BADD 2012: History is still happening

A day late--I was hoping something would go up on DSTU yesterday, but as it hasn't, I'll write this, rather than missing a year of BADD.  To read our past six, more punctual entries, see 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.  The official list of contributions for BADD 2012 is growing at the Goldfish's blog, and you can follow the @BADDtweets account on Twitter for updates.

A few years ago, I started a Flickr group for disability history images--called, cleverly enough, Disability History.  Today it contains over 200 images contributed from libraries and personal collections, including images of family life, activism, art, technology, war--all topics I was hoping it might address.  It's true that most of them are black-and-white, or rather that warm sepia tone that makes the past look maybe a little rosier than it should.  But some are in color, because history didn't stop with the invention of color film, and indeed, history is still happening.  I certainly welcome contributions to the growing collection of recent disability history images there--we could especially use more images from non-US/UK contexts.  Here's a sampling of the generous additions so far, by the Flickr users credited in each caption:

Lilibeth Navarro leads a Not Dead Yet protest in Hollywood, on a sunny March day in 2005, 
against the film "Million Dollar Baby" (which went on to win best picture).  In the image, several protestors 
in power chairs roll past stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with walking protestors behind them.  
(I'm just barely visible at the way back.)  Photo by Cathy Cole.

Candid undated snapshot from shows three people.  The young man at rear, left, is violinist Itzhak Perlman, 
smiling and flashing a peace sign; his arm crutches are both visible.  The other two people are not identified; 
one is an young Asian woman, and one is an older white man with a mustache.  
Photo from the account of Erin Corda, who writes, "I found this 120 color transparency of 
Issaac Perlman while clean out my fathers sheet music cabinet."

Informal snapshot from the 1960s, shows a smiling blonde little girl with glasses, a green print dress 
with very white collar and cuffs; white socks and black maryjanes.  She's standing outdoors, in front of blooming flowers and a stone wall.  Photo from the account of Joshua Black Wilkins, who writes, "My aunt Karen. 
Who had Downs Syndrome."

Art piece by Al Shep, titled clinical waste / institutionalisation, which addresses the history of asylums.  
In the image, two trash bins are marked with stenciled block lettering and images.  The trash bin on the left says 
"Empty Unreal Unable to Feel" with the face of a woman labeled "Annie, May 1900 Melancholia Recovered"; 
the larger blue bin on the right is stenciled with a definition of "institution" (the wording wraps around the bin so 
 we can only read part of the definition, with words like structure, social, behaviour, community, 
permanence, rules).  Other images of the project are here.  Photo by Al Shep.

A portrait of Jack Smith, of Rhodell, West Virginia, made by photographer Jack Corn in 1974; he is a white man in his early 40s with sandy hair.  His arms are crossed, showing his watch and wedding ring; he does not have legs.  Jack Smith was disabled in mining accident, and became active with the United Mine Workers Union during his eighteen-year struggle for worker's compensation.  Photo from the US National Archives, Documerica set, in Flickr Commons.

May 15: Friends Hospital (1817)

Regular DSTU readers won't be a bit surprised that I like visiting the Wikipedia pages that say what happened on this date in other years. On today's, there's this note:

1817 – Opening of the first private mental health hospital in the United States, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The name of the hospital stands out, for its length and specificity: "The Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason." The hospital offers relief, in the original sense of "asylum"--a refuge. The "person-first" language would satisfy the most ardent advocate of polite bureaucratese. Plain language wins too; no psychological jargon in this institution's name, because psychological jargon as we know it didn't much exist in 1817.

What else stands out: the hospital still exists. It's had various names over the years, of course, reflecting shifting treatments and labels and goals. Its 1813 mission statement says the asylum's Quaker founders "intended to furnish, besides requisite medical aid, such tender, sympathetic attention as may soothe their agitated minds, and under the Divine Blessing, facilitate their recovery"--intentions that reflected the most progressive ideas about mental illness and care in their time. The site and the building were modeled on York Retreat in England, "but with better ventilation and light." As the first of its kind, it set a standard that shaped similar institutions for generations; in 1999 it was named to the list of National Historic Landmarks.

Of course, hospitals seldom live up to their lofty mission statements, especially after almost 200 years. As with most institutions, it's not hard to find stories of abuse. PhillyGrrl had a three-part series about one man's protest at Friends Hospital. But it's maybe a little more ironic in this case: Quakers originally got into the asylum business after investigating the death of a Quaker widow, Hannah Mills, at the York Asylum in 1790. They condemned the abusive conditions they saw, and sought to do better.

"Blind Singer," William H. Johnson

Blind Singer
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution

[Visual description: An art print depicting two stylized figures, male and female, with dark skin; the man's eyes are closed, the woman's are open; the man holds a tambourine and the woman a guitar; both are dressed in the style of the 1930s, but the colors of their clothing are unusually bright]

The Smithsonian's latest batch of uploads to the Flickr Commons project is a collection of prints by William H. Johnson (1901-1970), an African-American artist who experienced mental illness and was institutionalized for the last twenty-three years of his life. The image above, "Blind Singer," is typical of his work c.1940--two-dimensional figures, bright colors, and depictions of everyday scenes. The National Museum of American Art holds over a thousand works by Johnson.

February 10: The Stratford Co. Insane Asylum Fire (1893)

[Image description: Newspaper clipping about the 1893 asylum fire near Dover NH, with the headlines "Cremated./Forty Crazed People Burned to Death./Insane Asylum at the County Farm Burned to Ground./Horrible Scenes Enacted in a Hell of Fire and Smoke./A Calamity Without Parallel Falls upon the County of Stratford." Found here.]

In the 1890s, states and counties in the US were locating asylums away from towns. It was justified as a more healthful location, with the opportunity for therapeutic and cost-effective agricultural labor; it was also popular as an "out of sight, out of mind" solution, given the general fear of people with mental illnesses. One consequence of this location choice was that the staff generally lived on the grounds of the asylum; another consequence was that, in the event of a disaster, there was no nearby community to come help.

Thus, the Stratford County (NH) Insane Asylum fire of 1893, on this date, a snowy winter night in New Hampshire. No one knew how it was set, but it began in the room of Mrs. Mary Lafontaine, a Canadian woman with a history of "melancholia." A watchman, Wilbur Chesley, alerted others and escaped along with the keeper William Driscoll, and Driscoll's wife and children. Of the more than forty inmates locked in their rooms in a large wooden building, only three or four survived the fire. (Of the hundred or so paupers in a workhouse on the same campus, all were saved, in part because they were quickly organized into a fire brigade.) The list of the dead in a newspaper report that week includes 26 women, 13 men.*

The New York Times headline appeared on page 5 the next day: "They Laughed at the Fire: Details of the Terrible Catastrophe at Dover. Forty-One Insane Patients, Unable to Save Themselves, Were Burned Alive--The Asylum Was an Old-Fashioned Frame Structure Unfit for their Occupancy." Opined the author of the article:

The fire conveys the sad lesson, patent to all, that the custom of isolating the county workhouse miles away from the town centre is something which cannot be longer tolerated in this enlightened age.

An investigation by the state board of health also noted rampant alcoholism and incompetence among the asylum staff, and the practice of furnishing matches to inmates who smoked (as Mrs. Lafontaine did), as further factors in the disastrous fire. The county asylums in New Hampshire were abolished in part because of the board's findings, and replaced with state-run asylums.

*The various new accounts don't have matching counts of the dead.

October 27: Sigrid Hjertén (1885-1948)

[Image description: A self-portrait by Sigrid Hjertén, showing herself painting, seated, in a plumed hat, with a pale-green top, bowtie, black belt, and red trousers; a child --presumably her son Ivan-- and his toy are nearby in the background.]

Born on this date in 1885, in Sundsvall, Swedish painter Sigrid Hjertén. Today she's recognized as a major figure in Scandinavian expressionism. She studied with Matisse; she married a fellow artist, Isaac Grünewald; she designed tapestries and ceramics. She had a solo exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1936, which was well-received.

By 1938, she was in her fifties, divorced, and experiencing mental illness. She had been hospitalized with symptoms of schizophrenia (as it was assessed in her time) as early as 1932; she would spend her last ten years in a Stockholm hospital, until she died from excessive bleeding during a botched surgical lobotomy in 1948.

July 13: John Clare (1793-1864)

[Image description: Engraved portrait of the poet John Clare, shown with tousled hair, wearing a suit with a heavy coat, vest, and a shirt loosely tied up with a print kerchief]

English poet John Clare was born on this date in 1793, in Helpston, near Peterborough. He was the son of a laborer, and himself a laborer, a gardener, who wrote poetry when he could, to be published by an acquaintance. His earnings were never enough to adequately support his wife and seven children (and his alcohol consumption); he experienced depression and later erratic behavior. In 1837 he was placed in a private asylum. After four years, he tried to live at home again, but his wife soon committed him again, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he eventually died in 1864. It was at Northampton that he wrote his best known poem, "I Am," reflecting his sense of being abandoned by friends and loved ones, his vivid torments, and his longing for rest, "untroubling and untroubled."

I AM
John Clare

I am; yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

December 28: Elizabeth Ware Packard (1816-1897)

"Thus the most sensible people on earth are exposed to suffer a life-long imprisonment, from the folly of some undeveloped, misguided person. And the tendency of imprisonment itself is sadly detrimental to a person who has intelligence enough to realize that he is held under lock and key. To persist in treating them as though they were unable to take care of themselves is to undermine self-reliance and self-respect. In short, it tends to destroy all that which is noble and aspiring in humanity..."

--Elizabeth Packard, The Prisoners' Hidden Life [1868], p. 248

Nineteenth-century American patients' rights advocate Elizabeth Ware Packard (portrait at left) was born on this date in 1816. Her pastor husband had her committed to the Illinois state lunatic asylum in 1860, because she was argumentative and disagreed with him on religious matters. Three years later, she was discharged, but it took a court case (Packard v. Packard) to determine that she should not be confined to her home.

Mrs. Packard went on to work for better legal protections for asylum inmates, like the right to send and receive mail; for more oversight of asylum superintendents; and for married women to have the same protections as others under commitment laws. She published her story and her positions in several books, which are available online.

A play and a museum exhibit earlier this year in New Jersey both focused on Packard's personal story and public career.

November 19: Gene Tierney (1920-1991)

What did actresses Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965) and Gene Tierney have in common, besides being considered among the great beauties of their generation? Both November birthdays. Both were directed by Otto Preminger in well-known roles (Carmen Jones, and Laura, respectively). Both women, in 1943, had daughters born with significant developmental disabilities. And both women's later lives were emotionally tumultuous. These latter two facts are often linked in brief biographies, whether or not they should be, just because that's the easy story. In fact, the pressures and temptations and health issues they faced were sure more a part of the general dysfunction of Hollywood life, with or without their daughters' disabilities.

I wonder if they ever knew each other--if they ever knew how much they had in common?

Gene Tierney (1920-1991) described her lifelong experience of bipolar disorder in her 1979 autobiography. She was institutionalized on and off through her thirties--not unlike yet another Hollywood beauty, Frances Farmer (1913-1970), had been a decade earlier. In her autobiography, she declared, "I have been subjected to electric shock treatments that deadened my brain, stole chunks of time from my memory, and left me feeling brutalized....Pieces of my life just disappeared." Tierney married her second husband in 1960, and more or less retired from making movies. She died in 1991, from emphysema (she had begun smoking at the beginning of her career, to lower her voice for film roles).

November 15: Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

English writer Charlotte Mew was born on this date in 1869, in London. Her sister Freda was institutionalized at age 19, in an asylum on the Isle of Wight, and remained there almost 60 years, until her death in 1958. Their brother Henry also died in a lunatic asylum in 1901, at the age of 35. Charlotte and her other sister Anne believed they might also become mad: "She and her sister had both made up their minds early in life that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity," wrote a friend. To another friend, Charlotte described her own "queer uncertain mind." Charlotte Mew died by suicide in 1928. This is one of her poems about madness, segregation, and stigma, and the belief that disability was "the incarnate wages of man's sin":

On The Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows---every pane---
Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk
Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
The hare-bell bowing on its stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
To fainter music; nor do we to them
Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
To them, yes, every pane!

Committed to Parkview

Ever have one of those days, where your projects follow you around? It's a nice day out, so I went for a walk, after a morning of writing disability history encyclopedia entries (on Blind Boone and Anna Klumpke, in case you're curious). But disability history followed me out the door anyway. On my iPod, a recent episode of the podcast Coverville noted Porter Wagoner's recent passing with his rendition of Johnny Cash's "Committed to Parkview"--a striking country song, originally released in 1976, about being institutionalized in Nashville (both Cash and Wagoner had spent time as patients at the Park View facility in the 1960s).

Kay at Gimp Parade sometimes posts videos and song lyrics with disability themes, but I don't think I've seen this one in that series. (It is, however, in this list.) After the video, I'll include the lyrics.



Video Description: Wagoner is singing almost a cappella, with brief, silent, sometimes slow-motion scenes of institutional life interspersed. Wagoner is in some of the scenes.

Committed to Parkview
Johnny Cash

There's a man across the hall who sits staring at the floor
He thinks he's Hank Williams hear him singing through the door
There's a girl in 203, who stops by to visit me
And she talks about her songs and the star that she should be
There's a lot of real fine talent staying in or passing through
And for one thing or another, committed to Parkview

There's a girl in 307, coming down on thorazine
And a superstar's ex-drummer trying to kick benzedrine
There's a real fine country singer who has tried and tried and tried
They just brought him in this morning an attempted suicide
There are those that never made it, those that did but now are through
Some came of their own good choosing, some committed to Parkview

There's a girl who cries above me, loud enough to wake the dead
They don't know what she has taken that has scrambled up her head
There's a boy just below me who's the son of some well-known
He was brought in by his mother 'cause his daddy's always gone
There's a bum from down on Broadway and a few quite well-to-dos
Who have withdrawn from the rat race and committed to Parkview

They wake us about 6:30,just before the morning meal
While they're taking blood pressure, they ask us how we feel
And I always say fantastic there ain't nothing wrong with me
And then they give me my injection and I go right back to sleep
The days are kind of foggy and the nights are dreamy too
But they're taking good care of me, committed to Parkview

Junius Wilson and Floyd Brown

I posted almost a year ago about Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner's research on Junius Wilson (1908-2001)--a deaf African-American man who was arrested at age 17 but never tried, was labeled insane, was placed in a state hospital in North Carolina, castrated, and held for more than seventy years. The extraordinary book Burch and Joyner co-wrote will be released this fall, as Unspeakable: The Life Story of Junius Wilson (UNC Press 2007).

It would be nice to think that stories like Wilson's are safely in the past, but they're just not. Floyd Brown is another North Carolina man, also African-American, also disabled, also arrested under shady circumstances and never tried, held in the state hospital for the last fourteen years now. Carolina Legal Assistance is on the case, trying to get the murder charge against Brown dismissed, so he can be freed. "Mr. Brown has fallen through the cracks," says the CLA's Greg McGrew. No doubt about that.

September 19: Frances Farmer (1913-1970)

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

--American actress Frances Farmer, born on this date in 1913, in Seattle, Washington.

Farmer was in and out of mental hospitals for much of the 1940s. She was originally committed on the basis on erratic behavior that was caused primarily by alcoholism. I didn't realize that the most sensational later accounts of her treatment have been debunked: there is apparently no credible evidence that she was ever subjected to a lobotomy, although biographies and the film Frances (1982) depict that event as a biographical fact.

August 28: Janet Frame (1924-2004)

'For your own good' is a persuasive argument
that will eventually make a man agree
to his own destruction.

--Janet Frame

New Zealand poet, novelist, and memoirist Janet Frame was born 28 August 1924, in Dunedin. She spent much of her twenties in mental hospitals, beginning with a voluntary commitment in 1947, ending with her final release in 1954. (A diagnosis of schizophrenia was made, but was later rejected by a panel of psychiatrists in London.) She underwent hundreds of electric shock treatments --"each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution," she said -- during her hospitalizations. Her mother had signed the paperwork for a lobotomy, but the surgery was canceled after Frame's 1951 book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won a national award. She wrote a novel based on her family and her hospitalizations, Owls Do Cry, published in 1957. Another novel by Frame, Faces in the Water (1961), features a heroine who is institutionalized and almost lobotomized. Her novel Scented Gardens for the Blind (1980) has as its main character a girl who never speaks.

Some cites on Frame and disability, to mark her birthday (plenty more cites here):

Simone Oettli-van Delden, Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness (Victoria University Press 2003).

Ana Maria Sanchez Mosquera, "Un/writing the Body: Janet Frame's An Angel at my Table," Commonwealth Novel in English 9-10(Spring-Fall 2000-2001): 218-241.

C. MacLellan, "Conformity and Deviance in the Fiction of Janet Frame," Journal of New Zealand Literature 6(1988): 190-201.

Susan Schwartz, "Dancing in the Asylum: The Uncanny Truth of the Madwoman in Janet Frame's Autobiographical Fiction," Ariel 27(4)(October 1996): 113-127.

Tanya Blowers, "Madness, Philosophy, and Literature: A Reading of Janet Frame's Faces in the Water," Journal of New Zealand Literature 14(1996): 74-89.

Venla Oikkonen, "Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," Helsinki English Studies 3(2004): online here.

L.C. and E.W.

Gimp Parade, Wheelie Catholic, Six, Almost Seven, and other blogs have noted that today is the eighth anniversary of the US Supreme Court upholding the "Olmstead decision," L.C. and E.W. v. Olmstead, in which a district judge ruled that "Unnecessary institutionalization amounts to segregation and is a violation of individual civil rights." There will be marches and celebrations marking this day--conveniently situated on the first Friday of summer.

But who were the L.C and E.W. of the case's name? Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson were the plaintiffs designated by those initials. Elaine Beverly Wilson of Atlanta was brain-injured by a high fever in infancy. Elaine attended public school at first, then a succession of private and specialized school. At fifteen, she came home from residential schools, but her family couldn't handle her behavior. She lived in mental institutions or on the streets for much of her life; she endured shock treatment and psychotropic drugs. "I felt like I was in a little box and there was no way out," she testified to the judge. After the 1999 decision, Elaine Wilson moved into her own home, with support. She enjoyed shopping and welcoming visitors, before her early death in December 2004, at the age of 53.

Lois Curtis has a similar story: she's an Atlanta native who spent years in state-run institutions. She also lives in the community now, and enjoys painting and writing. A painting by Lois Curtis, representing the course of her life so far, was displayed in the Temple Gallery in Decatur in Fall 2005, and her creative work has since been exhibited across the US.

The case might have been won with other plaintiffs; but it wasn't. These were the women who sat through the tedious days and weeks of courtroom procedure, through the Supreme Court appeal, and waited, who told their stories, knowing their own lives and the lives of countless others would turn on the outcome.

[Visual description: Image above shows two women, one closer to the camera, one further in the background. The woman closer to the camera is on the right, in a pink shirt, pearly necklace, and earrings, with her arms crossed over her chest, meeting the camera's gaze with an expression I'd call "determined." The woman farther from the camera is looking down at her upper arm, and is wearing black. The woman in pink is Elaine Wilson; the woman in black is Lois Curtis. Wilson is white, and in her late 40s at the time of the photo; Curtis is African-American, and about thirty. Image from the CDCAN report of 27 April 2007.]

Long Road Home: Celebrating Olmstead in Georgia

Cindy Sue of Six Almost Seven has details about the celebration for the 8th anniversary of the Olmstead decision in Georgia--they're looking for participants and volunteers. If you can be in Atlanta on Friday June 22, check it out. As one component of the day's events, Endeavor Freedom will be filming stories for preservation in the Georgia Disability Rights Exhibit. That makes so much sense. If you already have activists and survivors gathered to rally and celebrate, it's a perfect opportunity to record the stories that would otherwise be lost.

Susan Burch, on Junius Wilson (16 November, Ohio State)

If you're anywhere near Columbus, OH, make plans to go see Susan Burch speak on Junius Wilson (1908-2001), on Thursday, 16 November, 5:30-7:30pm, at Saxby Auditorium, Drinko Hall, Moritz College of Law. From the press release:

Dr. Susan Burch, Associate Professor of History at Gallaudet University, will address broad historical issues, including Jim Crow racism, disability discrimination, eugenics, & activism as they effected the life of Junius Wilson, a deaf African American. In 1925, Mr. Wiilson was falsely accused of attempted rape, deemed incompetent to stand trial, & imprisoned in the State Hospital for the Colored Insane for more than 7 decades. After 76 years in the State Hospital, his release was won by court order. It was officially noted in 1970 that Wilson was not mentally disabled. Dr. Burch teaches Russian, American, Deaf, & Disability History.

FOR PROGRAM DETAILS CONTACT: Brenda Brueggemann at brueggemann.1@osu.edu. The event will be signed in ASL. For questions about access or other types of accommodations, please contact the ADA Coordinator's Office at ada-osu@osu.edu.

Read more about Junius Wilson (shown above, left). Also check out information about Project Orange Neptune, which coordinates efforts to identify and improve the lives of Deaf people languishing in mental institutions, from misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and little access to Deaf culture (or even comprehensible information about their rights).

Susan Burch is cowriting a book about Wilson with Hannah Joyner; if you can't get to Columbus, watch for the book (last I heard, it's coming from UNC Press, and the title will be Unspeakable: The Life Story of Junius Wilson). I was on a disability history panel with Burch and Joyner at the 2005 American Historical Association meeting in Seattle--and I've worked with both of them in other contexts--their research is important and their presentations are worth attending.

July 28: Edith Lanchester (1871-1966)

Edith Lanchester (right) was born on this date in 1871, daughter of a prosperous English architect. When she was 24, living in Battersea, working as a secretary, she announced that she intended to live with her lover, Irish factory worker James Sullivan, without marrying him, as a feminist protest against marriage itself. In response, her father hired a "mental specialist" to interview Edith; he determined that she was threatening suicide--in the form of "social suicide"--and so he signed emergency commitment papers, under the Lunacy Act of 1890. Edith's own father and brothers bound her wrists and dragged her into a carriage that would deliver her to the Priory, an institution at Roehampton.

Edith Lanchester's socialist connections spread the word--within days, newspapers around the world carried news of the "Lanchester Kidnapping Case." The New York Times carried headlines like "Imprisonment in London Insane Asylum: Sullivan's Habeas Corpus Proceedings" (3 November 1895) and "Marriage --Without Ceremony: English Girl (Lanchester) Declared Insane" (also 3 November 1895). Four days after her commitment, Edith was released. The examining doctors this time declared her "misguided," but not insane. Upon her release, she and Sullivan resumed their intended domestic arrangements, raised their two children, and lived together until his death in 1945.

(If her name sounds familiar but her story doesn't, you may be thinking of her daughter: actress Elsa Lanchester, who played the Bride of Frankenstein and married Charles Laughton.)

The Suitcases

When the Willard Psychiatric Center near Albany NY was closed in 1995, 400 inmate suitcases were found in an attic, covered in dust. They contained the belongings of patients at the moment of their arrival (many expected short stays): letters, photographs, books, diaries, even handmade quilts, silk gloves, sheet music. I remember reading about the 2004 exhibit at the New York State Museum, and wishing I could see it. Now, there's a new online version, and a touring version too, so many more of us can explore these artifacts and learn more about the suitcases and their owners. Never has "Click to Enter" seemed so ominous a request.

The bricks-and-mortar version, and its online successor, share the structure of presenting a few of the suitcase owners' stories in detail, drawn from their own possessions and the hospital's records of their decades as inmates. As it's my research interest, I'm caught most by the women's stories:

• Theresa was German-born, a nun known as Sister Marie Ursuline. When her assigned mission in North Dakota failed, she was adrift. She returned to New York, and hoped her father could help her return to Germany, but in 1917 her letter was stopped under wartime restrictions. She was confused, but insisted "I don't hear voices, I don't see visions. I feel silly--I am not crazy--I am nervous." She stayed at Willard for 30 years.
  
• Ethel was a gifted needlecrafter, who raised her two children by working as a seamstress after she left her abusive husband. In 1930, a landlady complained of Ethel's refusal to be evicted, and Ethel was committed to Willard. She stayed for 43 years. In that time, her grown children visited her three times.
• Madeline (shown above, before and during hospitalization) was a Sorbonne graduate, who taught French at various girls' schools in the US. She was interested in the occult, which was enough to render her "unemployable" during the Depression, so in 1931 she too was committed to a psychiatric unit, and eventually arrived at Willard, furious: "I want out of here immediately. I think it is an outrage to be here." She stayed for 47 years.

One of the men stayed for 62 years, from 1919 to 1981--even hospital officials admitted in the 1960s that his admission was "a mistake." And these are only a few stories from hundreds found in the attic, from many thousands at Willard and other similar hospitals across the US. Go look in their eyes; look through their possessions (which no heir has come to claim); many had family, friends, jobs, cars, skills, college degrees. Nonetheless, it didn't take much for circumstances to place them all in a mental hospital for life. And only now are their stories being told.

[Thanks to Arlene Wilson for giving us the link to this online exhibit in comments.--PLR]

Capitol protest

About five hundred disability-rights protesters from across the US visited the Capitol on Monday, organized by ADAPT; over a hundred of them were arrested for refusing to leave private offices, and some spent the night in jail. They targeted members of Congress who had not signed as co-sponsors of MiCASSA and other legislative efforts to combat the institutional bias in long-term care services. The story was widely if briefly reported in local television stations across the US (so there must be footage), and carried, again briefly, to newspapers by the AP (here's a shortlived link to that account, so read it quick). ADAPT's got a longer version, of course, with photos, here, and in this press release.