Total institutions – asylums, prisons, the military and the like – fundamentally re-form their inmates, distancing them from the world outside. Here we see how this persists even after death, a product of neglect and willful stigmatization of the mentally ill, even as dis-Ability advocates fight against the injustice and indignity. -Jeff

On any given summer afternoon, light traffic hums along Route 62 as local teenagers armed with beer, and families with stocked picnic baskets, travel for a day of whitewater rafting, swimming, hiking, and waterfall-jumping in Zoar Valley, New York, a state park located thirty-five miles south of Buffalo. Few notice the grassy field where hundreds of people were laid to rest without dignity. I had made the trek from Buffalo to Zoar Valley several times each summer for nearly a decade, and never noticed the cemetery of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center (GPC) on Route 62. It is easy to miss: the grave markers lay flat against the ground, with no sign marking the site as a cemetery. To any car cruising past, the space looks like an open pasture amongst the vast surrounding farmlands.

The prisoners of the Collins Correctional Facility, the institution that now owns the property, occasionally mow the cemetery. Riding mowers glide over the field of flat nameless grave markers, with little further maintenance from those mandated to tend to it. But as graves are tended, they are also destroyed. The combination of the weight of the mower and poor drainage had caused many gravestones to sink into the earth. Nothing, then, marks the final resting place of the nameless former inmates of GPC.

The Gowanda Psychiatric Center, a total institution housing people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, opened in 1898. The residents, under supervision, grew their food, prepared their meals, and buried their dead. GPC was an example of what Erving Goffman studied as a total institution: the patients slept, played and worked enclosed within the institution’s high walls (1961:5). Every part of their lives was contained in a finite space with clear boundaries—boundaries within . . .

Read more: In Death as in Life: Stigma In and Beyond an American Total Institution