This nondescript building opened in 1912 as the Alberta Hospital for the Insane. I found this picture on Archive.org. It made me shiver.

Insane Asylum, Ponoka, Alberta, Canada. From Archive.org. Photo circa 1920

Situated in rural Ponoka, this insane asylum led the way in training nurses who specialized in psychiatric illness.  My lack of knowledge around Canadian geography is profound, so I had to look up this location up on a map.

I’ve read terrible things about the horrors that happened in places like this. This institution was known for sterilizing its patients. According to asylumprojects.org, the patient composition was 50% from the U.S. and Canada, 23% from the UK, and 12% from Poland. They also note that Scottish people accounted for 8% of the sterilizations.

I found a couple of interior images on asylumprojects.org, probably from around the time the institution opened.

The building is still standing and operational. It’s now a renowned psychiatric and brain damage treatment center called the Centennial Centre for Mental Health & Brain Injury. I have mixed feelings about these institutions. People housed in these old asylums were often treated cruelly and kept in inhumane conditions. But closing these institutions and replacing them with nothing has proven to be a bad idea.