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The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
by Robert Whitaker, Lisa Rinzler, Peter Stastny, Darby Penney
When the Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York closed in 1995, 427 suitcases were found squirreled away in the attic of the institution’s Sheltered Workshop Building. Darby Penney, a director at the New York State Office of Mental Health, psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker Peter Stastny, and photographer Lisa Rinzler decided to use the suitcases as a way to reclaim the lives of some of the long-term patients at the Willard.
In selecting which people to research, Penney and Stastny first eliminated any empty cases. They then sifted through the remaining cases looking for suitcases that appealed to them, either because of the size of the collection (one woman had brought with her 18 pieces of luggage), unique characteristics of the suitcase’s contents, or because of the markings and monograms on the case itself.
In other words, the authors assembled their target subjects not with an eye to creating a representative sample of the mental health patients at Willard, but with an eye to finding patients with a compelling personal story. As a writer, I find the idea of extracting a person’s history from the possessions they left behind compelling, but I can see why people looking for a robust critique of America’s mental health system might think this approach lacks a certain amount of scientific rigor.
Whether you will enjoy this book depends a great deal on what you are looking for from it. Readers looking for a dispassionate scientific study of the human toll of institutionalized mental care will be disappointed. This book is many things, but dispassionate is not one of them.
Penney and Stastny have spent their lives advocating for changes in America’s mental health system and their biases shine through nearly every line, as does their compassion for their subjects. At times they seem unwilling to acknowledge that the people they describe may have had real, enduring — or at least recurring — mental illnesses. The authors also argue passionately, and with some evidence, that the institutionalized approach to mental care actually made many of the people in this book worse. Even those who seemed to adapt reasonably well to their surroundings may have been exploited to some degree for the free labor they provided the asylum, which had to remain self-sufficient if it were to survive.
Life in an institution, Darby and Penney argue, is grim. You will find little in these pages to dissuade you of that.
The anecdotal stories are compelling, but in the end they are simply that -- anecdotal. Given the manner in which these ten people were selected for further study, it's hard to make a case that they are a truly representative sample of the more than 54,000 patients who have been treated at Willard over the years. For policy writers and social scientists looking for solid evidence to use in arguing for change, this book will fall short.
For a writer, though, this book is a goldmine of biographical detail. The short biographies include lots of wonderfully detailed information about the various roads that lead to a life in a mental hospital, the seemingly insignificant triggers that can lead to a person’s commitment, and the ways in which people adapt to life in an institution.
Longer review at my blog, BostonWriters, here.
In selecting which people to research, Penney and Stastny first eliminated any empty cases. They then sifted through the remaining cases looking for suitcases that appealed to them, either because of the size of the collection (one woman had brought with her 18 pieces of luggage), unique characteristics of the suitcase’s contents, or because of the markings and monograms on the case itself.
In other words, the authors assembled their target subjects not with an eye to creating a representative sample of the mental health patients at Willard, but with an eye to finding patients with a compelling personal story. As a writer, I find the idea of extracting a person’s history from the possessions they left behind compelling, but I can see why people looking for a robust critique of America’s mental health system might think this approach lacks a certain amount of scientific rigor.
Whether you will enjoy this book depends a great deal on what you are looking for from it. Readers looking for a dispassionate scientific study of the human toll of institutionalized mental care will be disappointed. This book is many things, but dispassionate is not one of them.
Penney and Stastny have spent their lives advocating for changes in America’s mental health system and their biases shine through nearly every line, as does their compassion for their subjects. At times they seem unwilling to acknowledge that the people they describe may have had real, enduring — or at least recurring — mental illnesses. The authors also argue passionately, and with some evidence, that the institutionalized approach to mental care actually made many of the people in this book worse. Even those who seemed to adapt reasonably well to their surroundings may have been exploited to some degree for the free labor they provided the asylum, which had to remain self-sufficient if it were to survive.
Life in an institution, Darby and Penney argue, is grim. You will find little in these pages to dissuade you of that.
The anecdotal stories are compelling, but in the end they are simply that -- anecdotal. Given the manner in which these ten people were selected for further study, it's hard to make a case that they are a truly representative sample of the more than 54,000 patients who have been treated at Willard over the years. For policy writers and social scientists looking for solid evidence to use in arguing for change, this book will fall short.
For a writer, though, this book is a goldmine of biographical detail. The short biographies include lots of wonderfully detailed information about the various roads that lead to a life in a mental hospital, the seemingly insignificant triggers that can lead to a person’s commitment, and the ways in which people adapt to life in an institution.
Longer review at my blog, BostonWriters, here.