Nineteenth-century state mental hospitals across New England and the United States are linked today with images of confinement, forced treatment, torture, abandonment, and family separation. This project does not directly challenge those associations. An ethnographic study in medical anthropology, this study is based on three years of fieldwork observations and qualitative interviews with neighbors, townspeople, former employees, and visitors to the open campus of a decommissioned state mental hospital in Massachusetts. Excavated from that hospital’s annual reports dating back to 1896 and gathered from local memories and storytelling, this projects considers the central place that work once held in the lives of psychiatric patients at Medfield State Hospital and the place that idleness holds for patients living within today’s institution of community care. Participants’ memories track the shifting perceptions and meanings of mental illness that resulted once “industrial therapy” programs were ended in state mental hospitals. This inquiry describes the ways that the loss of work changed psychiatric patients’ experiences of suffering, promoting the use of new chemical treatments, accelerating deinstitutionalization, and catalyzing new patterns nationally of service utilization and psychiatric disability. From participants’ memories and the author’s reflections on clinical practice as an independently licensed social worker (LICSW) in Massachusetts, this analysis uncovers the social functions of staying sick within contexts of unequal opportunity and joblessness. This study reveals the complicated and punishing work of surviving and helping people survive across de-industrialized landscapes as mental health practitioners assist the disenfranchised by recasting social suffering into psychiatric illness with treatment-induced embodiments that simultaneously help to manage poverty and perpetuate risk within disabilized citizens.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/36012 |
| Date | 18 June 2019 |
| Creators | McNally, Kellan Iscah |
| Contributors | Barnes, Linda L. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0025 seconds