Recovery Rights

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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?

Deegan, who had been hospitalized in both private and public psychiatric hospitals, was already an activist on behalf of mental health consumers when she discovered the cemetery. She was appalled by the fact that graves were identified only by markers with numbers, not names, and by the failure to treat the primitive graves with dignity. "If people treat a cemetery like trash, it’s a good indication of how they feel about the people buried there and those who are still receiving services." She set out to change things, beginning a process that has brought about healing for many former patients in state mental hospitals and a dramatic gesture of reconciliation between a state mental health official and consumers.

At about the same time Deegan discovered the anonymous graves in Massachusetts, members of the Georgia Consumer Council, an organization that represents consumers of mental health services, toured a cemetery at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville and found an even bleaker situation. Grave markers had been removed to make it easier for hospital crews to mow the grass.

Larry Fricks and The Georgia Consumer Network have led the way with a campaign to restore the 30,000 abandoned and forgotten graves at the former Milledgeville State Hospital.

From these beginnings, a movement is growing across America to restore the cemeteries and honor those who have died in America’s psychiatric hospitals. In state after state organizations are sprouting, often with the support and encouragement of the National Empowerment Center. As groups form to undertake restoration activities, they find the graves are unmarked or marked only by a number. Burial records have been lost.

Not surprisingly, it is the survivors of these same hospitals who have taken the lead in restoration efforts. But all of us whose silent acquiescence made invisible those living with mental illness carry a burden of guilt. For our own sakes, we must find a way to honor those who lived and died with such indignity at cemeteries near our homes, perhaps by participating in days of prayer and silent reflection, perhaps by chanting the names of those who died and were buried anonymously.

Sources:

Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeths By Kelly Patricia O Meara inInsight on the News - National(8/6/01)

Florida State Hospital cemetery: efficient, anonymous in St. Petersburg Times Monday, August 16, 1976

Psychiatric News August 3, 2001, Volume 36 Number 15, p. 10

American “Insane Asylum” History: Giving Names to Numbered Graves by Kirsten Anderberg Friday, Aug. 13, 2004 at 9:56 PM kirstena@resist.ca

Caring for Patients’ Graves Helps Hospitals Reconcile With Living by Kate Mulligan

National Empowerment Center, c/o Pat Deegan, 20 Ballard Road, Lawrence, MA 01843 USA

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