MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The New York Times’ recent expose of burial practices at Hart Island, New York brought to wide public attention the many social and institutional cracks through which people can fall, with such vectors as poverty, disability, and mental illness separating individuals from their communities and eventually consigning their remains to unmarked trenches. With over a million interments, Hart Island differs from other American cemeteries in magnitude, but all localities must provide for the mentally ill, including the remains of those who are unclaimed. My research focuses on ways in which some Americans with mental illness experience a type of “social death” – being isolated from their families, friends, and communities – and how that process relates to their physical death, including treatment of their remains and forms of memorialization. Western State Hospital (WSH) in Staunton, Virginia anchors my investigation; a cemetery behind it contains thousands of anonymous cement markers (c. 1850s – 1980s) for people who lived and died in this “lunatic asylum.” This segregation and social erasure were consistent with WSH director (1905-1943) Joseph DeJarnette’s perspective that the mentally ill were “defectives” who should be eliminated from society. Although laws, professional understandings, and public opinion have changed since then, the mentally ill still often fall out of webs of social connection in life and in death, as Hart Island shows. My work extends from the historic WSH cemetery to current practices in Virginia and involves interviews with social workers, sheriff deputies, community activists and others knowledgeable about processes that segregate the mentally ill in institutions and in cemeteries.