In Death as in Life: Stigma In and Beyond an American Total Institution

By Ariel Merkel, October 4th, 2011
Gravestone in the cemetery of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center with the inscription "Patient No 532, Catholic" © Ariel Merkel

Total institutions – asylums, prisons, the military and the like – fundamentally re-form their inmates, distancing them from the world outside. Here we see how this persists even after death, a product of neglect and willful stigmatization of the mentally ill, even as dis-Ability advocates fight against the injustice and indignity. -Jeff

On any given summer afternoon, light traffic hums along Route 62 as local teenagers armed with beer, and families with stocked picnic baskets, travel for a day of whitewater rafting, swimming, hiking, and waterfall-jumping in Zoar Valley, New York, a state park located thirty-five miles south of Buffalo. Few notice the grassy field where hundreds of people were laid to rest without dignity. I had made the trek from Buffalo to Zoar Valley several times each summer for nearly a decade, and never noticed the cemetery of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center (GPC) on Route 62. It is easy to miss: the grave markers lay flat against the ground, with no sign marking the site as a cemetery. To any car cruising past, the space looks like an open pasture amongst the vast surrounding farmlands.

The prisoners of the Collins Correctional Facility, the institution that now owns the property, occasionally mow the cemetery. Riding mowers glide over the field of flat nameless grave markers, with little further maintenance from those mandated to tend to it. But as graves are tended, they are also destroyed. The combination of the weight of the mower and poor drainage had caused many gravestones to sink into the earth. Nothing, then, marks the final resting place of the nameless former inmates of GPC.

The Gowanda Psychiatric Center, a total institution housing people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, opened in 1898. The residents, under supervision, grew their food, prepared their meals, and buried their dead. GPC was an example of what Erving Goffman studied as a total institution: the patients slept, played and worked enclosed within the institution’s high walls (1961:5). Every part of their lives was contained in a finite space with clear boundaries—boundaries within . . .

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October 4th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Jared Lee Loughner

By Gary Alan Fine, January 12th, 2011

Gary Alan Fine is a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial. He considers here a very difficult example of what has been one of his ongoing research concerns. Jeff

Although I feel abashed admitting it, I find my sympathy for Jared Lee Loughner is swelling. Mr. Loughner is, as every sentient American is aware, the young man who pulled the trigger – again and again – killing six, wounding others, including his local Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords in a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

Note that I do not say that he is an accused assassin, killer, or murderer, which legally he certainly is under our rule of law. I am entirely prepared to accept that Mr. Loughner was, last Saturday, a violent man, who deserves whatever a jury or set of juries (both federal and state) will eventually determine. I will not call for parole in 2061. I am also prepared to admit that a court may determine – although it probably will not, given American attitudes – that this young is not fully culpable for his violence because of mental illness.

What I am not prepared to accept is how from the moments after the attack, Mr. Loughner’s identity has been taken from him to be used as a political football by smart people who are willing to be ignorant. Again and again we see that we do not truly care about the self-imagined identity of this 22-year old, but only about what we need for him to be. Perhaps we need him to be a tea party manqué boisterously inspired by Sarah and Rush, perhaps an out-of-control, drug-crazed Goth worshipping at the altar of a skull, perhaps a follower of Hitler or Marx, or perhaps we just need for him to be, as is often stated, “a nut job.” But these are what we need for Mr. Loughner to be, and not what he is. The truth is that Jared, we hardly know you.

So we search through the shards and debris . . .

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January 12th, 2011 | Tags: , , , ,