Word: hospitalers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Californian photographer David Maisel has spent years shooting the blighted landscapes around America's copper mines. No surprise, then, that in 2005 he was immediately intrigued when he read a small news item describing the efforts of the Oregon State Hospital to move the cremated remains of thousands of psychiatric...
The tale behind the canisters is indeed deeply disturbing. They hold the remains of 5,121 people who languished in the psychiatric hospital in Salem, Oregon - many of them for their entire adult lives - for reasons that nowadays might require nothing more than a Zoloft prescription and some couch time...
The possibility that some families might have kept quiet about their relatives' conditions struck a nerve with Maisel. He recently learned that his grandfather had been treated for severe depression with 12 rounds of electro-shock therapy before Maisel was born. "Here was this very important piece of my family...
Now under new management, the hospital has decided to lift the shroud of secrecy around the storeroom and its contents. And Maisel's photos have prodded staff to release the records of some patients to relatives who can produce death certificates proving their family connections. One of those patients was...
Still, the rise in borderline diagnoses may illustrate something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans...