MEHAMMED MACK: Well I first heard the news early that morning and I was just devastated because I myself grew up in Los Angeles and I was a great patron of these Latin X nightlife spaces that were targeted that night. And I just reached out to all my friends who are all along the LGBTQ spectrum or also Latino people of color and I sent them my condolences. That was the first thing and the other was it was just a familiar feeling for Muslim Americans I think and Muslim Canadians wishing that whoever perpetrated this would not be a Muslim in order to avoid the inevitable backlash that usually follows these things.

AMT: May El-Abdallah, what have the last couple of days been like for you?

MAY EL-ABDALLAH: It's been really overwhelming actually. I similarly was completely devastated by the news. I mean this was a celebratory space for queer Latino people of color that are similar to the spaces that I occupy here in Toronto and to hear that people were so subject to such a violent attack in space that was meant to be a safer kind of space for them was really, really devastating. And then of course being Muslim and hearing that the shooter was identified very early on as Muslim you do have that fear of backlash and you know you don't have the space to mourn really because the backlash has already started and you’re immediately put on the defensive.

AMT: Lali Mohamed, what have you been thinking?

LALI MOHAMED: I think, similar to May, I've been feeling this sort of unbearable grief and rage. At once, I know very intimately that the lives of Black and Latino people are intimately connected to violence and to death. And so I was sad right, because these young people looked like me and they were the victims of a racialized homophobic violence, but at the same time I started really early on preparing myself for the onslaught of violent Islamophobia that already is manifesting itself both in the Republican Party but also in the LGBTQ community in Toronto. Just yesterday after finishing an interview with Global News, I was walking down Church Street around 2:30 or 3:00 PM and some man was wearing a t-shirt in broad daylight that said it's not Islamophobia, they really do want to kill us. And this man was walking on Church unchecked. And so I am just trying to make sense of it all. It has been difficult 48 hours for me.

AMT: Mehammed Mack, you're both queen and Muslim. How do you navigate those identities in the aftermath of this shooting?

MEHAMMED MACK: Well I think that in my case I've been very blessed to have accepting parents, a welcoming community. I grew up in Los Angeles, like I said before and we do have progressive leaders there who did not make me feel like I was not welcome in the mosque community for instance. I would just say that in the aftermath of this, I really have a greater understanding of sort of intersectionality and how my Muslim and queer identities are connected rather than disparate and I think it has to do with a shared status of vulnerability and being on the receiving end of intolerance or in some other cases violence. And I've just been really heartened to have so many people sort of reach out to me who could see that because of what was happening I might be suffering. Not suffering compared with what the Latino queer community is suffering but just suffering a sort of media scrutiny of being under the microscope once again and not being able to mourn like the other guests.

AMT: And we played that clip of Donald Trump off the top there, that that kind of statement came out from Mr. Trump right away on the Sunday. How do you react to that?

MEHAMMED MACK: Well I think that statements like the one Mr. Trump came out with just underscore this really false idea that Muslim Americans have never been part of the fabric of the United States and really undermine our sense of national belonging, which I don't think is a great message to send out, especially if you're trying to tie together people in national unity. I grew up in California. I'm the son of a Saudi immigrant and an Austrian immigrant who have contributed great things to the state and in many ways it's a typical California story. So, he might as well tell all Californians to cede from the nation, which some of them may want to do in the case of the Trump presidency.

AMT: And yet there are people who actually support that view.

MEHAMMED MACK: Yes, I mean it's baffling. It's baffling to me. I think part of it is not many people have met another Muslim and I think meeting another Muslim, talking to another Muslim, seeking them out, it's really important at times like these to calm things down, to dramatize the situation and I think once you have contact you can't really hate so callously.

LALI MOHAMED: And it's less surprising for me. I feel like Trump's remarks are indicative of the type of foreign policies that the US has. I think it's indicative of the very real ways Muslims, queer or otherwise are surveilled in the US, are detained and deported. And so I'm not surprised. I’m somebody who lives in the intersections of queerness of Muslimness and of Blackness and I know very intimately that every single day I need to navigate and negotiate a world that is premised on the othering of Muslims, that is premised on the othering of black people, that is premised on the othering of queer and trans folks. So I'm not surprised by his remarks, in fact I think the very culture of the US and Canada really allow his remarks to have a platform and to be sort of disseminated to the public.

AMT: May, what are you thinking?

MAY EL-ABDALLAH: I'm thinking the irony of course of Trump's comments, is what could be more quintessentially American than the type of crime we saw here, and for Trump to try and frame it as this other kind of thing or this foreign threat is really dangerous. I mean here we have a gentleman who was born in the United States, had access to very high grade assault type weapons, committed a mass shooting in a public place as we have seen over and over again and in various places around the United States, so it's very dangerous. Of course the other thing is that the very policies that Trump is trying to promote in exploiting this tragedy would hurt the very same people that were very tragically murdered by Omar Mateen at Pulse nightclub.

AMT: And more details are coming out about this shooter. It's not clear, he's been called radical Islamic. It's not clear how radical he--how much he was doing this in sort of in line with any kind of radical religious ideology versus something else. What are your thoughts on that?

MAY EL-ABDALLAH: Yeah, and I think-- I mean we have to acknowledge that we have a problem with homophobia and transphobia across North American culture, across the world surely, but here as well we have notions about masculinity and what that means that are very, very harmful to people and manifest themselves in violent ways. To me what happened there was-- it's about homophobia and it's about transphobia and that is certainly no-- it is not limited to the Muslim community. Each community has to be accountable of course for the way that homophobia and transphobia plays out in it, but certainly a cultural idea that permeates everything.

AMT: How common is it for you May to encounter people who believe that Muslims are homophobic?

MAY EL-ABDALLAH: Every day. And I think it's people meet me, they may not know, I don't present visibly as Muslim perhaps and when they do find out that I come from a Muslim background or that I am Muslim, immediately there's this idea of wow and you're queer? Does your family know? How is that for you? Which is fine, you know there's a curiosity there. But of course this assumption or underlying those questions is this is not possible, but for me I have a lot of queer Muslim friends. I'm sitting in a room with another queer Muslim and we’re speaking to one, so it's not an uncommon thing.

LALI MOHAMED: And that's so often one of the best responses, right? The response of surprise is one of the best responses. On the sort of flip side of it, so often when you encounter queer secular or queer atheists, individuals who then find out that you're also Muslim, it can be a really violent experience. And by that I mean they can sort of begin perpetuating Islamophobic narrative, they can erase your identities, they can suggest that you come from a culture that is inherently violent and backwards. And so that surprise, I welcome. Because the surprise is so often one of the better responses rather than the sort of you know, deeply racist and problematic narrative of the backward Muslim.

AMT: Mehammed, you want to jump in here. Go ahead.

MEHAMMED MACK: Yes I just wanted to say that this is something that I actually research. I mean I look at the immigration debate in Europe and particularly France and the way that things like gay friendliness and homophobia are politicized when it comes to accepting immigrants and raising awareness about immigration and so on. And I think that this has been used a lot this narrative of Muslim homophobia everywhere whether it is statistically founded or not and in most cases it's not, particularly in France because you cannot measure racial statistics or religious statistics by law. But, in that case it's been used kind of to render on French people who are already French, who are second generation, third generation, fourth generation immigrants. And by creating this sort of fiction of a civilizational difference of sexual clash of civilizations if you want to call it that, and I think it's been very toxic because I can tell you 100 stories of non-homophobic Muslims but it wouldn't seem to matter because these narratives are so grounded in the media. And it also kind of silences the way that Muslims can queer gay culture in another way and I think it's very important to realize that queer Muslims express a deep attachment to spirituality and that's what seems to pose a problem in what I'd call home or normative environments or mainstream environments.

AMT: There are also reports now that the shooter had been a frequent visitor to the Pulse nightclub, had exchanged messages with gay men or at least one gay man on a gay dating app, what do you make of these stories? Lali?

LALI MOHAMED: I mean, I think we live in a violently homophobic and transphobic world and so I'm not surprised that an individual can internalize that. And so often how homophobia and transphobia manifests itself is through violence. We know this through the killing and the murder of trans women of colour. We know this through the disappearance of two spiritual indigenous women and we saw this on Saturday night, Sunday morning through the mass shooting that happened in the club that was frequented by Black and Latino queer and trans folks.

AMT: May?

MAY EL-ABDALLAH: As Lali mentioned, homophobia and transphobia doesn't limit itself to only people that don't struggle with homosexuality themselves. It is certainly something that as I said earlier is a cultural idea and we do internalize it. So I completely echo what Lali’s saying about that and we have to focus on the fact that why is it so accepted in our in our society that two men in love or kissing or being sexually romantic with each other can provoke feelings of disgust or feelings of rage. We have to really, really examine that because it's not only in a violent incident like this that we have to really break that down. It happens in small ways in our in our everyday lives where you hear comments or ideas that this is not okay, or this is disgusting and all of those things build up and build up to the point of violence.

AMT: Lali, there's been calls from Muslim leaders in North American to have what they call an honest conversation about homophobia within Muslim communities, what do you make of that?

LALI MOHAMED: I think all communities should have a honest and frank conversation about the ways in which homophobia shows up and transphobia shows up in our communities. I would resist and pivot away from the very--from the sort of racist and seductive call to somehow account for one man's actions. I'm not responsible as a Muslim for one man's actions but absolutely, Muslims need to have a conversation but these conversations are occurring, they have been occurring. There are out, queer Muslim Imams in this world, there are queer Muslim mosques in this world and so I think the conversation around sexual and gender diversity has existed for hundreds of years. I would resist that call in light of this. I think what needs to occur right now is that queer people of color and trans folks need to be given the space to grieve what is a racialized homophobic and transphobic attack on our communities. Not to have some sort of conversation about the ways in which homophobia shows up or may not show up in certain Muslim communities.

AMT: Mehammed Mack it's interesting, we were just looking at the number of shootings in the last couple of years in the United States, the mass shootings. Most of them were done by young white men. And we have a different conversation when that happens. Speak to me a little bit about—

MEHAMMED MACK: If I could just chime in on what was discussed before and then I’ll definitely answer that question.

AMT: Go ahead.

MEHAMMED MACK: I think there is evidence about what is changing in sort of the US Muslim community's attitude about homosexuality. And this was done by the Peel Research Center and it found that especially among the youth generation and all across the board, attitudes were evolving towards a greater acceptance of the legitimacy of what was quoted as the homosexual lifestyle and I don't think it's only on the Muslim community to change. But I do think those conversations are happening like the other guest said. I've had been involved in many of those conversations and I've seen attitudes change just like in the rest of this country over the last ten years where not very long ago we did not have gay marriage. We had a lot of homophobic laws on the books even more than we do now. And the other thing I was troubled by when it was revealed that Omar Mateen may have had a dating app profile and was a longtime patron of the club spending I think one club patron said he had seen him going there for years, is that it brought up all this narrative of the schizophrenic lifestyle, the double life of people who might be Muslim and how this might have resulted in sort of his lashing out. And I think it sort of presents the closet as the psychologically disturbed place but in many ways you know we have to say that people who choose to remain in the closet sometimes for very good reasons, even when it is available for them to come out. These are not psychologically disturbed people and I've heard a lot of about this about how the closet can produce these kinds of things.

AMT: We have to leave it there. I would like to continue this conversation but we're out of time. Thank you, to all of you for sharing your thoughts today.

GUESTS: Thank you.

AMT: I've been taking with May El-Abdallah, she's a lawyer, Lali Mohamed is a community activist, Mehammad Mack is an assistant professor of French studies and the study of women and gender at Smith College in Massachusetts. Stay with us the news is next. You're listening to The Current.

Rising urban rat population pose health risks to humans, says researcher

Guests: Chelsea Himsworth, Bobby Corrigan

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, over the course of her career, Kay Parle say sweeping changes come to the field of mental health. She got to know Saskatchewan’s then named Weyburn Mental Hospital from the inside out, first as a psychiatric patient, then as a psychiatric nurse. Now, at 93-years of age, she shares her reflections from both sides of the gurney at Weyburn, where they once did cutting edge research into the therapeutic uses of LSD. Kay Parle in half an hour. First, I smell a rat.

SOUNDCLIP

[Circus music]

VOICE 1: Hello, I’m Remy and this is my brother Emil. We’re here to speak out on behalf of oppressed rats everywhere. Rats don’t have the access to media that movies and sports does.

VOICE 2: Speaking now?

VOICE 1: Yes, we have to. Rats need to take a stand.

VOICE 2: You said we’d sing something. You know, joke around. You did not say we were going to take a stand.

VOICE 1: This is important! Humans need to know, humans need—

VOICE 2: FEED US! That’s what you need to do. Leave some garbage out and we won’t bother you. Leave the lid on the top of the can—

VOICE 1: Alright, alright. Moving on.

AMT: Well, rats in Disney movies such as those two in Ratouille may be downright adorable, but in the real world rats can do real damage spreading destruction, disease, and downright disgust. This season, pest control companies in Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax are all saying they are getting more rat calls than usual. Speaking of rat calls, we just have to share this one with you. It’s from CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon program. Martin Mallett is the caller, he is speaking with expert Dave Holland.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I opened the bathroom door and there is a rat staring at me from inside the toilet bowl. I didn’t know that actually happened in real life, and it just looks at me and it turns around and swims back up the toilet [laughs]. I just closed the toilet bowl, I flushed it a whole bunch of times, weighted the lid, and for about four weeks after that, we lived in terror.

VOICE 2: A rat can tread water for like three days, so being in a toilet for an hour is nothing. When that toilet flushes, that water goes down. It’s just a tunnel. They actually had a lady who did that a number of years ago and I guarantee you, she’ll never use that toilet downstairs ever again. Sitting on it, especially.

AMT: Whether they are scurrying down the streets, or swimming in a toilet bowl, rats are always a startling sight, and potentially a very bad sign. Right now, the Vancouver Rat Project is conducting the first and only research into urban rats in Canada. According to the lead researcher, rats are more dangerous to human health than we knew previously, and the way we try to get rid of them may actually make matters worth. Chelsea Himsworth is a veterinarian and assistant professor in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC. She is in Vancouver, hello.

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: What led to the creation of this Vancouver Rat Project?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: We know that historically, rats can pose a significant risk to human health, so most people are probably familiar with The Black Death, or the Bubonic Plague, perhaps the most famous of rat-associated disease, and that killed approximately 60 percent of the European population in the 14^th century. People would probably be surprised to know that at least seven countries have been affected by plague every single year since the mid-20^th century. Rat associated leptospirosis,a disease spread by rat urine, is another interesting example. Now, Zika virus has received a lot of publicity running up to the Olympics in Rio, but again, probably not many people are aware that rat-associated leptospirosis has been causing outbreaks, large scale outbreaks, in Brazilian cities since the 1970s. Despite these potential health threats, and despite the fact that rats appear to be thriving in cities around the world based on the anecdotal reports like the one you shared right now, they are surprisingly little known about rat populations or the health risks that they pose to people in modern cities. That’s why we developed the Rat Project, to start to address that knowledge gap.

AMT: Just to clarify, what is leptospirosis?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: That is a bacteria; disease that can be transmitted through rat urine.

AMT: How severe can it get?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Like most of these diseases, they have a broad range of clinical signs, so it can vary from a febrile illness to a disease that can cause renal failure, or even bleeding into the lungs. This wide range of clinical signs is one of the reasons it is thought that these diseases are very often under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed.

AMT: What have you learned so far for the project’s first phase?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: I’d say we had two pretty major findings. The first is that the range of health risks associated with rats is much broader than previously appreciated. In Vancouver’s rat population, we found two broad categories of zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that could be transmitted from rats to people. The first category I would describe as the usual suspects, or rat-associated diseases. These are diseases that rats have been long known to carry, and potentially transmit to people, so these are things like leptospirosis. The other category was a little more surprising. Indeed, we found that rats can actually act as this magnificent pathogen sponge, so they can go into an environment and actually absorb human pathogens, potentially propagate them, and give them back to us. One of the interesting findings is that humans in the downtown East side, where we focused our study, carry a specific strain of MRSA, which is known as the super-bug. Most people are probably familiar with it, but rats in the downtown East side were also carrying MRSA and were carrying the same strains as are found in humans. When we start to dig deeper, we found that rats were carrying human strains of C-difficile, which is an intestinal pathogen in people, as well as multi-drug resistant E-coli.

AMT: Wow. All of the things we really want to avoid.

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Absolutely, and it suddenly showed us that the range of health risks associated with rats could be as broad as our imagination, or much broader than previously thought. I guess the second major finding, which I want to highlight because it leads into our new program of study, was this idea that disease dynamics in rats, and associated human health risks, are intimately intertwined with rat ecology and behaviour. This isn’t too surprising for people who study diseases in animals, but it is actually a relationship that has been largely ignored. One important thing we found was that rats form these amazing self-quarantining family units. We found that a colony in one block could have an extremely high prevalence of disease and exist literally within spitting distance of a colony within an adjacent block that was completely disease-free.

AMT: And they recognize it. The ones that are disease-free recognize that they need to stay away from the other one?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: This is what we are trying to find out. We actually don’t know. We think this is a phenomenon of rat population structure. Basically, how rats choose to organize themselves in nature, they form these close-knit family groups and they don’t like to interact with adjacent families, and why that's interesting from a public health standpoint is it suggests that your risk of encountering a rat-associated disease is not necessarily proportional to the number of rats you're exposed to. It has something to do with that specific rat population you're exposed to. As a corollary to that, within a family group, again just like in human families diseases are transmitted through specific social interactions and these interactions usually have to do with dominance and social hierarchies. So this all sounds like a lot of maybe ecology mumbo jumbo but it's interesting because when taken together, it suggests that external interventions that disturb these established social structures could have really unpredictable effects on disease, for example, by causing infected rats to migrate to uninfected areas or by increasing fighting and disease transmission within the colony. And what is more disturbing, I would ask, than going into a colony and killing members. It could be that indiscriminate trapping and poisoning, which are most popular methods of rat control for the moment, may actually be causing the disease risks we're trying to prevent.

AMT: This is quite extraordinary and I've got lots of questions to go with that. First of all then, if they are carriers of MRSA, the superbug, and C. difficile and a bad strain of E. coli, do they get the disease themselves or do they just carry it?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: So, this is an excellent question because you see every once in a while in the media, people making claims that Vancouver has the healthiest rat population in the world, they pose no disease risk. Well, those two statements are not mutually exclusive, so it ties in to your point that for most of these pathogens, pretty much all of them, they cause no disease in rats so rats are exclusively carriers. They appear to be this unique and pretty amazing vessel to propagate and transmit disease while resisting disease themselves, and indeed we found that it was often the largest, healthiest, most robust and resilient rats in a colony that were the greatest shutters of disease.

AMT: Do they have to bite you? Can they just brush by you, or is it through their feces, is it through them just kind of being in the same space and leaving like their hairs and other things behind?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: To tell you the truth, the answer is pretty much all of the above and I think this is one of the reasons that rats have been recognized to be such a health threat and that's because of the multitude of ways they could transmit disease. So it could be as intimate as biting, there is a disease called ratbite fever or it's a bacteria called streptobacillus, and that's been recognized ongoing to be a health rep, particularly for example, in homeless populations that might be bending or going through garbage bins and getting bitten. But it doesn't have to be that intimate. It could be through rat urine, so I mentioned leptospirosis and that doesn't have to be direct contact with rat urine, that rat urine can then contaminate the wider environment and serve as a source of disease. It could be through feces. It could be even through fleas. So plague was a famous example spread through fleas but there are a number of other rat associated pathogens that can be spread through fleas that can jump off the rat into the environment and onto people and, really the list goes on and on.

AMT: Are there any known cases of a human contracting an illness such as C. difficile from rats or rat feces?

CHESLEA: There are two really interesting questions when it comes to what is the human health burden, particularly in cities like Vancouver, where I'll be the first to admit, you know we're not experiencing epidemics of rat associated disease, but I think there's two important points: one is that there's definitely a possibility that these diseases are occurring and being misdiagnosed or under-diagnosed. There was a neat little study out of Johns Hopkins where they were actually able to detect this rat associated leptospirosis in homeless individuals, but they found that it was misdiagnosed for a prolonged period of time because of lack of physician awareness.

AMT: Wow, so that really speaks to how we need to be more aware of what they can carry and transmit.

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Absolutely. And the other part which gets into the more tricky aspect with these sponge diseases is it gets harder and harder for scientists to pinpoint rats as the cause, so leptospirosis that's pretty simple if you can manage to think about it and detect it. You can link it to a rat because rats are the reservoir, but if you've got Clostridium difficile or MRSA, how would you prove that you got that from a rat versus another person because the rat is sort of a link in this chain between two people, so the rat is getting it from one person and transmitting it to another. That is going to be the ongoing challenge now that we found this other class of diseases is to say really to what degree do those pose a risk to people?

AMT: And so what steps is the city Vancouver taking to deal with its own rat population and the implications?

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Really, Vancouver is a little bit behind the eight ball here in terms of having an actual municipal rat control strategy. So, at the moment it really is up to each individual citizen to take care of rat infestations where they occur and I always liken this to an ambulance type approach. So we wait until there's a problem and then we try and resuscitate the situation, but we know for other health risks we don't deal with them using ambulances, we deal with using preventative measures knowing that although it costs more at the front end we have cost savings on the back end with having less of these problems.

AMT: Okay, well Chelsea Himsworth, thank you for your insights into this and the information.

CHELSEA HIMSWORTH: Thank you.

AMT: Chelsea Himsworth is the lead researcher with the Vancouver Rat Project. She's a veterinarian and assistant professor in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC. Well, let's go to a city that is so jam packed with rats, there are even rats celebrities. Remember the New York City pizza rat? Well, here she became a virtual video star last fall after being caught on camera dragging a slice of pizza pie down the subway stairs. Bobby Corrigan is the Big Apple's former rodentologist. These days he consults on rat issues for cities across the world. We have reached him in New York City, hello.

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Is it fair to single out New York City for its rats? How bad is the rat problem in New York?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well, I don’t think it is fair to single out New York City for the rats, but New York City is somewhat unique in that it's one of the most densely populated human cities in the world. It's a harbour city. Manhattan is an island, water is everywhere. Ships have come in by the hundreds of thousands over the past couple of centuries. It has a very old infrastructure, so New York is somewhat one of the most perfect storms for rats and mice.

AMT: And so what are some of the things that New York City has tried over the decades to try to reduce and confront its own rat population?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well, you know vermin doesn't rise to the top of the To Do list for the average person, and so for a probably 200 years, everyone thought the way to get rid of vermin is you put out poison bait or just put out traps and you kill them or you capture them and you move on. New York City, like other cities, has done that for a long time, but now we're realizing it’s much more sophisticated as Dr. Himsworth said. You need a very sophisticated strategy. It has to be a holistic approach.

AMT: And so what does that mean? What's working?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well, in New York for the past couple of years through additional funding for example, the target has been to address the rats with more science. What that science is about is addressing where the epicenter is, to use that term for now, where the epicenter is of rats. How do they radiate out? Do they radiate out? What are their means of traveling? For example, a lot of people seem to generalize and think it's just subways. If you have a subway, that's where the well rats are and the fact of the matter is subways are not a major home for the rats. They use the subways and what have you but sewers, on the other hand, are a major area for rats and sewer rats on a regular basis will migrate to the surface and then back down to the sewers and they also love the connections to green spaces where there is, you know earth that they can burrow into their natural home. So a holistic approach has to look at an entire city, the people, the commercial, the infrastructure. It has to be put together in a form of architecture, quite frankly, to then target them in a realistic way because to manage rats really, you're managing an urban environment.

AMT: I just want to ask about the sewers for a second so that that clip we heard about the person who saw the rat in the toilet, and I've heard those stories before, I thought they were been legends but they're not.

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Absolutely not. Rats can negotiate from a sewer up through the toilet system, the plumbing through your buildings, and it's common for me to get a call where there's a rat in a toilet bowl. You know, what do we do? And sometimes even rats are able to climb out of toilet bowls, and it's just like we heard. Someone opens a door and there is a rat waiting for you in your bathroom.

AMT: [laughs] Okay, well, bit of a problem there. Now I have a clip here. There's a group of citizens who call themselves the Rider’s Alley Trench Fed Society, RATS for short. They meet regularly with their dogs to hunt down rats. Let's hear what their outing sounds like.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I was so excited last week when he got his first kill, so he just went after it. He did it on his own. It was kind of fun. Every day at lunch, we go for a walk in the park because I work from home and he just goes after every garbage can and lets me know if he thinks something is in it. We shake it up and something comes out. It’s a lot of fun.

VOICE 2: There goes one! There goes another one!

VOICE 3: They’re hunting and there are a lot of rats in there.

AMT: There’s another one and another one. Bobby Corrigan, what do you think about residents taking matters into their own hands like that?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well you know, I would be a bit concerned. I mean, rats have been killed by predators for many years and dogs have been used for many years to actually kill rats, but one is that's not going to be an effective strategy for long term control. The rats can rebound from that type of predation to, I guess I would be a little bit concerned if the rats are caring diseases as Dr. Himsworth mentioned, and we are now putting our dogs, our pets, our companion animals, into the mix to kill these animals and they're going to get involved with blood and saliva and perhaps the viscera of these animals. You know, I would worry what about the health of those dogs being used in that regard.

AMT: What are the most effective ways you have seen in New York and your work around the world to reduce rat populations?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: You know, if you want to manage urban rap populations, you manage the food. These animals are relatively large, they need anywhere from one to three ounces of food every single night to stay healthy. So if you have 16 rats in a family unit below a sidewalk on a street, that's a pound of food every night disappearing to these rats, and so to manage these animals we have to manage our cities and particularly we have to manage our refuge streams. Many times you watch people take out the trash, so to speak, and there's no attention to detail of taking out the trash. If they use a dumpster, the question should be which dumpster. Where's it going to be placed? Is it going to have lids? Are you going to throw the bags in or place the bags in? People should actually be trained, and probably back in second grade we should learn this as children. How do we take care of our own trash as a species? And we don't do a great job in that around the world, and these rats have benefited from that.

AMT: Does the average civic government understand this point?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: I think as the cities grow and the populations increase, it becomes tougher. You know, realistically it's a burden for large cities to collect all of human beings’ trash and haven't gone within 24 hours, or by morning to have all the trash off the streets. It's an infrastructure situation where we're stretched to the limits in many cities. So even though cities may understand it, it's like deteriorating roads, or deteriorating sewers, or deteriorating railroads, and so forth. How do we keep up? And again, the rat sees that opening and goes for it.

AMT: I have to talk to you about Alberta. It boasts being Canada's only rat-free province. Phil Merrill is the provincial rat and pest specialist. Listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

We don't have rats basically because we never did have rats. And when rats started coming over land, we attacked them before they got a foothold in the province. Now presently, Saskatchewan is doing a real good job in rat control, and two-thirds of their rural municipalities are rat free, and the pressure from the east is not near as great as it was. Occasionally, rats do come in and get started as an infestation and soon as we hear about it, we take measures to eliminate that infestation.

AMT: Okay, Phil Merrill is Alberta's rat and pest specialist. Bobby Corrigan, what do you make of an entire province claiming to be rat free?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well, I think it's possible. Certainly Albert is proving it's possible and I think that should be the goal. I think the point to really applaud Alberta is they are being proactive in their philosophy of this pest. I think that is the goal, but it's very difficult for a big city with everything that's on everyone's plates to have, you know a lot of money put into proactive programs. So in less dense areas, it's probably a little lighter lift but it's difficult for the big cities.

AMT: And so what does it all mean for a homeowner who has a rat problem?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Well, that's important. A homeowner has a rat problem, specifically a rat problem, unfortunately that is not a job for the do-it-yourself-er. Rats are cunning animals, they are very aggressive, they can be very aggressive and bite under the wrong circumstances, and so a homeowner needs to find a quality pest professional and trust them to do the work, but do not try to do it yourself.

AMT: Thank you so much for your time.

BOBBY CORRIGAN: Thank you.

AMT: Bobby Corrigan, former rodentologist for New York City. He now consults with cities around the world on rat and rodent issues. He joins us from New York City. If you have a rat story worth sharing, we think we want to hear it. Send us an email, go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. We're also on Facebook and on Twitter @thecurrentcbc. Wow, turns out the rat in the toilet is not an urban legend, the things you learn on The Current. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti.

[Music: Extro]

93-year-old former psychiatric patient and nurse on lessons from LSD

Guests: Kay Parley

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Come on, open the door!

VOICE 2: Quiet here, no talking, I said!

VOICE 3: They pretty sure think that we're criminals.

VOICE 2: That's right.

VOICE 1: Criminals?

[Music: Dramatic]

VOICE 1: Criminals. Prison? I should have known it. How did I get here?

VOICE 3: What's wrong, honey?

VOICE 1: Let me go, let me go!

VOICE 3: They'll hear you!

VOICE 1: I won't stay here, I won't stay in this place another minute, I want to get out!

VOICE 2: What's the trouble?

AMT: From the 1948 film, The Snake Pit, that is Olivia de Havilland portraying a woman in a psychiatric institution, suffering under an abusive nurse. My next guest remembers the first time she watched that movie, because she was a psychiatric patient at the time, on a visit home. Some of the film's darker portraits of patient life rang true to her experience. And yet, Kay Parley still considers her time there as the best thing that ever happened to her. She went on to become a psychiatric nurse, witnessing that same hospital transform from a regimented institution to a facility at the forefront of mental health research. And that included cutting edge research on the therapeutic use of LSD. Kay Parley is a former patient and nurse at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. She is the author of Inside The Mental: Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry and LSD. She joins us from Regina. Hello.

KAY PARLEY: Hello.

AMT: You remember that movie, The Snake Pit?

KAY PARLEY: I remember my reaction to it. While I was in Regina, I saw The Snake Pit and I went back to the hospital thinking how much better our hospital was, but we had a few wards in Weyburn that would have been pretty good snake pits in those days.

AMT: What was it like for you? What was going on in your own mind when you had the mental breakdown that first led to your first hospitalisation?

KAY PARLEY: Oh, goodness, I can hardly begin. See, I was in Toronto. I had just failed a CBC acting edition and I was hanging around doing office work hoping to take another one, and everything fell apart. I mean, I think I was maybe too ambitious and I was in a very competitive environment, and I wasn't where I really should have been, and everything fell apart. I started hearing voices, I was getting all sorts of horrible prophecies, and then I'd have wonderful prophecies, and they wouldn't coincide. And most of my friends had left town and I was lonely, and oh, my goodness, it was just so terrible I can hardly describe what it was like.

AMT: You walked a lot then, too, didn't you, to try to sort that out?

KAY PARLEY: Yes, the voices would tell me to keep walking, and I had walked-- I think I walked Toronto across and back several times, wore out some shoes and my feet. [chuckles] It was awful.

AMT: It must have been awful. What year was that, Kay?

KAY PARLEY: That was 1948.

AMT: And how old were you?

KAY PARLEY: Must've been 25.

AMT: 25, because you are now 93.

KAY PARLEY: Yes.

AMT: What was your first impression of the Weyburn Mental Hospital when you got there?

KAY PARLEY: I had just spent a month in treatment in the psych ward in Regina General Hospital, so I was getting a little bit more realistic and I had accepted the General Hospital fairly well, and the idea that I was sick and should try to get better, etcetera. And when they told me I had to go down to Weyburn for further treatment, I was kind of shattered because to me, you never got out of Weyburn. Because my father had gone there when I was six years old, and I never saw him again, you see. And I was horrified. And I remember the nurses on the on the psych ward being very nice to me, they got me all cleaned up and gave me a lovely hairdo that day and sent me off, and they gave me a shot so I would be out cold on the bus, ambulance. And we got to Weyburn, here was this enormous building, it was a huge-- one of the biggest buildings in Canada, you know. And it had this beautiful door with pillars, and I thought, oh, what a wonderful looking place, but I expected that inside it would all be cells and that I would be locked away like in a jail and I'd never see the daylight again. And then we went through the door, and there was a wonderful corridor in there with high ceilings and marbleized floors, and a stair with brass strips that they used to call a golden stair. And I thought, my goodness, they're certainly trying to fool the public. You see, [laughs] I thought this was all for show and I still expected terrible things. And then they led me to a ward, and it was just like a ward in a hospital, in a way, and I began to sort of think, well, maybe I'll survive here. [laughs]

AMT: Mm. How long did it take before you actually had a diagnosis?

KAY PARLEY: Well, it took until 1972. That was a long time, from '48 to '72.

AMT: And what was the diagnosis in the end?

KAY PARLEY: I'm a manic-depressive. Manic depressive psychosis, manic-depressive will happen once in six years, so I had some very good periods in between, you know.

AMT: And you make the point that your father went into the Weyburn Hospital when you were six years old.

KAY PARLEY: Yes.

AMT: So you met him in there after years.

KAY PARLEY: I met him in the hospital, yes. One of the patients set it up so that I would meet him at a concert one night. [laughs]

AMT: And what did you think?

KAY PARLEY: Nothing, this is dad, he was just the same. I just sort of remembered him as soon as I saw him, and we got along just fine. [laughs]

AMT: Did you expect him to be in worse shape when you met him?

KAY PARLEY: Yeah, I guess I did. I mean after all, he’d been there all his life, he must be sick. Well he wasn't, he was just like me. He'd had years a good spells in between. He'd worked out of the hospital a lot, you know, he'd helped construction gangs, and he'd been digging gardens around town, making money and so on, and he had a lot of friends in the town. And then when he got sick, of course, they'd put him in shock treatment and bring him around again, and then he'd be fine again. But he never came home again, I think my mother had asked them not to send him home, if you want to know the truth.

AMT: Hmm.

KAY PARLEY: Yeah.

AMT: So what were you told about him when you were growing up?

KAY PARLEY: Nothing. Mother wouldn't talk about him at all. They had an idea in the old days that you shouldn't talk to children about problems because you should let them forget, and mother believed that. She never talked to me about my dad.

AMT: You also met your grandfather in that same hospital.

KAY PARLEY: Yes, that was quite interesting, that was. He was a paranoid and he was a brilliant man, very brilliant, smart dresser. He was called the most respected patient in the whole hospital.

AMT: And so how were you treated in that hospital, how were they treated in that hospital?

KAY PARLEY: Well on the psych ward in Regina, everything was, well, you were being watched all the time, you know. There were so many nurses. And I was very sick at the time, and I had felt terribly, oh, I don't know, under surveillance. The Weyburn Hospital gave me a little more freedom, there's bigger wards and fewer nurses and I was treated quite well. I was resentful at first, because they would say, for instance, the first time Sunday came along and there was a church service, and the nurse said I had to go. That's the sort of thing, you see, we were sort of told we had to do these things. Of course, I resented that, not being able to make my own decisions. But as I got better, of course, that got better and better. They were much better at letting you make your own decisions about things, and I got much more freedom as time went by. But just at first, it was repressive, I'll put that word on it.

AMT: You called it at one point a human garbage heap.

KAY PARLEY: It was, yes. Saskatchewan had just gone through the dirty '30s and the population at Weyburn was so big they had patients sleeping on the floors. All these people had had breakdowns in the '30s, and there hadn't been enough money, and you just felt as if all people that couldn't handle things very well had just been dumped in there. A lot of them didn't have nice clothes anymore, and they were wearing clothes made in the hospital with cheap fabrics, and it just was a real dump. Yep. [laughs]

AMT: But it was different for you, though?

KAY PARLEY: While I was on the admission ward, and the two admission wards, the male and female admission wards, they were treatment wards. They were trying very hard to get us well and get us out of there. And that was a very different thing from being on any of the other wards. If you were six months on admission, they usually moved you over to the workers' wards, if you're well enough to be doing a job in the hospital. They had people helping in dining rooms and helping with cleaning and helping carry garbage out and all sorts of things, and they had some of the men working on the farm. So they treated them very well. They didn't get a therapy, psychotherapy, but they got good food and they got lots of entertainment, there was lots going on. So those wards weren't too bad, but then they had refractory wards in the basement for people that were very, very out of it, or very violent, and so on. And they were pretty bad wards. They were the snake pits, were the basement wards. But the admission wards were wonderful, they were full scale treatment units.

AMT: So they treated some people and they gave up on others, in other words?

KAY PARLEY: They treated you for six months, put it like that. And I was really lucky, because I was doing so well, they kept me for nine months. I think that's why I never had to go back.

AMT: You were busy, too, eh? You edited the hospital newspaper.

KAY PARLEY: Yes, when anybody showed a flair for that sort of thing, they would soon get you going. The recreation people were marvelous. You know, I've heard a lot of mental patients tell me that it was the recreation staff that made them well, because the nursing staff were so prone on keeping order or worrying about your health, but the rec people met you like a human being and kept you occupied and had a lot of fun with you. They put me in charge of this hospital paper, and I had my own office, which gave me a good feeling. Yeah, that helped a lot, being editor of the Torch.

AMT: At one point, you actually say that you felt that it was a community.

KAY PARLEY: Oh, it was. People had been there for over 20 years, some of them, and they knew each other. And everybody felt as if he was contributing, all those workers. And I felt I was contributing by editing the paper and helping with concerts and all that. That's community.

AMT: You say that your life changed for the better there in that first stay.

KAY PARLEY: Oh, did it ever! Mhm.

AMT: How so?

KAY PARLEY: I found myself, I learned how I was affecting people and I learned a little more about what I really wanted out of life. I got a lot more confidence, I found out a lot about what had been bothering me, I'd met my dad. All sorts of things changed for the better.

AMT: And you end up back in the hospital in 1956. But this time, you're training to be a psychiatric nurse.

KAY PARLEY: That's right.

AMT: Why were you interested in that?

KAY PARLEY: I think probably I felt a little guilty that I wasn't doing something about it when my dad had it and I'd had it, and I thought I owed them something, and I was curious. In fact, the person who interviewed me was a nurse, she had known me when I was a patient. And one of the questions he asked me was, why do you want to take psych nursing, Kay? I still remember what I said. I said, I would like to write a book about my experience and I have to see it from both sides. In other words, I think I had caught on that if some of the nurses were pretty bossy and so on, and that there was a reason for it. And that the hospital organization wasn't all open to me as a patient, and I wanted to know how it worked. I didn't want to write one of these books like The Snake Pit that seemed to show it all from the patient's point of view, you know, all the awful things that were happening to patients. I wanted to see both sides.

AMT: So when you became a psychiatric nurse, what was changing in the way mental illness was seen and treated at the time?

KAY PARLEY: Whoa, so much was changing. They had turned all the wards into treatment wards at that time, and they had trained some of the graduate staff in counseling, so they could actually give psychotherapy to people that had never had a chance for it. They had a tranquilizer, the first one, Largactil, and that had calmed things down. That was one of the great magic bullets of the time, so that you were able to reach more patients. They'd hired a music therapist and an art therapist, they had more occupational therapists, oh, it was just a different place at that time. But from the point of view of, let's say theoretical: in the days when I was a patient, there was always that feeling that, as I said, you could contribute to the community. It was as if they were saying, you can help me, you can be of use, and that was wonderful. When I went back in training, although everything was so much nicer and quieter, and there was so much more going on, but there was an attitude of you are sick, I can help you. In other words, the medical model had taken over. The old psychiatric model pushed the patients to do things; the medical model says we'll cure you, we'll look after you. And I think that was a bad change. I worked at University Hospital after I left Weyburn, on the psych ward up there, and it was most noticeable. The patients got to do nothing, they didn't even make their beds or scrub their floors. In other words, they weren't contributing at all.

AMT: That changes your self-esteem, doesn't it?

KAY PARLEY: Uh-huh. I think the old system was the right one. Yep, I do.

AMT: The Weyburn Hospital ended up on the leading edge of research. Tell us about the experiments with LSD?

KAY PARLEY: Groups of staff were taking it, they were trying to find out how their patients felt and they were learning a lot, because it upset your perception so badly. What it was like if you weren't see and hearing things realistically, you know? And I think they got a lot more empathy for patients. I noticed when I worked with nurses that had had LSD, they always seem to understand their patients better. It was a pretty awful experience for a lot of people, and yet, some of them wanted to take it again because they claim that they got insight. I know I got some insight the one time that I took it. I learned something about myself I hadn't realised before.

AMT: Well, let's explore some of this. First of all, one of the people working with the nurses who were starting to try to take LSD was, as you put it, a Huxley. Who was he?

KAY PARLEY: Oh, Francis Huxley, that was Aldous Huxley's nephew. He was a social anthropologist and they were busy redesigning the hospital, and they asked him to do a study of interaction on the wards. And he's the one that gave me LSD. I took L.S.D. from a Huxley. [laughs]

AMT: When you got the LSD, he put it in a glass of water, and he stayed with you. Describe what happened.

KAY PARLEY: He'd asked me over the evening, and I thought he'd be asking a bunch of people. I was surprised when I got there, he said, I don't think anybody else is coming. And he asked me if I'd like a cup of tea, and I said, okay, thanks. And he said, would you rather have LSD? [laughs] That was a bit of a surprise. So I said, well, Dr. Osmond has told me no way because I'd had a breakdown, and he wouldn't let anybody that had a breakdown have LSD. And then I got thinking, well, goodness sakes, Dr. Osmond would have okayed this, you know, Francis worked with him all the time. So I said okay. I know he didn't give me very much. We sat and talked, he had some music on and he was sitting under a light, a standing amp. And all the sudden, this lamp blinded me. It just went, oh! The light just got so bright and I shielded my eyes. So he turned the light down. And then the music started flooding me, and I couldn't stand it, and he turned the music down. And then everything I looked at started becoming richer and deeper and brighter, and oh, it was really quite something. I began to think about other things, like-- I think this what they mean by insight, because I began to feel paranoid. I began to feel as if people used me, because I had been a bit of a writer and an artist, and I felt people had often asked me to do things that I didn't really feel up to, but I did them. And I started to feel unappreciated, awful experience. I got so miserable and I just sort of collapsed. And I remember nothing more of that evening, but I know that after a while, Francis gave me niacin. We could take people out of LSD with niacin. I was able to talk to him about the experience, and when I told him about feeling used, he said, you might as well face it: you're one of the strong ones. And that was the biggest change in my life that I'd had to date, because I think I'd looked at myself as one of the weak ones, and here he was telling me I was one of the strong ones. Without that, I'd probably never had the nerve to go psych nursing in the first place. So I thought I got a little bit of insight or help from that treatment, and that's all I remember until he walked me home. Francis thought I was walking a little strangely, I guess, and he said, do you know where the ground is? And I said, oh yes, I know where the ground is, I'm just not sure where my feet are. [laughs] I still remember saying that. That was what it was like to be under LSD, it was quite weird.

AMT: The lingering effects. So you became a sitter for other people taking LSD. What did you do?

KAY PARLEY: We saw them the day before to make sure that they knew who was going to be with them, and then on the day of the treatment, you stayed in the room with them and you kept everybody else out except the doctor. And you just had to concentrate. You took notes, and if they had asked you to ask them some questions or help guide them, you tried to sense when it was time to ask them, and you would ask them. And you would just sit there the whole treatment, which usually took about eight hours or more. But we all liked it, I don't know how to explain it to anybody that's never sat with an LSD. It drained you, you concentrated until you were just beat, but you felt all the time that you were helping somebody stay on Earth or something. I don't know, you just felt useful.

AMT: We know now that Weyburn was at the cutting edge of LSD research. They were using hallucinogenic drugs to research schizophrenia, they were even thinking about treatment of alcoholism. And then the hysteria of the '60s and the counterculture use of LSD closed everything down.

KAY PARLEY: Oh my, oh my. [laughs] Oh. It spread onto the university campuses, and they started making impure varieties. Oh, it was simply terrible. No wonder there was a hue and cry about it, because it was dangerous. Goodness, the reason we watched people. But the trouble was when they made it illegal, doctors that were using it so carefully couldn't get it anymore, I think that was sort of too bad.

AMT: It was a different time, eh? Now, there was a move across Canada and the world to take patients out of psychiatric mental institutions in the '60s. Many of the patients left the Weyburn Mental Hospital. What do you think of that move that was getting the mentally ill out of hospitals and into the community?

KAY PARLEY: Well at the time, we had high hopes that the new drugs were going to make it possible. That they would be able to participate and take jobs and do oaky. But it hasn't quite worked out that way. We have people who are in the community now and they've got a caseworker. The caseworker can't see them every day like you would in a hospital, like, you just have to see them when they can, and mental patients need motivation more than anything. That was the chief job of the psych nurse, was to say get out there to dance tonight. Get to that concert, get out there and play ball, come on! [laughs] And this got them going, you know? Well, there's nobody doing that now. So what are they doing? They're sitting vegetating, they're ending up street people. We've got a lot of people falling through the cracks now, I think. I just think that it isn't working. I think we needed the big hospitals, and that's a problem, because now there aren't enough patients needing them that you could have one. Because the old mantle practically paid for itself. It had a farm where all of food was raised, and it just didn't take the kind of money it would take now to rent a place like that. Another advantage of the big hospital: you could be admitted any time. A doctor just had to see you. If you were sick, you were admitted. There was none of this waiting and waiting to see if you could get a bed and this kind of thing, you know? Even when they had the patients asleep on the floors, they'd take them in. [laughs] And they all felt as if it was home. I remember, to this day, I feel that was home. I liked it in the big hospital. Once you've got used to the place, all those people around that you knew, I think it was a terrible loss.

AMT: Do you suffer from the same illness these days?

KAY PARLEY: Oh, I've had a breakdown every six years all my life.

AMT: Did you-- really, going on right into your 80s and 90s as well?

KAY PARLEY: No. Manic-depressive tapers out when you get old. The last one I had was 72, I think.

AMT: You have written this book now about all of those years that you went through this. What stays with you at the age of 93 about your earlier experiences?

KAY PARLEY: Just that it was inevitable, I think. I inherited this thing, it's hereditary, manic-depressive psychosis is what my dad had. I've learned a lot from it.

AMT: Also, you are from a generation that would not have normally even admitted to this. But it's important for you to talk about it?

KAY PARLEY: Oh, well I'll tell you, we had a wonderful psychotherapy group when I was on the admission ward. We had an awfully good group leader, he was a psychologist. And one day, he said to us, people have so little understanding about mental illness. Those of you who get discharged, you should see yourselves as ambassadors. You should go out there letting people know what it was really like in here, and what you learned, and what you enjoyed, and the friends you made. And I came out being an ambassador. Another thing he said, don't ever keep it a secret that you were in the mental hospital, or you'll spend your life being scared somebody's going to find out. So I never kept it a secret.

AMT: Kay Parley, it's really good to talk to you. Thank you.

KAY PARLEY: Well, thank you very much for the chance.

AMT: Kay Parley, former psychiatric patient and a nurse. Her book is called Inside The Mental: Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry and LSD. Kay Parley joined us in Regina. Finally today, we've got one more story from former New York City rodentologist Bobby Corrigan. We heard from him earlier about the ongoing scourge of rats. Now, before he left, I asked him if he had a favourite memory of his time spent working among the rats of New York City. He gets the last word: you get to squirm. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

BOBBY CORRIGAN: About two years ago, I went into a closet in a bottom of a large building where the rats were very, very heavy. I could actually feel them as I was very close to the ledge where they were, and I could feel their, what's called whiskers, their vibrissae, actually touching my shirt and running up and down my neck here and there. For me, it was a close encounter which was fabulous. To be this close to an animal where we're actually interacting with one another. They were sensing me out and I was sensing them. But I had to stand there awhile before they got brazen enough, if you will, to get that close to me. But I started taking pictures, I could hear them hissing and spitting. A few were stomping their feet. But for me, that was a special time in my career.

AMT: Wow, how many were in there?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: You know, it's hard to say. Based on experience of my inspections, what have you, probably a couple of dozen. But they were very active in a very tight space, because there was garbage very close by to where I closed the door. Luckily, the door opened.

AMT: This was a closet in a house?

BOBBY CORRIGAN: This was a closet in a basement of a large, very large building that was becoming decrepit. And garbage was being thrown down a chute from some of the tenants, and it should have been repaired, the chute, but it had not been. And so the rats were getting a foothold in this particular tiny space.

AMT: So a perfect place to be for a rodentologist.

BOBBY CORRIGAN: [laughs] It actually was. I have to tell you, I remember standing there in the dark, saying, this is so cool. I am having so much fun. It was a Friday night, most people thinking, you know, I would rather be doing something else on my Friday night.

AMT: [laughs]

BOBBY CORRIGAN: But for me, it was great.

AMT: Better you than me, but I'm glad you had the experience.

[both laugh]

[Music: Sting]

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June 14, 2016 episode transcript

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