Notabilia

Documenting Social Death

There’s a lot happening in this paragraph from Shuko Tamao’s “Picturing the Institution of Social Death: Visual Rhetorics of Postwar Asylum Exposé Photography.” The observation about women and Black Americans being portrayed as anonymous others is spot on, as is the description of their “social dead” status, but the idea that the asylum system shouldn’t have be reformed and should have instead abolished actually had merit, as did the “visual rhetoric of unfreedom” that post-war journalism in the United States gave rise to, despite that not being their goal. People should never be out of sight, out of mind, and many folks are advocating for an end to forced treatment, no matter how humane it looks on the surface.

—

Despite well-intentioned goals, these exposé photographs had the unintended effect of portraying asylum residents—especially women and African Americans—as unsettling, anonymous others whose long-term institutionalization was an additional exclusion from the body of the citizenry, signifying their socially dead status. For example, journalist Albert Deutsch frequently mentioned how attendants gathered naked asylum residents together, treating them as if they were animals (1948, 42). His writing was meant to sell a sensationalistic narrative, ultimately aiming to win the public’s approval for improving asylum-based care. He hoped that a series of reforms would transform asylums into hospitals. Thus, he meant to use the photographs of restrained women with no treatment, therapy, or recreation to argue that they deserved medical care so that they could eventually live outside as productive members of American society (Rose 2017). However, these photographs of asylum residents in physical restraints communicated what I call a “visual rhetoric of unfreedom” that elicited a powerful emotional reaction in readers, forcing them to question the validity of the asylum system itself.

On Civil War Photography

As with the much larger corpus of Civil War photographs, which as Keith Davis asserts, become endlessly “new” in a continuing process of rediscovery and interpretation, this subset of medical images too seemingly becomes endlessly new. As we will show through analysis of selected but representative examples from the archival collections of the successor to the Army Medical Museum, Civil War medical photographs became medical research materials; evidentiary documents to support disability and pension claims; a commodity to be sold or traded for personal, commercial or institutional gain; occasional worthless scraps; historical artifacts; and fine art images. Along this path of varied uses many social issues such as race and gender, personal privacy and patient anonymity, sexuality, memory and identity, nationalism, warfare and death are encountered. This exploration thus raises many emotive and perplexing issues that the images’ creators and original guardians could not have foreseen. Or did they? As we will argue, it seems an inescapable conclusion that, at times, the photographers and their subjects knew that they were participating in more than a simple, objective visual recording of a biomedical condition or injury.

‘Socially Dead’ Others

Disability researcher Shuko Tamao on using photos of patients in an attempt to bring about reform in postwar asylums in the United States:

Devoid of any opportunity to communicate their personal experiences, these asylum residents became illustrations on popular magazines and on the front pages of newspapers, serving as vehicles for eliciting the pity of readers. Because the reformers elicited pity for their cause while simultaneously inciting a morbid fascination in their readership, these photographs had the effect of giving their subjects the status of socially dead other, whether that meant a mad other or a racial other.

—

I don’t know that I agree with the conclusions this researcher draws, but she makes important points. I think the way we receive and perceive visual information is contextual and socially constructed, so it’s fluid and can change over time. The point about not allowing patients to tell their own stories is important, as is the way these patients were used to sell magazines and newspapers, which is another form of dehumanization and objectification. Still, I see value in these images, and I feel each person’s humanity when I look at them. But their use and reception in 2025 is different from the way they were initially used and received in the 1940s.

This article includes a photo taken in the back ward at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, where my mother began working a few years later.

—

From “Picturing the Institution of Social Death: Visual Rhetorics of Potwar Asylum Expose Photography,” published in Journal of the Medical Humanities, September 30, 2021. Link in comments.

Midnight Dana

3 a.m. Migraine. I can’t wait to see what Facebook tries to sell me in this compromised, throbbing, barely awake state. Also: asthma, brought to you by weeks of wildfire smoke. At least I’ll survive it, unlike some of our wildlife and some of our trees and whatever else suffocates, which is both an act (dying) and an acting upon (causing to die). Maybe this is why Facebook shows me jiggly boobs. Maybe it’s tyring to help me out of what suffocates and what is suffocated, out of my own sentences, out of Midnight Dana and her (is her pronoun her, I wonder for real) pounding worldview.

Me: Midnight Dana, what are your pronouns?

Midnight Dana: I only know fear and pain. What is this place, this world a pox, a terror? Leave me here in the dark with the things that hide under the bed. Monsters got nothing on humans, on family. Where’s my mommy?

Me: So, like she or they or …

Midnight Dana: My pronoun is her. I am of her. I am hers. Where is she? You look like her, but you’re not her. I want Smurfs. I want a bird who sings to me. I want something shiny to carry in my left hand, something only I know I have. I want her, but she’s not mine.

Me: OK. Midnight Dana. Let’s see how Facebook markets to that. I mean to you. Let’s try to find you an inhaler. I’m going with she/her for your pronouns.

Midnight Dana: I die and cause to die.

Me: Where did you hear that?

Midnight Dana: From you, just now.

Me: That’s not what I said.

Midnight Dana: That’s what I heard.

Pinfeathers

There are some things you can’t show, things you can’t share once you’ve seen them, so you turn them into a poem, and you can barely do that. Because they happened in the state you’re from. Because they happened in the state mental hospital where your mother worked. Because they happened while everyone looked away. Because we were not much better here in the United States than the Nazis were where those sent to mental hospitals were concerned.

Because in a day room in Taft, Oklahoma, we let a little boy sit wet with his own excrement or urine or blood or all three, a strip of white cloth cinching his arms to his neck. Because he’s not the only boy or the only man in the photo. Because this is what we did to human beings in the 1940s but also now or again or now and again with a new face, a new flavor, a new reason, from a new hatred, a new greed, a new form of consciouslessness.

What did I leave out? That the boy was Black. Everyone in the photo was Black. This was at the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. That’s what they called it. Are you sick yet? Do you want to turn away? You already have, from all of us, as the cages are built in Florida, as we find new reasons to cage. Will PETA come to the rescue? People are animals, too, and being treated worse than animals.

People who cage people are animals in a different sense of the word. They should start an organization called People for the Obliteration of People. POP for short. It has a ring to it. It’s weaponized.

Here, drink from this metal cup. Here, sit on this wooden bench. Here, look through this barred window for the rest of your life. Here, here. Here, here.

The photos I’m looking at include one of the back ward at the hospital where my mother worked in Norman, Oklahoma. These are not easy images to see, but this history matters. What’s been happening to people like me has been happening to people like me for a long time. This country could learn a lot from this history as its pinfeathers break our democracy’s skin.

The Oklahoma History Most Oklahomans Never Learned

On the desegregation of American psychiatric institutions and structural racism in American psychiatry. Link in comments.

—

Oklahoma,1964: Taft State Hospital was an all-Black facility, with an all-Black staff, located in an all-Black town. In 1940, its 738 patients were cared for by three psychiatrists (including the superintendent), three nurses, and an unknown number of direct care staff, who apparently all lived in one room. In 1949, Oklahoma consolidated the state hospital with the Institute for Colored Blind, Deaf, and Orphans and the Training School for Negro Girls, creating one large facility for Blacks with all manner of clinical needs. Oklahoma desegregated its public facilities in 1964. Rather than admit white patients to its state hospital for Black patients, as most of the other states would do, Oklahoma transferred the Black patients to its two other (all white) state hospitals. Taft was closed in 1970 and converted into a correctional facility, thus confounding in the public’s mind people with mental illness and criminals. (Some state hospitals have converted some of their units into correctional facilities, leading some people to think that psychiatric patients are being held behind multi-layered, barbed wire, razor-topped fences.)

Consciousness and the Sonnet

In The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Paul Oppenheimer argues that … the invention of the sonnet must itself be considered symptomatic of the slowly developing state of mind that we designate by the term “Renaissance.” The sonnet is so much more than a form. It marked a shift in Western thought, and what it left out is as important as what it ushered in. That’s what makes it alive and allows us to push up against its constraints. We can both live freely inside its walls and break its walls down to live free. It ain’t no pantoum, baby. That’s for sure. The sonnet exists on a whole other level.

On Plagiarism

In this piece on plagiarism, the author argues that it’s not a behavior caused by mental illness. I’ve been trying to understand the psychology behind plagiarism because a poet was recently identified as having plagiarized a number of poems that were published in literary journals, placed in or won contests, and may have been included in a forthcoming collection. Excerpt below.

—

As a psychiatrist, I do not believe primary mental illnesses (aside from the aforementioned personality disorders) cause plagiarism. Plagiarism involves an internally logical thought process, a steady hand carefully putting together portions of copied information in a linear fashion; the product pretends to be an original completed written piece. Plagiarism is difficult to detect without someone directly pointing out the absent attributions and copied words.

It seems atypical to me for this deliberate, planned, coherent act of writing to be associated with the thought disorder and flight of ideas and ramblings of someone in the throes of acute delusional psychosis or florid mania. It is also atypical of the creativity and originality well-known to be associated with some people with mood disorders (including famous artists and writers), who tend to have no trouble coming up with their own ideas and material, and if anything, seem the least likely types to merely copy someone else’s work.

[Do Not Read]

I woke up at 2:34 a.m. when the nearly unbearable headache I developed two days ago turned into an unbearable headache.

[Do not keep reading this. It is not interesting.]

The pain is spreading down my back now, too. I know there are bigger problems in the world, but this is my immediate problem. Tylenol does nothing for this pain. Massage, creams, ice. Nothing. Meditation nothing. Distraction nothing. Writing nothing. Sleeping nothing.

[Seriously, why are you still reading this?]

It actually gets worse with sleep, this pain, hence my no longer being able to sleep. I feel like my head weighs too much. I need flying buttresses or similar architecture to help hold it up.

[Here comes a not-so big insight.]

Oh, this is from my posture when I use my phone. I’m using my phone right now. I’m making things worse. I literally need to shape up.

[I warned you about how this boring post was going to be boring.]

I don’t wanna sit up straight. I love my bad posture. I love my phone. So pretty. So bright. Thank you for coming to my Ted Whine. It’s like a Ted Talk only whiny.

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.