Renewed spotlight on CSH cemeteries helping to mend wounds of the past

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May 16, 2009

Anonymous The Union-Recorder Sat May 16, 2009, 08:00 AM EDT

One morning in June, some of us will wake up and turn on NBC’s Today show. We will view shadowy images just outside Milledgeville that we may have never noticed before. “Today” will be highlighting the restoration of Central State Hospital’s cemeteries, long a hidden secret in our region.

In 1997, the Georgia Consumer Council (GCC) toured Central State’s campus and discovered a wildly overgrown forest. Some GCC members were former patients at the hospital, which housed 12,000 people in 1960 (among the world’s largest mental health facilities at the time).

What they saw made them cry: at least 20,000 deceased patients were buried in what appeared to be a tangled, dense jungle. Many of the patients that were buried there were during the years that CSH was very large, and due to the stigma of a mental health facility, families did not visit, or even claim, a patient at CSH. This was not a result of a deliberate act by CSH but due to circumstances of time and resources.

That ghastly sight motivated the GCC to begin a cemetery memorial project to clarify the struggle against prejudice, discrimination and stigma — to send a message that mental health patients deserve humane, equal treatment in life as well as in death. Up through the mid-1950s, CSH wards were segregated by race. Its cemeteries were segregated by both race and gender. There was no equality in life or death, and in general, those suffering with mental illness were segregated from society. It was a time when so little was known about mental illness and individuals with mental health issues were treated very differently than today.

Now, there is a growing movement to restore human dignity, however late, by groups who hope to memorialize the lives and deaths of mental health consumers. There may even be a monument in their honor on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., before too long. Three of Central State’s five cemeteries are already on the National Register of Historic Places.

They were once forgotten. Releasing the stigma that surrounded mental health consumers in the past, stigmas that allowed for their civil rights to be violated and them to be neglected in death in such a manner, we must no longer neglect those among us who suffer mental illness or disability. Their legions are abundant, numbering in the millions upon millions and affecting countless families every day. As Susan Sontag once put it: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick … Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

If you are interested in learning more about the cemetery projects and/or wish to make a contribution, call the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network at 1-800-297-6146.

This project is not only important to the families of those with mental illness and restoring dignity to those were buried at CSH many years ago but should be of importance to us as citizens of Milledgeville.

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