Photo Credit: Meghan Power
October saw the completion of a $200,000 labyrinth in Bowring Park. No, it is not a labyrinth in the traditional sense – you won’t feel like Jennifer Connolly in a Jim Henson movie, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. You won’t get lost in this labyrinth. What you will do is stare at the ground and walk in circles. The Bowring Park labyrinth is one-dimensional and consists of a tiled pathway that park-goers can walk on and follow to the centre of the “labyrinth,” which is adorned with a bird motif.
It may seem like an extravagant and unnecessary addition to the park, but those who funded it insist that it is an important “mental health space” and that its quick completion demonstrates the desperate need for mental health spaces in St. John’s. To my knowledge, the two are not connected. Public donations weren’t asked for, so were the construction workers hurriedly building it for themselves to use? Or was the town just eager to throw money at this project as a band-aid solution to the lack of mental health resources? I feel it is important to mention that there are currently six of these labyrinths in the province, four of which are located in St. John’s and one of which is close by in Mount Pearl.
The Cahill Family Foundation donated the majority of the cost of the labyrinth, contributing $125,000. The remaining $75,000 bill was split between the City of St. John’s (taxpayer money) and the Bowring Park Foundation. Assuming that it was split evenly, that means that the city spent $37,500 on a flat labyrinth. What else could this money have been used for in terms of important mental health infrastructure?
Speaking as a fourth-year psychology student, I think the money would have been better spent on more practical and convenient resources.
Realistically, for this labyrinth to have more than an extremely temporary effect on a person’s mental well-being, they would have to visit it often. But what if they don’t live close to Bowring Park? Which part of the population is the most in need of mental support? Logically, we may first think of those who are financially insecure and who may frequently experience money stress or threats to their wellbeing and feel “trapped” in their situation. Do all of these people have access to transportation and free time enough to avail of the labyrinth’s dubious psychological effects? It seems, after some thought, that the Bowring Park labyrinth was constructed with little regard for practical access by the working class.
Most of the cost of the labyrinth was donated by the Cahill Family Foundation.
What else could the money have been used on? A donation of $200,000 or even the $37,500 spent by the city, in my opinion, could have had a much more positive effect on the city’s population. It could have been used to fund mental health resources for community members that don’t have medical insurance or the money to avail of therapists and prescriptions that improve quality of life. In my experience, high-quality mental health care in Newfoundland has always been a privilege that a large part of the population, including university students, have a difficult time accessing. This is due to the high price of therapy sessions, the extensive waitlists, and the stigma concerning mental illness.
I personally walked around the labyrinth to test its mental health-restoring abilities. After walking 1,140 feet, I found that it allowed me to focus on getting to the centre, momentarily forgetting about my personal strifes. Now, maybe it’s because I’m a working student and $200,000 is an amount of money that I could never dream of having. Maybe it’s because having that kind of money would relieve my financial stress and help me to avoid digging myself deeper into student debt, but I don’t think that the result justifies the amount of money that has been spent on this piece of architecture. The claim that it is a mental health space that is any more effective than taking a 15-minute walk through any other area of the park is insulting. Let’s call it what it is: a vanity project that was passed off as an acceptable use of taxpayer money by exaggerating its usefulness as a mental health resource for the general public.