From the New York Times:

Currently on display in New York City: a handful of artifacts from patients who spent decades locked in the Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York.

The 427 suitcases, trunks, crates and bundles recovered after Willard closed in 1995 turned out to belong to patients who had spent decades in this vast state mental institution. In them were the remnants of lives left behind when their owners entered the locked gates.

“The history of mental health is almost always told by psychiatrists and hardly ever by patients or through patients’ lives,” said Darby Penney, “so this is pretty amazing.” Ms. Penney, who worked in the New York State Office of Mental Health, and Dr. Peter Stastny, a psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker, spent years piecing together what happened to 25 patients from their belongings, medical records and interviews.

The exhibit can be seen at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library in Midtown through Jan. 31.

More information is on the Web site suitcaseexhibit.org and in a forthcoming book, “The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic” (Bellevue Literary Press), written by Ms. Penney and Dr. Stastny with photographs by Lisa Rinzler.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under history, institutionalization, mental health, stigma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.