A good potential Reclaim the Records project...
The only thing my father ever said about his Italian immigrant family was that his parents died in the 1930s, shortly after arriving at Ellis Island.
Except they didn’t.
In the 1940 Census, they turn up at the Rockland Insane Asylum.
Here’s a short description from The Abandoned Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, NY is Now the Stuff of Nightmares by Jinwoo Chong.
The semi-abandoned Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, NY, formerly Rockland State Hospital, was one of the many asylums built during a particular time period in American history that sought, at least at first, to approach mental illness with spaciousness and tranquility. Opened in 1931, like most, it fell as treatment evolved from an agrarian philosophy to the use of more controversial methods. In addition, several unique cases of negligence and patient death marred its reputation.
At the start, it contained over 5,000 beds, and by 1959 was treating over 9,000 patients with around 2,000 on staff. Even with 2,000 staffers, however, the hospital languished throughout the two World Wars when doctors and nurses kept getting drafted to the army. Reports showed 300 patients assigned to one psychiatrist, at one point. Most patients alive today, many of whom comment with their own stories on blog posts and web tours of the abandoned hospital, reference some forms of treatment that would be considered abusive today.
Discovering what actually happened and why is the core of my book, Immigrant Secrets.
I encountered many helpful people and institutions during the journey to unravel this tale.
But there remains one source that WOULD have been useful that continues to be denied to me – their health records.
I initially tried to request their records from various NY state agencies, thinking this would not be difficult since I was the nearest living relative of my grandparents. I did so both directly and through Freedom of Information Act requests but ran into brick wall after brick wall. The refrain was always the same. Per the New York State Office of Mental Health, if you are a family member of a deceased patient, you can request information if:
You have proof of the patient’s permission prior to his/her death.
It is relevant to your own health and is requested by your physician.
You are the executor of the estate and have included a copy of court papers.
Have written consent from the executor.
Which, of course, means that for the most part, no one who cares about these records can actually access them.
Along this journey, I ran into hundreds of tragic stories of other people whose deceased relatives had been institutionalized long ago in the New York Mental Health system and had been systematically denied any information about what had happened to them. And that’s just in New York State. The same pattern is true in just about every other state in the country as well.
All in the name of a misguided and antiquated concept of privacy.
This might be a good project for the Reclaim the Records folks.
