Egyptian royalty were buried with jewelry, combs, food, clothes, wigs, and perhaps a puppy. Mayan burials included food and jewels to ease the journey into the next world. Muslims wash and shroud the deceased, and Jewish law requires a tombstone with a name.
Tens of thousands who died at state psychiatric hospitals had only an iron stick to mark where they were buried. "Individuals who were shunned in life were deprived of dignity in death," said John Allen, a leader in the movement to restore the cemeteries.
Work continues to identify abandoned, unmarked graves for at least 100,000 people. The biggest number came from Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. Originally called the Georgia State Lunatic Asylum when it was founded in 1842, it was also the nation's largest hospital, with as many as 13,000 patients at a single time. There, 25,000 forgotten graves were slowly found under brush and bramble.
"Each person out there has a story," said Bud Merritt, who discovered the cemetery. Since then, relatives have learned for the first time where family members were buried.
The discovery in Milledgeville focused outrage and spearheaded consumer activism. Abandoned burial sites were discovered in places such as Danvers, Mass. (768 graves), throughout Arizona, where volunteers restored 2,420 graves. So too in Minnesota, Florida, and New York State where searching continues. On behalf of the National Empowerment Center and the Center for Mental Health Services, Georgia's Larry Fricks published a technical assistance manual about restoring cemeteries.
Cremains in Oregon
The remains of about 5,000 patients were discovered on a shelf accidentally during a visit to the Oregon State Hospital. Labeled with numbers on masking tape, they became symbolic of the overall neglect and unlawful conditions leading to justice department investigations.
As reported by The Oregonian, when the state needed land for other purposes, the graves of 1,534 people were exhumed, the remains cremated and placed in copper cans. Initially they were stored in a basement room, later relocated to the dried well of a fish pond, then returned indoors until 2000 when discovered by lawmakers inspecting the hospital. The corroded cans of lost lives, identified only by numbers, shelved floor to ceiling. By then another 1,000 had been added.
The Oregonian called the discovery "a brutish reminder of Oregon's decades of neglect of its mental health system." A series addressing the hospital's unchecked power on forgotten lives earned the Oregonian a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.
National Consumer Memorial
In June, mental health activists gathered at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, to unveil plans for a landscaped memorial that will signify 50 states from which patients came. When St. Elizabeths Hospital opened in 1855, it was intended as the National Asylum for the Veterans of the Army and Navy. Civilians were also admitted and St. Elizabeths became the federal hospital for treating psychiatric illness at a time when forced ECT, isolation, and restraint were used indiscriminantly.
The National Consumer Memorial culminates five years of planning and coincided with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Mental Health Association. The founder, Clifford Beers, was very much in evidence and a marble marker with his declaration "I must fight in the open" is part of a new garden design. Beers led a campaign for mental health reform after his own discharge from a hospital in Conn. where he consistently was treated with straight jackets for manic-depression. Upon release from the hospital in the early 20th century, the Yale graduate charted a strategy for reform that continues to inspire the consumer movement, one that is coalescing around projects such as these.
