Montreal's Argyle Institute closes after decades of mental-health services

“It is very sad for the people who built the Argyle — and very sad for the Montreal community."

The Argyle Institute had planned to celebrate its 40th anniversary this year — 40 years of providing accessible mental-health services to the Montreal community and 40 years of training future therapists.

But the celebration was not to be.

At a Zoom meeting on Aug. 18, the nearly 60 therapists affiliated with the not-for-profit community institute learned that the Argyle “would no longer be able to continue operations and would dissolve,” said therapist Brian Wrench, an associate member who has been connected with the Argyle since he did his own training there 25 years ago. On Aug. 22 the therapists voted in favour of the resolution to dissolve, the Argyle ceased operations Aug. 31 and, by Sept. 30, will have vacated its Westmount space.

The news of the closing came as a shock to much of the Argyle community. “Many of the therapists associated with the Argyle had been there for years; they had trained there and become clinical members or associate members,” Wrench said.

“It is very sad for the people who built the Argyle — and very sad for the Montreal community,” said longtime Argyle therapist and board member Lisa MacMartin, who is working to spread the word about the closing.

Part of the Argyle’s mission was to serve clients with low to moderate incomes: The rate in most private clinics and centres is $130 to $200 per session, although sliding fee scales are available in some. At the Argyle, a fee scale based on annual income and number of dependents ranged from $45 per session to $105. Although the institute was in Westmount, it drew clients from all parts of the island and beyond and provided services in English and French.

It was also a place where graduate students from six Quebec universities could do their practical training as interns under the supervision of Argyle therapists.

What is not widely known is that the Argyle struggled financially for much of its existence, MacMartin said, and even faced closure a couple of times. “It has always been a very precarious financial situation,” she said.

Yet the Argyle always found a way to keep going — until the pandemic.

The majority of the 60 therapists associated with the institute rented office space there. Their rent, averaging $700 a month, covered the monthly rent of almost $30,000 for the Argyle Institute space in a Ste-Catherine St. building near Greene Ave. with 28 offices for therapists, boardroom and classroom space, a kitchen, library and office space for the interns.

The interns were not paid; the fees paid by their clients who went to the centre. Otherwise, apart from a small administrative fee for opening a file, the Argyle did not earn money from its clients: Those fees went to the therapists.

A generous lease provision meant therapists could terminate the leases for their Argyle office space by giving six months of advance notice and paying a three-month penalty. This had worked to everyone’s advantage when the offices were in great demand but, when the pandemic took hold in March of 2020 and therapists began to work remotely, more and more of them gave up their office space. “And that’s evidently what sank the ship,” said Wrench, who was a supervisor of interns at the Argyle.

As more and more therapists worked remotely and as older therapists chose to retire, “we were bleeding $12,000 a month, which is not sustainable,” he said.

Therapists working remotely in most other Montreal offices and centres continued to pay rent and many returned to the office a few months after the pandemic was declared. Wrench, for instance, returned to his office by the summer of 2020. “Being in person adds an element which — to me — is very important, if not essential,” he said.

He works out of a space in a Westmount building with three small offices and a waiting room. Therapists renting space from him paid their rent “even if they weren’t coming in — and our little ship stayed afloat,” Wrench said.

Although MacMartin rarely used her office at the Argyle, she kept it to support the Institute. “We knew rent was a problem because we had more and more empty offices as the pandemic went on,” she said.

“Would we have kept going even without the pandemic? It’s hard to say. It felt like our model maybe wasn’t working, because we were always struggling financially. it was the empty office issue that did us in,” MacMartin said.

Argyle bylaws excluded the centre from receiving much pandemic relief. There was a $60,000 Canadian Emergency Business Account loan, of which $40,000 required repayment, and some temporary rent relief.

“We had been looking for donors since spring of 2022 to find solutions to our rent problem, and it all came to a sudden and crushing end in August, when we realized we didn’t have as much money as we thought we had,” MacMartin said.

As the day to depart the space draws near, the nearly 200 clients on the waiting list have been placed with Argyle therapists and the 16 interns assigned to clinics in Montreal and Laval.

MacMartin and others have been sorting through files — older files are shredded and others put into storage — and packing. The fate of the Argyle Institute library, which includes some valuable volumes by influential psychoanalysts including Sigmund Freud, is still unknown. Because it was a not-for-profit organization, everything must be donated, not sold. And so far, said MacMartin, “we can’t find anyone to take our library.”

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sschwartz@postmedia.com