A Visit to an Insane Asylum

By Elton Camp In the 1960s before I finished graduate school, I worked for five years as a high school biology teacher. The principal assigned me as advisor to the Allied Medical Careers Club during the final year. Membership was for students who planned to enter any of a number of medical fields. The ladies auxiliary of the Columbus Medical Association arranged for various tours and speakers, some of them actually interesting. As the wives of doctors, they could get an unusual degree of cooperation from the medical community. We visited a hospital pathology lab where dissections were performed. The lady pathologist held up a blackened human lung that shed removed from a corpse. This is what happens to people who smoke, she warned. One of the more cocky boys slumped and fainted flat on his back on the floor. When we got him up, he had blood all over his sweater. That set off a chain reaction of faints among the students. I began to feel a bit queasy myself. The doctors wife and I were glad when the ordeal was over. Ill never arrange for students to see a place like that again, she declared with determination. That scared me half to death. The club field trip that stands out the most was by a Trailways bus to the mental institution at Milledgeville, Georgia. At that time it held over 12,000 inmates, and so was the largest insane asylum in the world. Since those places are long gone, I thought some might be interested in what that one was like. In past years, the inmates of that particular institution reportedly had been used in numerous experimental medical procedures, including electric shock and prefrontal lobotomies. The lobotomies involved operations on their brains. In the early stages of development of the drastic operation, no anesthesia was used and little attention was paid to employing sterile equipment. The patients usually died. By the time we visited, such barbaric procedures were long past.

When we arrived I was surprised to find that it looked a lot like a college campus. It boasted many elegant buildings and well-kept grounds. If fences existed, they didnt let us get into those areas. The facility, in preparation for our arrival, had arranged an orientation meeting. There we were divided into small groups to be escorted to the various divisions. The guide of the group I accompanied was pleasant, friendly, and quite surprisingly candid. I had expected a cover-up of the shortcomings of the place, but that wasnt the case. There are many people here who arent mentally ill in any way. They perhaps were, but recovered long ago. We cant release them because there isnt anywhere for them to go. The stigma of mental illness had been so great that, in some cases, their families announced their deaths and buried weighted caskets. Theres no way they can show up. Another guide told of a specific case. We have a young Orthodox Jewish woman in our ward. Her parents had her placed here when she converted to Jehovahs Witnesses. Orthodox Jews just dont do that. Theyll let her out only if she promises to leave the Witnesses, but she wont agree to it. A few years after that, class action litigation ended forced confinements of people in mental institutions. Milledgeville, along with similar places in other states, was cleared out and closed. The flip side of that gain in human rights was a huge increase in homeless people roaming the streets. Some of the inmates had been turned out with no place to go and no way to earn a living. Medication could control the condition in most of the patients, but without institutional supervision, many of them failed to take the prescribed drugs. Some of the former inmates were so mentally ill that they needed to remain institutionalized for life. That usually didnt happen unless they demonstrated that they were a threat to society when they killed or seriously injured someone. The guides let us have direct contact with mental patients who were deemed not to be dangerous. Some of them had compulsive behaviors. For example one woman sat in a straight hair and rocked toward the wall all day every day. She took breaks only to sleep, eat and use the bathroom. Others jabbered aloud continuously and exhibited strange tics. Another woman had a fetish about rings. She moved among us to touch and turn our rings. When I get out of her, Im going to find me a man and have some fun, she

declared. Ive escaped before and Ill do it again. They cant watch me all the time. Others of he inmates seemed totally normal on the surface. They chatted with sensibly and amiably. In years past, escapes had been common. Due to the definition of insanity in use at the time, the general practice had been to declare the escapees sane and make no effort to locate them. The fact that they reintegrated themselves into society was taken as proof that they werent insane anymore. Acres of small, rusted iron markers marked the graves of perhaps 25,000 patients who died at the once-called Georgia State Lunatic Asylum. In the 1960s, groundskeepers uprotted them to simplify mowing. The mentally ill were shunned when living and deprived of their names in death. Eventually, the cemetery was restored and the markers replanted. It has not been possible to recover the names. It was a strange, disturbing experience. I dont know what the students thought about it, but I was horrified and thought about it with revulsion for days on end.

Cemetery at Milledgeville