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The Current Transcript for July 22, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

My plan will begin with safety at home, which means safe neighbourhoods, secure borders and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order.

LAURA LYNCH: The United States is a dark and frightening place, according to the newly minted Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. As he accepted the mantle last night, Trump proclaimed that only Trump and Trump alone could save the country. But some say his mission could end up destroying the Republican Party itself. We’ll look back to the week that was in Cleveland and forward to the campaign ahead. And later…

SOUNDCLIP

Everything fell apart. I started hearing voices. I was getting all sorts of horrible prophecies and then I’d have wonderful prophecies. It was just so terrible. I can hardly describe what it was like.

LL: First Kay Parley was a patient, struggling with profound mental illness in a hospital in Saskatchewan. But she emerged from treatment with a newfound focus—helping others like her. She became a psychiatric nurse and part of a new approach to treating those who were sick by using LSD. Kay Parley shares her remarkable story in our second half hour. I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Back To Top »

Republican convention shows 'triumph of celebrity over politics,' says historian

Guests: Keith Boag, Geoffrey Smith

SOUNDCLIP

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans, I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

[crowd cheering]

LL: Well, what a week. It is official, Donald Trump, the New York real estate developer and reality show star, is the Republican National Party’s presidential nominee. It was the crowning event of this week’s unprecedented, disorganized, chaotic and divisive convention in Cleveland, Ohio. All week, over the top rhetoric was on full display from speakers who took the stage in support of Mr. Trump, that is, until Senator Ted Cruz spoke on Wednesday night.

SOUNDCLIP

TED CRUZ: If you love our country and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand and speak and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.

LL: The former Republican leadership candidate’s refusal to endorse Mr. Trump was met by loud objections from the convention floor. Today, we look at the deep divisions in the GOP and ask if Republicans can actually achieve unity around Donald Trump. For more on this, I’m joined by Keith Boag, CBC’s Washington correspondent, and he joins us from Cleveland, Ohio. Hello.

KEITH BOAG: Good morning, Laura.

LL: So tell me, how was Trump’s speech received by the Republicans at the Cleveland Quicken Loans Arena last night?

KEITH BOAG: Well, they loved it. I mean, they were on their feet and cheering at all different points in the campaign. I thought—in the speech, rather. I thought it was kind of long. They may have found that themselves but Donald Trump often goes long.

LL: Yeah, it was like what, an hour and 20 minutes? Close to that? [laughing]

KEITH BOAG: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could have been an hour shorter. If he were Ronald Reagan, it would have been. [laughing] So, a very long speech. Not entirely as well focused as it was written on paper. He had some stray moments, moments where he strayed from the script. But other than that, it was—people are asking me, was it presidential. It was more presidential. I don’t know whether than qualifies yet as presidential but he did—it was a coherent speech. He didn’t wander off talking about you know, his many many many many businesses. And thankfully, he stopped dominating every speech with how well he’s doing in the polls. So you know, there were clear, kind of generalizations about policy prescriptions. It wasn’t just him looking in the mirror and admiring his achievements.

LL: But what do you think the goal of his speech was last night? And did he achieve it?

KEITH BOAG: I think it was you know, in spite of being an hour and 20 minutes long, it was summed up in three words: I am your voice. Okay, it was four words.

LL: Four words.

KEITH BOAG: I hadn’t heard him say that before. He may have, I haven’t listened to every speech. But to me, that most succinctly captured what his entire campaign has been about for the last, well for more than a year. He has been the voice of those who are frustrated and sometimes angry about the way America is changing. It’s changing in ways they don’t understand and in many cases don’t like. He has been a voice for the expression of ideas and thoughts, emotions, sentiments that haven’t been allowed to be expressed before. That’s what he means when he says I am not politically correct, and that’s the reason people stand up and cheer when he says that. But again, very succinct last night: I am your voice. I thought that was very effective.

LL: I guess one of the questions though is you describe whose voice he is, but is he the voice of the Republican Party now? To what extent did he manage to unify the party and the crowd around him?

KEITH BOAG: Well, I think the party is more unified than maybe people expected or more unified in a way than perhaps the media would like to see it—which is not to say that they are committed to Donald Trump so much as they are committed to the idea now that he is their nominee. As others have said this week, it’s a choice between fish and chicken, Hillary or Donald Trump. And you know, like it or not, that’s just the way it is, and I think that’s a motivating factor for pulling people behind Donald Trump. It’s not only a motivating factor for uniting the party but it’s mobilizing as well, as they repeatedly this week, as I’m sure you heard, used the podium to attack Hillary Clinton. So that’s the kind of campaign I think we’re heading into, and I think it’s that kind of campaign that has a natural kind of unifying effect on the Republican Party anyway.

LL: Except for apparently Ted Cruz. [laughing]

KEITH BOAG: [laughing]

LL: His non-endorsement… what was it like to actually be at the convention during that speech and its aftermath?

KEITH BOAG: Well, you know, there was a lot of suspense. It’s one of those things where you wonder if he’s going to say it, and you think oh this is where he’s going to say it, when he says don’t stay home in November. I thought man, he’s going to do it. [chuckling] And then he just glided right over that and into the vote your conscience. And then we knew that he wasn’t going to do it and it was going to be an electric moment on the floor of the convention and it was, with people yelling out endorse Trump, endorse Trump. And of course, he refused to. The other interesting thing, I think Laura, about it, was the next day he brought it up himself again and was questioned about it and he doubled down on it. He’s not endorsing Donald Trump. He said first of all, because he doesn’t think that Donald Trump is a true conservative and Ted Cruz is nothing if not a true conservative and always wanting to promote that idea of himself. So he said I’m not one of those who changes his mind because it becomes convenient to do something else. I’m a politician of true conviction and I can’t endorse him because I’m a true conservative. But he had another reason, which I think may have been one that created more sympathy among Republicans, and that was—it was widely publicized during the primaries that Donald Trump insulted his wife and insulted his father personally. And Cruz said I can’t endorse a man that does that. Effectively, he said that was his personal reason for not doing it and I think people are much more comfortable with him standing on a principle defending his wife than they are standing on a principle of conservatism that is divisive for the Party.

LL: Keith, I just want to ask you very briefly. Among the people who are watching this convention closely or obviously the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, how do you think they’re viewing this week’s events?

KEITH BOAG: You know, I think there was a lot made out of the way it was disorganized, things that were said from the podium that they might find useful. I think the parade of people who are giving essentially victim impact statements on the ways in which they had been hurt by the crimes of illegal immigrants is something that Democrats can use against them because it was such a one-dimensional portrait of what the problem with illegal immigration is in America. That might be useful. But the most useful thing of the week I think didn’t happen at the convention, I think it was probably that New York Times interview with Donald Trump on foreign policy, where he talked about having some hesitation and not automatically having the United States come to the defence of a NATO member in Eastern Europe, should Russia like to attack. And I think that has a tremendous potential for the Democratic Party to use in an advertising campaign that says that Donald Trump really doesn’t get the world. He really doesn’t get how important it is for America to live up to its obligations. He thinks everything is a real estate deal you can back out of.

LL: Okay Keith, thank you very much for this. And you’re off next week to the Democratic Convention. Thanks for today though.

KEITH BOAG: Thanks Laura.

LL: Keith Boag is CBC’s Washington correspondent and he was in Cleveland. For more on how the 2016 Republican National Convention and Donald Trump’s meteoric candidacy fits into the history of the GOP, I’m joined now by Geoffrey Smith. He’s a professor emeritus in the departments of history and kinesiology at Queen’s University. He’s originally from San Francisco. We reached him today in Kingston, Ontario. Hello.

GEOFFREY SMITH: Good morning.

LL: Well, the Republicans have had quite a week. What did you make of the convention?

GEOFFREY SMITH: That’s a big question. I could say it looked to me like a dog and pony show. I could say it looked like something that was out of control. I would say that it was an extension of Entertainment Tonight. It was the triumph of celebrity over politics as we’ve known it.

LL: You heard Keith suggest that maybe this question of unity isn’t that big a deal. I’m wondering what you think. How unified is the Republican Party coming out of this?

GEOFFREY SMITH: That’s a great question because the answer is not clear. I guess if I’m looking at it critically, the whole issue of Trump’s candidacy, it’s—I would argue that the Republican Party isn’t there anymore as a political vehicle. It is a different kind of thing that Trump is doing, and that is, he’s reaching out to groups in various areas of economic life that have been depressed, that have been put down, people who feel aggrieved. And there’s also looking at the coarser side of American life, and that would be the people who have never be able to embrace the idea of a black man in the White House. That’s a tough one. And the issue of racism is working right beneath the surface. It was there at the convention. It was quite clear that they had a few non-white people. But I tell you, Donald Trump stands for white America and that should be clear. And the Republican Party, if it has a hope in Hades, really needs to stand for a little bit more than that. I think the question finally will come down to how well Trump can reach out to constituencies that heretofore have either not voted or have voted Democratic. And that will be very interesting to see.

LL: Well, how do you think though, the convention will affect the outcome of the election?

GEOFFREY SMITH: Well, this convention is hard to read. Again, quite honestly, I sat there last night and I quite expected with all those little Trumps running around to hear a new name, the Von Trumps, and to have them sing “These Are A Few of My Unfavourite Things.” It’s a very negative convention. It is a convention that is beholden to a man named Richard M. Nixon, 1968 and George Wallace.

LL: Well then, but let’s not forget that Richard Nixon won the election.

GEOFFREY SMITH: That’s what I was going to say. I’m sorry you took my words.

LL: [laughing] Sorry about that.

GEOFFREY SMITH: No, look, look, look. I am saying this as a lecturer in history, I laughed when Ronald Reagan was elected. I know who the last laugh was, it was on me. And I’m saying right now that I am not ready to call this one for Hillary Clinton or for whomever, against Donald Trump. Donald Trump started out and he put down 16 competitors. And he told people he was going to do that. Well, you know, that’s a pretty impressive record. Now those competitors may be pantywaists and lightweights, but on the other hand, he did something that no one else could have done. And I think that that is important and I think that he is definitely a player in November.

LL: Okay, but now he’s up against another significant presidential nominee or she will be after the end of next week. What do the Democrats have to do to face off against Donald Trump and beat him?

GEOFFREY SMITH: This is very interesting because there is a reservoir out there of anti-Clinton sentiment and that dates from the 1990s as we know. That hasn’t gone away. And now, Trump is trying to loosen that and free it and make that part of his campaign. The Democrats have to make quite clear that Donald Trump is—despite his protestations—not presidential. He isn’t. Donald Trump doesn’t have an idea that is consistent over a period of time. He says what he thinks and often what he thinks are contradictory. Often what he says are not necessarily true. And you know, you say to yourself, if I were a thinking man—and I am a thinking man even though I’m an old retired professor—I would not for a minute want my country’s future and the world’s future to be in this guy’s hands. So, if I’m Hillary Clinton, let us say Donald Trump, you are really Dr. Strangelove. That’s who you are.

LL: So you’re saying that this is going to be a campaign that is almost completely consumed by the idea of fear.

GEOFFREY SMITH: Well, this was my course, Conspiracy and Dissent in American History. And I always emphasize the fact that fear has played a far more important role in electoral outcomes than given credit for. Richard Nixon’s campaign against [unintelligible] is very much like the Republican campaign right now against Hillary Clinton. I have heard things said about Hillary Clinton that probably would, in polite society, get banned for life. But the Republicans are not a polite society. They are far from it. They are blood hungry, much like the Goldwater people in San Francisco, my hometown in 1964. They were out for meat, raw meat, and they won it.

LL: Well, we’re about to speak to one of those Republicans, but I thank you very much.

GEOFFREY SMITH: You’re very welcome and I tell you something, watch Trump and be very very careful.

LL: Alright. Geoffrey Smith is a professor emeritus in the departments of history and kinesiology at Queen’s University and he was in Kingston, Ontario. Well, not everyone agrees that Donald Trump is a dividing force within the Republican Party or even the United States. Teri Galvez is a Republican delegate from Washington, D.C. who attended the convention this week and we’ve reached her from just out of Cleveland in Independence, Ohio. Hello.

TERI GALVEZ: Hi, good morning.

LL: So, are you scared? Are you very very scared?

TERI GALVEZ: [laughing] Well, I mean, I think it’s interesting that he pointed out that Donald Trump is running a campaign of fear and you know, ironically, that fear is really what is motivating me. I was not a Trump supporter by any means. He wasn’t my first choice, he wasn’t my second choice, he wasn’t even my third choice. But in the past few weeks, given what’s happened throughout the United States with the killing of the police officers, with what’s happened overseas in Paris, excuse me Nice, and in Paris, you know, there have been three separate incidents of terrorism. Yes, I’m fearful. But you know, he’s not instilling that fear in me. I’m actually quite fearful of the climate around the world and domestically. It really does seem a bit of a game changer.

LL: Why do you think he can make a difference? He seems to think that he can fix these problems overnight.

TERI GALVEZ: I don’t think that the problems could be fixed overnight and I don’t think that’s what his message was. I do think that you know, there’s a lot of political correctness on the part of the Obama administration and also I think I’ve seen evidence of that from Hillary Clinton. As somebody who is not an ardent supporter of Donald Trump but is a Republican, I have a lot more confidence in our Party’s ability to deal with this than I do with Hillary being able to deal with this.

LL: Well, given your self-admitted lack of ardour toward your candidate, what kind of shape do you think this is leaving the Republican Party in? There’s all this talk of division.

TERI GALVEZ: Well, I mean it’s interesting that I felt one way coming into this and you know, not hugely motivated but open to listening. And you know, what I heard last night in the speech, I was reading, I use social media quite a bit and I was reading comments on Twitter and on Facebook and even from friends of mine who were kind of anti-Trump, and I heard from several people that they liked the speech. And I happened to like the speech. So I was kind of surprised at my own reaction to the speech because you know, a lot of times he speaks and there’s a bit of an eye roll and some skepticism. But there were many things in his speech that really sort of appealed to me, frankly.

LL: Yeah, I was looking at your tweets from last night and there were, I think I read about three of them, it wasn’t hugely enthusiastic. I think the most enthusiastic thing you said was that many of the items he discussed make sense. Is that enough for you to get out and campaign for him enthusiastically?

TERI GALVEZ: Well, look. [laughing] I guess I sort of look at my Republicanism like I look at my Catholicism. I’m a Catholic. The Catholic Church has issues. The Republican Party has issues and this candidate certainly does. But philosophically, I am a Republican. And you know, I’m the daughter of Mexican parents. My mother and father both came from Mexico. My father came under the guest worker program from Mexico. So you know, I have every reason not to want to support him, given what he said. Despite that, I am a Republican and—

[crosstalk]

LL: It sounds like you’re going to hold your nose. [laughing]

TERI GALVEZ: Listen. Let’s just say, let’s just say the checkmarks don’t line up with the Democratic Party at all. And it’s not a question of holding my nose. It’s just the fact that philosophically, I’m a Republican. All the things that the Republican Party stands for are things that I believe in. And very little about what the Democratic Party stands for is what I believe. So I guess the answer is plain and simple. I could not really vote Democrat. It’s kind of funny, I don’t think—

[crosstalk]

LL: I know, but the question I asked you was whether you are going to be getting out and knocking on doors and trying to make sure—

TERI GALVEZ: I don’t know that I would knock on doors, okay. When I have worked in the past for candidates, the situation was very different. I had the time. I own my own business and this is a really busy time that we’re going into. It just so happens that I’m having a busier year than I have had in the past. It’s more a timing issue than anything. But you know, I don’t know that I’d walk door to door, but at least he’s changed my mind in this convention. At least I would be open to supporting him whereas before, I was kind of a never Trump person. I sort of agree with a few of his statements. There can be no prosperity without law and order. I believe that. You know, an attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. These are statements that he made that I agree with.

LL: Okay Teri. We’re going to have to leave it there but thanks very much.

TERI GALVEZ: Sure.

LL: Thank you very much. Teri Galvez is a Republican delegate from Washington, D.C. and she was in Independence, Ohio. Well, coming up, how receiving treatment for hearing voices led one woman to a career as a psychiatric nurse on the cutting edge of mental health care. Kay Parley shares her story, which includes experiments on the therapeutic use of LSD, after the news. I’m Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

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

Guests: Kay Parley

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of 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: That is Olivia de Havilland in the 1948 movie The Snake Pit, portraying a woman in a psychiatric institution who suffers under an abusive nurse. Kay Parley remembers the first time she watched that movie. That’s because she was a psychiatric patient at the time, on a visit home. While some of the film's darker portrayals of patient life rang true to her experience, Kay Parley still considers her time in care as the best thing that ever happened to her. She went on to become a psychiatric nurse herself, and is now sharing her story in the memoir, Inside The Mental: Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry and LSD. Kay Parley spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in June. Here is that conversation.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: 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 hospitalization?

KAY PARLEY: Oh, goodness, I can hardly begin. See, I was in Toronto. I had just failed a CBC acting audition 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. [laughs] 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: Twenty-five, because you are now 93.

KAY PARLEY: Mhm.

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 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 when 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 of 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 thirties and the population at Weyburn was so big they had patients sleeping on the floors. All these people had had breakdowns in the thirties 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 any 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 she 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, that there was a reason for it. 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 seeing 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 seemed 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 realized 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 LSD 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 lamp. 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. Well, 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 sixties and the counterculture use of LSD closed everything down.

KAY PARLEY: Oh my, oh my. [chuckles] 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 sixties. 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 okay. 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 the 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 the 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.

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.

LL: Kay Parley is the author of Inside The Mental: Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry and LSD. She spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in June. That is today’s edition of The Current and after the week that was in Cleveland, we’re now looking ahead to next week in Philadelphia, where Democrats will gather to formally nominate Hillary Clinton as their candidate for president. As always, we’re curious to hear what you have to say about all of this. You can tweet us @thecurrentcbc or post on our Facebook page. You can find that by looking for CBC The Current, all one word, on Facebook. You can also email us through our website by clicking on the contact link at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can tweet me @lauralynchcbc. But stay tuned now to CBC Radio One for Ripple Effect with Anna Maria Tremonti. This week’s episode explores how technology shapes our minds, brains and communities. I’m Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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July 22, 2016 full episode transcript

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