Growing Up Next to The Mental

We called it the Mental and thought nothing of it. No more than eeny, meeny, miney, mo and who we were supposed to catch by the toe. Wish Mooney’s earliest memory in life is finding a corpse in the Waterford River. Jarring stuff for a four-year-old, yet far from the most shocking or bizarre he would witness growing up in west end St. John’s next door to the Waterford Hospital. Or, as it was unabashedly labelled before the advent of political correctness: the Mental. An unfortunate moniker, ...