(March 3, 2014) When Mississippi Clarion-Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell takes on mental illness, you know you’re going to get the full story.
That’s once again the case in his new article about the discovery of graves from the Old Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum that were uncovered during a university construction project (“More than 2,000 bodies of mental patients buried on grounds of UMMC,” Clarion Ledger, March 1).
The original state hospital was built at the urging of mental illness treatment reformers for $175,000 and completed in 1855. The first patient listed in the Registry of Admissions, Evelyn Seastrunk, was admitted at the age of 29 in 1857. She was discharged 35 years later. The reason given for her discharge? Death. Seastrunk was among the 2,000 bodies discovered on the grounds of the old hospital.
One in five of the patients died in those days. Dr. Luke Lampton, chairman of the state Board of Health, who has written about the history of the hospital calls them “forgotten twice — when they were originally sent there for treatment and after they were buried there.”
Today, patients with severe mental illness are vastly less likely to be forgotten in this way because there are few psychiatric beds left for them, and individuals who occupy the few that exist typically spend only a few days in treatment. Instead, people with severe psychiatric diseases are more likely to be forgotten as members of the homeless population or left in jails and prisons when they are pushed off the grounds of psychatric treatment hospitals.
Mitchell’s story is a poignant orientation to the landscape of psychiatric hospitalization over the last 150 years. For the most up-to-date data on its condition today, see our 2012 study, “No Room at the Inn: Trends and Consequences of Closing Public Psychiatric Hospitals” on our TACReports.org website.
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