A campus with a wall that once kept patients in, now mostly gone
CAMH
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health formed from a 1998 merger of four Toronto institutions, on grounds that once housed the notorious Provincial Lunatic Asylum and its surrounding wall.
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CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, formed in 1998 through the merger of four existing Toronto institutions: the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Addiction Research Foundation, the Donwood Institute, and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. That last institution's site, at 999 Queen Street West, traces back to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which opened on the same grounds in 1850 and became notorious over the following century for the high stone wall that enclosed its grounds, a physical symbol of the era's approach to institutionalizing mental illness.
Redeveloping the asylum grounds
Most of the old asylum wall has since been removed as part of a deliberate, decades-long effort to redesign the campus around openness rather than confinement, integrating CAMH's buildings into the surrounding neighbourhood street grid instead of walling them off from it. CAMH has grown into Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital and research centre, with a public campus redevelopment explicitly framed as an attempt to shed the site's institutional, asylum-era legacy.
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