Recovery Rights

News of legal, legislative, and organizational importance to recovery rights organizations

Remembering…

Graves at Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts are marked with only a number. The State has lost the list of the names of those buried there. We turned this photograph of grave marker #115 into a button to use during our advocacy campaigns.
Photo: National Empowerment Project, Inc. National Empowerment Project

"They were humiliated and abandoned in life. The very least we can do is make sure these people get the dignity in death that they never got in life." Pat Deegan

Imagine this: In the 15 years from 1950 to 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf. During the next 25 years, deaths in American psychiatric hospitals exceeded 1,103,000, almost double the 650,563 recorded deaths recorded in American battles. And it is likely that many, many hospital deaths were unrecorded and uncounted.

Imagine this: In 1976, Florida State Hospital employed a full-time undertaker. The hospital cemetery, a 27-acre hilltop contains 6000 graves. As soon as one is filled, another is dug immediately Coffins and tombstones are manufactured on the hospital grounds.

Imagine this: 30,000 people were buried on the grounds of Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Imagine this: In Canton, South Dakota, at the Hiawatha Insane Asylum, the only federally-operated psychiatric hospital for Native Americans, 121 inmates are buried in land subsequently developed by the city as golf course.

Imagine this: It is late 1998 and you are Pat Deegan and you are walking your dog in the rain when you stumble upon an abandoned cemetery on the grounds of Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts. What do you do?

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About Recovery Rights
Although few realize it, we believe we are in the early stage of a social movement, the movement for equal rights and full inclusion in American society of people living with mental illness. We believe that this movement will profoundly transform society as we know it, shaking cultural foundations which stretch backwards to the Middle Ages.

Those we refer to as "people living with mental illness," those once called "mad," for whom our language has so many derisive terms, are an aspect of ourselves and society which most of us have not wanted to look at and have not wanted to see.

The battles that will bring these folks to the societal table will transform every one of us. We will be transformed gladly or we will be transformed kicking and screaming. In Recovery Rights, we will celebrate this change and the movement out of which it evolves, tracking organizational developments, legal and legislative struggles.

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