If you want to view a pretty amazing historical art project online, check out The Willard Suitcase Exhibit Online. Willard Psychiatric Center in New York opened as the Willard Asylum in 1869 and after being renamed in 1890 to the Willard State Hospital, reached a record census of 4,076 patients in 1955. In its 126 year history, the psychiatric facility saw more than 50,000 patients pass through its doors. It closed its doors for good in 1995.
The description below is reproducted from the site, and describes the project in far better terms than I could.
“When Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995, staff members Beverly Courtwright and Lisa Hoffman, along with Craig Williams, a New York State Museum curator, worked to save historical artifacts there. Beverly found a door tucked under the pigeon-infested rafters of an attic. Prying it open, they found rows of wooden racks, packed with almost 400 suitcases of all shapes and types — men’s on the left, women’s on the right, alphabetized, labeled, and covered by bird droppings, seemingly untouched for years. Realizing they had stumbled across unique and valuable artifacts, Craig had the suitcases moved to the Museum’s warehouse near Albany.
This is where Darby Penney and Peter Stastny encountered the luggage in 1999, wrapped in dusty plastic sheets. Working with a list of names and hospital identification numbers, they went through the suitcases to choose a smaller number of individuals and identify their belongings for closer study. Peter, Darby, and photographer Lisa Rinzler spent several years immersed in the material and documentary remnants of these people’s lives, forming relationships with them through the things they left behind. They went to their homes, visited their graves, read their correspondence and medical records, studied their snapshots, talked to their neighbors and caretakers, and Lisa took photographs of what they saw. They also examined hundreds of Willard photographs and documents at the New York State Archives.”
The online exhibit requires Flash.
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Links to This Article
From Psych Central's World of Psychology:
Mental Health is Medicine’s Second Fiddle - World of Psychology (3/26/2008)
Advances in the History of Psychology » Blog Archive » What Shall I Bring to the Asylum? (5/29/2008)
From Psych Central's website:
The Lives They Left Behind | Psych Central (3/3/2009)
3 Comments to
“The Willard Suitcase Exhibit Online”
It’s good to see this being made into an online exhibit, so more people have access to it. When I first read of it opening for public viewing in a New York City venue last December, I was a little taken aback at how little it took for some people to be locked away for life in that facility. Though I know of many atrocities and abuses that have taken place in the name of psychiatric treatment over the decades, it was still a little surprising to see how easily people could be locked away for life with no right of appeal, and few if any rights of any other kind, either. I think I remember reading of someone who was locked away there (at Willard)just for going through a fairly normal grieving process.
Nowadays there seem to be some individuals and groups who long for a return to the days when this kind of thing was widespread. It would be nice if the advocates of “assisted” (aka forced) treatment would be more forthright about the abuses of the past such as this. Perhaps then it would be harder for them to justify lobbying so eagerly for legislation making this type of thing more likely to happen again in the future.
In doing some family genealogy I have found that an aunt, Mildred Calhoun O’Connor, was a patient at Willard Psychiatric Center. I have been unable to get information as to her death or burial site. I am now curious to know if possibly one of the suitcases could be hers. How do I go about finding out if, in fact, one of them would be hers? I have asked family members about her and why she was a patient there and was advised her husband admitted her and walked away. She was diagnosed as “incompetent” - whatever that means!!!
1/8/2009 thurs. i got some free mental health care through social services in the late 1970’s at the psychiatric center…i wonder how to get in contact with the group[behavioral program 1980 chris lynch,dr.saati] kathleen mchale geneva ny
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