History of the Queen Street Site

Architect John Howard's "Provincial Lunatic Asylum" as it would have appeared in the 19th Century.

1001 Queen Street West has been home to a mental health facility for 150 years. On January 26, 1850, the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, as it was then known, first opened its doors. Throughout the years there have been numerous name changes -- the Toronto Lunatic Asylum, the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, "999 Queen Street" and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. The site was a Provincial Psychiatric Hospital operated by the Government of Ontario until 1998 when the Provincial Psychiatric Hospitals began to be transformed into Public Hospitals.

CAMH was created as a result of a 1997 report of the Health Services Restructuring Committee (HSRC), an independent agency appointed by the Government of Ontario to redesign the Ontario Health System. In 1998, the former Addiction Research Foundation, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Queen Street Mental Health Centre and the Donwood Institute merged to create a new Public Hospital: the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. CAMH was asked by the HSRC to address four key challenges: quality of care, access to care, fragmentation of services and stigma.

The organizational merger of CAMH was a first step in addressing these challenges and developing strategies to improve client/patient care. Now, the redevelopment provides an opportunity for CAMH to consolidate onto the Queen Street site and continue to address these challenges further.

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