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Although New Brunswick was the first to develop a
facility for the mentally ill, it was paralleled by other colonial governments
in British North America in the middle decades of the 19th century.
In the eastern provinces, permanent purpose-built asylums were established in St. John's Newfoundland (1854); Halifax, Nova Scotia (1859); and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (1879). Quebec opened asylums at Beauport near Quebec City (1850) and at Longue Pointe near Montreal (1875). Ontario opened institutions at Toronto (1850), Kingston (1862), and London (1870). Only two of these buildings survived largely intact; the former Rockwood Asylum in Kingston and the former Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Saint John, NB.
In Nova Scotia, the mentally ill were housed with the sick, poor and the destitute in Halifax's Poor Asylum until 1859, when another asylum was opened near by. Similarly in Prince Edward Island, there was a combined asylum and house of industry in Charlottetown in 1847, which was replaced by a permanent purpose-built mental hospital in 1879. In Newfoundland, lunatics lived in charitable hospitals and private boarding houses until 1847, when the government opened a temporary asylum in a converted farmhouse near St. John's. This is now known as the Waterford Hospital.
In Ontario, the provincial government opened an asylum in Toronto in 1841 which was located first in an abandoned Toronto gaol (sic), then in a wing of Parliament Buildings until the first permanent building was completed in 1850. Next, Ontario built a permanent asylum for the criminally insane (Rockwood) in Kingston in the late 1850s, which was soon converted to a general asylum because of overcrowding at the Toronto asylum.
In Quebec, the mentally ill lived in numerous temporary facilities until 1845 when a privately-run asylum was established at a farm site in Beauport, near the city of Quebec. A purpose-built asylum was completed there in 1850, with the cost of patient care subsidized by the government. In 1875 the government repeated this contract arrangement with the Sisters of Providence, who opened the province's second permanent asylum, Saint-Jean-de-Dieu at Longue-Pointe, Montreal.
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Brunswick Community College - Saint John.