Mysteries of Mental Illness

The civil war ravaged America. It siphoned resources and drove thousands of traumatized people to a asylums, like the one in Mississippi. Like many institutions in the state, it suffered in the immediate post-war period. There was overcrowding and under-resourcing, and it was almost immediately overwhelmed by the need to care for the mentally ill. After the war, in Mississippi's segregated wards, black patients were often forced to sleep on the floor, and they died at twice the rate of whites. Over decades, some 30,000 patients came through, many never left. The asylum's cemetery was only recently discovered. In the fall of 2012, construction work was happening on the University of Mississippi Medical Center's campus. And they stumbled upon a burial. In total, 68 human skeletons were excavated from the site. So we used ground penetrating radar to map out where burials might be in the remainder of the area. We've estimated approximately 7,000 burials on the site. There are no institutional records that allow us to determine with any certainty who is buried in what particular part of the cemetery. Of the 7,000 burials, not a single one has been identified. And there's no trace of the grand Kirkbride asylum that once stood here. But records in the state archives reveal why many were admitted and how many died. Be careful with them. Yes Do you want to follow this one? Yeah, sure, so let's see who this is. This would be John Ross, and he was a farmer from Holmes county. Chronic mania, and then Is the form of mental disorder? Is the form of mental disorder. The assumption was that people would recover quickly and be able to be released. Here's the dementia praecox, which is now called schizophrenia. Epileptic mania, acute mania, recurrent mania, depressive mania. But there were extremely limited treatment options so a lot of these people were going to be there for the rest of their lives. Here's a man named Willis Barns, and my goodness, he had 20 kids. And the reason he was admitted was worry. Hardships outside the asylum often lead people to its doors, and poor nutrition was one common culprit. A lot of people who were involved in cash crop agriculture, so primarily cotton production, were not able to produce agricultural products in their farms that they could eat. And instead they were dependent on what they could buy, which was primarily processed corn meal. Those really protein deficient diets resulted in pellagra, which is a vitamin B deficiency. Pellagral insanity, died from pellagra. Huh. Pellagra could lead to dementia and was a common cause of admission and death. Everybody on this page died of pellagra. It wasn't exactly what caused pellagra, but it wasn't something that could be effectively treated. So this is quite a run here, we have syphilis, syphilis, unknown, TB, tuberculosis, and syphilis. Nearly a quarter of asylum patients had syphilis, the sexually transmitted bacterial disease, a leading cause of psychosis. Then their form of mental disorder is acute mania. The increase in cases of syphilis into the early 1900s is really, really dramatic. And you would not have recovered from this disease. So we have kind of burgeoning populations in all of these asylums, and an inability to provide caretaking that is necessary for them. Here's a teacher from Warren county, which is Vicksburg, and her form of mental disorder was nymphomania. Patients could be admitted if a family member merely claimed they were insane and two physicians backed it up. She was there for 11 years, 6 months, and 20 days and then she died. The idea that people could die in institutions and just be buried there without any public accounting, without any public awareness, and that these stories could be unearthed many, many decades later highlights one of the fundamental problems with asylums. People were literally out of sight, out of mind, and in many instances, forgotten.