The Shame of the States

Public [psychiatric] hospitals became overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of patients. In the 1950s, there were only 26 U.S. cities whose population exceeded the aggregate population of public psychiatric institutions. The two largest hospitals each had a census that exceeded 16,000 patients. Never able to keep up with the needs of their patients, the hospitals went from awful to appalling when their workforce—from the farmer to the doctor—was pulled away to meet the manpower demands of World War II. The population at large learned of the horrors of their public psychiatric hospitals, tragedies long hidden away, through exposés such as The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward’s fictionalized account of her hospitalization at Rockland State Hospital (book, 1946; movie 1948); author Albert Q. Maisel’s article in Life magazine (1946) accompanied by some of the most painful pictures the American public had ever seen from Pennsylvania’s Byberry and Ohio’s Cleveland state hospitals; and The Shame of the States (1948), New York Post reporter Albert Deutsch’s opus based on research from 1944 to 1947.