Anonymous No Longer at St. Elizabeths

National Memorial to Honor Psychiatric Patients Buried in Unmarked Graves

As he walked through a cemetery filled with more than 4,000 unmarked graves, Patrick J. Canavan, chief executive of St. Elizabeths Hospital, said he and his colleagues were making a major step to correct decades of wrong.

"This is about respecting people who are the aunts, uncles and grandparents of my neighbors in the District of Columbia, who have never been recognized in their death [but] were part of this community," Canavan said.

His comments followed a service last month at the Southeast Washington campus, where mental health professionals from across the country remembered the unnamed people buried at their institutions.

In almost every state is a cemetery like the one behind St. Elizabeths, because at one time patients sent to government psychiatric facilities were admitted with no expectations of ever leaving. But in recent years, a coalition of mental health providers has launched an effort to build a national memorial on the grounds of St. Elizabeths to stand for the thousands of patients who died at such facilities.

"This memorial sanctifies and makes holy the grounds where people were forgotten and buried away silently but are now being brought to visible attention," said A. Kathryn Power, director of the Center for Mental Health Services for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "The importance of this memorial is that it is a national symbol of the fact that people with mental illness, at all times, should have the opportunity to live where they choose, to get the treatment they choose and to be in partnership with the people who are helping them with their journey to recovery."

During a memorial service in the chapel of St. Elizabeths, a marble marker was dedicated. It reads, "I must fight in the open," the words of Clifford W. Beers, a young Yale graduate who in 1908 published an autobiography about the abusive practices of a mental hospital in Connecticut. He later founded Mental Health America, originally known as the National Committee for Mental Hygiene.

Stephen T. Baron, director of the D.C. Department of Mental Health, said that, for too many people, "when you checked into a state mental hospital, you didn't check out until the time of death. And in this facility, if you were not in the military, there was a high likelihood that you would have been in an unmarked grave."

Baron said St. Elizabeths was selected as the site of the national consumer memorial in recognition of its historic leadership in moral treatment for people with mental illness. "The Gardens at St. Elizabeths -- A National Memorial of Recovered Dignity" will be woven into the cemetery on the hospital grounds, where more than 4,500 patients are buried, along with several hundred veterans of the Civil War.

The memorial will include metal markers surrounded by gardens and a pool of water representing those buried in hospitals from throughout the country, including in the District.

During the program, Phyllis Cureton, chaplain for St. Elizabeths, sang "We Are Standing on Holy Ground," and Pam Thomas, who has been treated at St. Elizabeths since 1972, read a poem that moved some people to tears:

Every one of us, with dignity and respect, would want the world to bury us, when life's end we've met. That is why this call goes out to rally around this quest. Let's give these souls what they deserve. This really means our best. And if the voiceless people happen from the grave to cry, are given a voice by those who live we never could deny. For we too have had no voice, we have suffered much as well, we've come together on this day, and this is oh so swell.