The era of instititutionalization
My interest in how society treats its mentally ill and challenged has endured for decades. Publication of Abandoned Asylums of New England: A
Photographic Journey, by John Gray, gave me a chance to reflect again. A highly recommended book, published by the Museum of disABILITY History. Here is my review, which ran in the June 9, 2013, Sunday Providence Journal.
One of the remarkable things about "Abandoned Asylums of New England: A
Photographic Journey" by John Gray is that it makes such a powerful
statement about how society treated some of its most vulnerable members
without using a single image of a person.
Actually, there are
representations of a few people in this extraordinary contribution to
the literature of disability: in a cartoon, an old postcard, a few
vintage photos, and magazine illustrations taped to walls. But that's
it. By focusing on the abandoned buildings where untold thousands of the
mentally ill and mentally challenged (and other vulnerable people)
spent their lives, often neglected and abused, Gray has paid dramatic
testament to forgotten humanity in a way face shots and candids could
not. He has made us see something more haunting: the ghosts of people
who deserved better.
A 1970 Providence Journal investigation, 'The Outlines of a Public
Disgrace,' chronicled warehousing of patients at the now-closed
Institute of Mental Health in Cranston.
Years in the making, Gray's book is
literally an inside look at 12 institutions around the region that now
crumble to dust, or have been razed into oblivion. Their names bespeak
their era, which belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries: Danvers State
Lunatic Hospital; Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded; the
Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates; the Lakeville
State Sanatorium, for victims of tuberculosis; and eight more.
We
see broken windows, collapsing stairs, peeling paint, a piano with
broken ivories, an open drawer in an old morgue, a dusty laboratory
table with empty vials and jars, mattress-less beds, doors off their
hinges, catacomb-like utility tunnels, a tattered Cabbage Patch doll in a
funhouse-esque corridor, iron lungs, a wooden wheelchair, the skeletons
of birds, and rooms: day rooms, bathrooms, auditoria, solaria, these
places once alive with people. And we see many exteriors: the brick and
stone walls, the Gothic spires, these massive and towering edifices that
contained what were then called lunatics, feeble-mindeds and
consumptives.
Remarkably, too, Gray has found beauty amid the
ghosts that surely roam these grounds. A consummate artist of the lens,
he has given us page after page of black-and-white and color photos that
are rendered masterfully, with exquisite lighting and textures - the
exteriors especially. His twilight shot of the old Danvers hospital
skyline (which, coincidentally, I used to pass every day on my way to
high school), is breathtaking, as are many others. That such beauty
could have countenanced such ugliness is an inescapable irony.
Gray
did not include photos of the two Rhode Island institutions that closed
years ago as treatment shifted to community programs: Exeter's Ladd
Center, and the handful of buildings that are the last vestiges of
Cranston's Institute of Mental Health. But having covered those
institutions years ago for The Providence Journal (indeed, I lived
inside each of them for several days for front-line reporting), I can
assure you that Gray's work speaks for Rhode Island's story, too. And I
would note that it was the power of The Journal's many photos, along
with articles, that helped build public support for more humane options.
Books
like Gray's impress on us the importance of never forgetting.
"Abandoned Asylums" is also a reminder that while community care is an
improvement over institutions such as Ladd and the IMH, society still
has a distance to go in overcoming tired old "retarded" and "lunatic"
stereotypes. It still falls short of the mark in providing better care
for some of our most fragile people, not a few of whom today wrongly
inhabit another institutional system: prison.
G. Wayne Miller
wrote and co-produced "ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place," a
PBS-broadcast documentary film about tuberculosis sanitariums. Visit
him at gwaynemiller.com.
Photographic Journey, by John Gray, gave me a chance to reflect again. A highly recommended book, published by the Museum of disABILITY History. Here is my review, which ran in the June 9, 2013, Sunday Providence Journal.
One of the remarkable things about "Abandoned Asylums of New England: A
Photographic Journey" by John Gray is that it makes such a powerful
statement about how society treated some of its most vulnerable members
without using a single image of a person.
Actually, there are
representations of a few people in this extraordinary contribution to
the literature of disability: in a cartoon, an old postcard, a few
vintage photos, and magazine illustrations taped to walls. But that's
it. By focusing on the abandoned buildings where untold thousands of the
mentally ill and mentally challenged (and other vulnerable people)
spent their lives, often neglected and abused, Gray has paid dramatic
testament to forgotten humanity in a way face shots and candids could
not. He has made us see something more haunting: the ghosts of people
who deserved better.
A 1970 Providence Journal investigation, 'The Outlines of a Public
Disgrace,' chronicled warehousing of patients at the now-closed
Institute of Mental Health in Cranston.
Years in the making, Gray's book is
literally an inside look at 12 institutions around the region that now
crumble to dust, or have been razed into oblivion. Their names bespeak
their era, which belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries: Danvers State
Lunatic Hospital; Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded; the
Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates; the Lakeville
State Sanatorium, for victims of tuberculosis; and eight more.
We
see broken windows, collapsing stairs, peeling paint, a piano with
broken ivories, an open drawer in an old morgue, a dusty laboratory
table with empty vials and jars, mattress-less beds, doors off their
hinges, catacomb-like utility tunnels, a tattered Cabbage Patch doll in a
funhouse-esque corridor, iron lungs, a wooden wheelchair, the skeletons
of birds, and rooms: day rooms, bathrooms, auditoria, solaria, these
places once alive with people. And we see many exteriors: the brick and
stone walls, the Gothic spires, these massive and towering edifices that
contained what were then called lunatics, feeble-mindeds and
consumptives.
Remarkably, too, Gray has found beauty amid the
ghosts that surely roam these grounds. A consummate artist of the lens,
he has given us page after page of black-and-white and color photos that
are rendered masterfully, with exquisite lighting and textures - the
exteriors especially. His twilight shot of the old Danvers hospital
skyline (which, coincidentally, I used to pass every day on my way to
high school), is breathtaking, as are many others. That such beauty
could have countenanced such ugliness is an inescapable irony.
Gray
did not include photos of the two Rhode Island institutions that closed
years ago as treatment shifted to community programs: Exeter's Ladd
Center, and the handful of buildings that are the last vestiges of
Cranston's Institute of Mental Health. But having covered those
institutions years ago for The Providence Journal (indeed, I lived
inside each of them for several days for front-line reporting), I can
assure you that Gray's work speaks for Rhode Island's story, too. And I
would note that it was the power of The Journal's many photos, along
with articles, that helped build public support for more humane options.
Books
like Gray's impress on us the importance of never forgetting.
"Abandoned Asylums" is also a reminder that while community care is an
improvement over institutions such as Ladd and the IMH, society still
has a distance to go in overcoming tired old "retarded" and "lunatic"
stereotypes. It still falls short of the mark in providing better care
for some of our most fragile people, not a few of whom today wrongly
inhabit another institutional system: prison.
G. Wayne Miller
wrote and co-produced "ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place," a
PBS-broadcast documentary film about tuberculosis sanitariums. Visit
him at gwaynemiller.com.
No comments have been added yet.
