Iowa’s mental health institutes have story to tell

I was idly browsing on the Internet when I came across an article on old, and sometimes abandoned, big mental hospitals.

I noticed the architecture of some of them and then remembered that the institution at Independence looked very similar and so did the others in Iowa. Then something snapped into focus. I could see them clearly but I didn't know very much about them. Aside from brief snippets and a few academic papers about the former Mount Pleasant MHI I could find nothing to really enlighten me. I thought that I had better write their histories myself since no similar effort seemed forthcoming, but I did not then realize what a formidable topic it was to be, nor how illuminating.

Three years later, I have largely completed the books (a set of three volumes). One book would not suffice since there was so much primary and secondary source material. I did manage to get what I thought was most important into these books. Two of them are histories of the kind I thought was appropriate to the subject. The third book is a compilation of some of the magazines and newsletters of the employees and patients, various staff members in fact, and an article by a former superintendent.

I used newspaper files, magazine, microfilms, interviews, the Internet and whatever else I could think of to locate the information I was seeking. It was a bit frustrating at times since some records are sealed (as they should be). And the local early newspapers were not interested in the local asylums or only were interested in them in a derisive way or for sensationalist purposes. Also patient memoirs did not come into being until decades after the hospitals begun their work.

But, bits and pieces began to knit together and the official reports to the State of Iowa by the hospital superintendents revealed a lot about the inner workings of the institution, sometimes more than I had expected since, once in awhile, some real frustration with conditions would appear amid the usually standardized official verbiage. I enjoyed the research which brought out so much that had been long forgotten (or not widely known in the first place).

This is not a Churchillian sort of history. Churchill was at the center of his history and wrote masterfully about his times. What I finally had was what I call a narrative and documentary history in which I stand aside and let the people do the talking. I let them have the mike most of the time and what a variety of people they are: state and national officials, hospital administrators, staff members, patients, family members, journalists, conscientious objectors, firemen, county sheriffs, reformers and more … they are all there.

I did not intend to make this a timely history but the times suddenly caught up to me as I was busily transcribing the historical record. Suddenly the controversy, not yet settled, about whether to keep these institutions open came into public awareness and I became involved in the discussion myself. I was well aware through my research that some of these big hospitals had abused the confidence the public had in them. I knew of their more sinister days but, really, in their long history, they did what they originally intended to do: to provide a safe haven for those whose illness caused them to be in peril from themselves and from a cruel world which would injure them or jail them. The social cruelty toward the mentally ill has come back again. My hope is that the mentally ill homeless and the mentally ill imprisoned can again find refuge in institutions like these, that they will again find Asylum.

' David L. Rosheim, of Maquoketa, is a bookseller and author, most recently of 'The Four Sisters: Iowa's State Psychiatric Hospitals.” Comments: tcbooks@q.com