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Current Projects: Social Justice

It is not enough to focus on issues of individual recovery. We must also be concerned with collective recovery or the process by which we, as people with disabilities, strive for a just society in which we have the opportunity to participate fully as citizens. We must take a stand against the forces that oppress and silence people with disabilities: poverty, discrimination, lack of employment and educational opportunities, self-serving bureaucracies, and dehumanizing clinical practices. We are all connected and as long as one person is oppressed, none of us are free.

Cross-disability rally at Tewksbury State Hospital.
We are human beings!

Below are descriptions of some of the social justice projects we are currently involved with.

State Hospital Cemetery Restoration: From Numbers To Names

All across the United States there are forgotten cemeteries at state hospitals. Historically, people who died at state hospitals and whose remains were not claimed by family or friends, were buried on the grounds. Most state hospitals buried former patients and marked their resting place with numbered markers. Patient confidentiality and tight budgets often comprised the rationale for burying people in this way. Over time many state hospital cemeteries fell into neglect, and were subsequently forgotten.


A 1923 burial at the former Goldsboro State Hospital for the Colored Insane in North Carolina		A numbered marker at Danvers State Hospital, Massachusetts 1999.		A burial at Topeka State Hospital in Topeka Kansas.

In 1997 Pat Deegan stumbled upon two abandoned cemeteries at Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts. Small, round, numbered markers lay beneath jungle-like overgrowth and the state had lost all record of the names of those buried there. Pat organized a group of ex-patients who called themselves the Danvers State Memorial Committee. Over the next five years this grassroots organization successfully restored the cemeteries and replaced names with numbers.


The ex-patients who worked to restore the state hospital cemetery		Justice: From numbers to names.		With Love We Remember Your Names: A wall-of-names remembers those people for whom we could not locate the exact place of burial

For a detailed review of the campaign to restore the cemeteries at Danvers State hospital, as well as information about the national movement to restore these cemeteries, click here http://dsmc.info.

African American Perspectives on the History of Mental Health Services

Pat Deegan collaborated with Vanessa Jackson on a project titled It’s About Time: Discovering, Recovering and Celebrating Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient History. As part of that project Vanessa researched and wrote a groundbreaking manuscript titled In Our Own Voice: African American Stories of Oppression, Survival and Recovery in Mental Health Systems. The manuscript includes an overview of the legacy of segregation and racism in American mental health systems, oral history, and suggestions on how you can get started collecting the story of “living historians” and survivors of the mental health system.

State hospital patients “loaned out” to local
farmers to help pick cotton

Click here to download a copy of Vanessa’s manuscript.

Vanessa and I also collaborated on a project documenting the history of racially segregated asylums in the United States. You can download a copy of the cultural competence toolkit titled, Separate and Unequal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Psychiatric Hospitals.

You’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the manuscript. If you don’t have it already, you can download it for free by clicking here.

Native American Perspectives on the History of Mental Health Services

Pat Deegan collaborated with Pemina Yellow Bird on a project titled It’s About Time: Discovering, Recovering and Celebrating Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient History. As part of that project, Pemina Yellow Bird researched and wrote a manuscript titled Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians. In this work, Pemina explored the little known history of the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians, established in the early 1900’s in Canton South Dakota. As an enrolled member of the

The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians,
Canton South Dakota, early 1900’s.

Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations, Pemina raises up the long oppressed voice of First Nations People in relation to the asylum. Ride with her in the back of a buckboard wagon as she imagines herself into the experience of a man or woman or child taken from home and incarcerated hundreds or thousands of miles away in the asylum at Canton.

Click here to download a copy of Pemina’s manuscript.

You’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the manuscript. If you don’t have it already, you can download it for free by clicking here.