"There is nothing more frightful....

than ignorance in action." Johann von Goethe, German writer

For a person living with serious mental illness, there are very few thoughts more horrific than that of the insane asylum. For many reasons, (reasons enough for an entry on its own) the insane asylum of legend is a thing of the past, but not so distant past. This is a picture of a window in the interior of St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, D.C., formerly known as the Government Hospital for the Insane. Out of this very window gazed the brilliant poetic mind of Ezra Pound from 1946 - 1958. In my "Stigma Busters" email today from NAMI I read an extremely unfortunate article about a man named Joe Jordon, who bought an abandoned psychiatric hospital in West Virginia. He is planning to use the property as an attraction for such things as a "Hospital of Horrors" at Halloween, and to build a "Pyscho Path" for dirt bike races. To use hundreds of peoples' tortured pasts as a method to make money and get laughs is incomprehensible and deplorable. And it brings up something I read last week from the AP. Ghost hunters in Iowa have been given the go-ahead to spend one night in a one-time insane asylum to check for spirits or other bizarre happenings, even though there have never, ever been reports of such in this building. Their only basis for choosing this building as a site to hunt for paranormal activity is its past with housing the "insane." I find this an insult of great magnitude! Are crazy ghosts a bigger fish to show off than a ghost with a past of tuberculosis or polio? And to put a face on the effects of stigma associated with mental illness, my grandmother's blatently obvious mental illness has gone untreated even till this day. She is 78 years old and lives in hell and so do those who attempt to have a close relationship with her, b/c she refuses any psychiatric help. I see my own past's tortures reflected in her eyes when she talks in circles, each sentence more nonsensical than the last. Thanks to NAMI and all the people who fight each day to live with dignity and defiance of the labels others have thrust upon us. Stigma Busters!!!! jody