"One short story of incompetence and political history". (Booknote).

Political Asylums, by Ron LaJeunesse, A Muttart Fellowship Book, Muttart Foundation, Edmonton, $10.00

This books pace of writing and reading is staccato. In a sad way it is one short story of incompetence and political history written repeatedly over the close to hundred years that Alberta has been a province. It does end up on a positive note with the potential for a last meaningful change. It is a chatty book that covers the perspectives of the patient administrator, politicos and doctors. It shows the sorry state of the state of mental health care. At the moment the province of Alberta is on a cusp of how it administers and views mental health in Alberta. It is going from a centralized mental health board to a decentralized system of mental health being under the nine new regional health boards.

Mr. LaJeunesse took off one year from his job as executive director of the Alberta Division of the Canadian Mental Health Association to take a fellowship, the result being this book, "Political Asylums."

The book is a good read for the layman and is not full of jargon that sometimes is the type of result of more academic work. It reads like a novel and this was intentional to give perspectives that are not even known inside the mental health community.

It is ironic that the mental health system has been under such disarray, in the words of Ron LaJeunese, that "Designing a mental health system that will help people with the most severe and persistent mental illnesses is not rocket science."

What has changed the mental health system during the brief successive moments of reform is that "Media interest and government embarrassment has driven reform in almost every situation." Although the conclusion that is obvious from the book is that these moments of media scrutiny based reform do not last.

Economic interests in the communities, around the remote Ponoka mental hospital, have kept the institution there in spite of the fact that such facilities in far locations are no longer seen as `best practices'.

The book is a steal at $10 a copy and is a must in the library of those interested in the history of the mental health movement in Alberta and if written for other provinces would likely have similar histories. As with all optimists Ron LaJeunesse ends his book on an optimistic note. With the advent of new drugs, treatments and the attempts to have `best practices' implemented in Alberta and across North America I would hope that with good political guidance the system can help those who can't help themselves. The publication of this book will hopefully assist in the implementation of significant reform.

Austin Mardon, Ph.D., co-Chairman of Unsung Heroes, an Edmonton self-support group for people with schizophrenia, is author of books and articles on astronomy, Antarctica, and Alberta history. [e-mail]