Explore Human Rights - Asylum Stories and Patients' Rights

"'I had a good name before': Asylum Stories & Patients' Rights in New York State"
Monday, March 28, 2022, 6:00-7:30 p.m. EST

In the early 2000s, walking the overgrown cemetery of Willard Asylum, with its anonymous, numbered markers, one would have never known that more than 5,000 patients were interred on the grounds of the institution, which is now abandoned. In a sense, though, this process of loss of memorialization is echoed in the complaint of a Willard patient — "I had a good name before, but it is sullied now, incomplete, and forgotten." Between familial shame, a focus on the illness rather than the person, and, in some cases, abuses, mental health patients are often made voiceless, especially when they become synonymous with their illness, and their larger personal stories disappear. Michel Foucault remarks that in an effort to verbalize the pathological, the 19th century gave birth to the asylum as a place where silence, surveillance, and all-powerful doctors completely alienated and invisibilized patients. What would it mean then to give voice to those patients—to give them back a (good) name? This panel examines how psychiatry dehumanized patients and offers a re-consideration of the history of mental illness in the context of patients' lives and rights in New York State.

Dr Peter Stastny, a patients rights advocate and psychiatrist, is the author of the seminal The Lives They Left Behind, which looks at the content of abandoned suitcases found at Willard Asylum in 1995 and attempts to reconstruct and thus re-humanize some of the patients of the institution.

Actress, director, writer, and educator Elizabeth Mozer is an associate professor in the Theater Department of Binghamton University and the author of a one-woman play The Asylum Project and of the play Castle on the Hill, both based on stories of Binghamton Asylum patients.

Organized and introduced by Dr. AC Sieffert, Romance Languages & Literatures

Zoom link: https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/93393554228
Meeting ID: 933 9355 4228
Sponsored by the Human Rights Institute; Citizenship, Rights, and Cultural Belonging TAE; the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures; and the Department of Theatre

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Co-hosted with: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Department of Theatre, Human Rights Institute (HRI)