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There is no doubt schizophrenia is a difficult condition, but we now know it’s something from which many can recover. To get to the point, however, I have to declare that within a few months of his seemingly endless rounds of shock therapies in 1954, my father ended up becoming, for most of the rest of his life, what could be uncharitably described as a zombie.

Riverview notes about him in 1955 and after describe him as “very vague and uninterested,” “apathetic,” “withdrawn and secluded,” “staring into space” and “wandering the halls and vestibules.”

In other words, he didn’t get a chance.

Photo by Submitted / PNG

Most of the time I’m not too angry about my dad’s tragic life.

That was then. That was when the medical profession was in an almost total fog about how to treat mental illness, particularly the signs of schizophrenia my father exhibited a few years after returning from driving an ambulance in the Second World War. He earned a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of B.C., married my mother, Mary, had two sons and worked as an accountant. Then something mysteriously flipped in his mind.

Reading my father’s medical history — which I obtained with his consent through his psychiatrist, before he died in 1999 — has left me with many questions. They include ethical concerns about the best ways to respond to past wrongs, and especially about how to discern possible grave mistakes being perpetrated today, in medicine and beyond.

I have written about the Sunday visits my mother, brother and I had with my father at Riverview and at my grandparents’ house, but now, after willing myself to read 100 or so pages of his medical records, I am wondering how far offspring should go when their parents have suffered mistreatment.