In a 1953 article, “Crowding of Youths at Crownsville Told,” the chief supervisor of social work at Crownsville, Gwendolyn Lee, noted that some of the overflowing patient population was not arriving of its own will. The hospital received “too many teenagers with no hope,” she said, and many of them arrived by force. Lee argued that there was “too large a percentage of cases where people are picked up off the street and taken to Crownsville without the knowledge of relatives… Less than 2% of the mentally ill are brought by relatives.”
