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296 13 “Mental Hospitals Are Again under Fire” The mid- to late 1940s was a difficult time for state institutions. They were barraged by a series of exposés and attacks. COs, literally outsiders to mental hygiene and psychiatry, brought public attention to conditions at individual institutions and eventually to the entire institutional system. The Life magazine and PM exposés of 1946 were followed by the publication of Frank Wright’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind in 1947. Albert Deutsch was not only a muckraker but a keen reporter on the history of mental illness and mental deficiency as well. Deutsch credited the National Mental Health Foundation with starting a “new crusade” to reform state mental hospitals. Like Maisel in his Life article, he introduced the NMHF by dissociating himself with the pacifist views of COs: “Much as we might disagree with the attitudes of the conscientious objectors who refused to bear arms or otherwise participate in World War II in defense of their imperiled country, we must admit that large numbers of them acquitted themselves most creditably in various types of humanitarian service.” He explained how the COs were appalled by the conditions they found, documented their observations, and then created the National Mental Health Foundation: “This group has worked up a file of reports from scores of mental hospitals that prove conclusively that brutality and neglect are by no means rare. This file constitutes a damning indictment of our institutional treatment of the mentally sick.” Deutsch singled out individual leaders of the national foundation for their enthusiasm in organizing citizens and psychiatrists, sending out information, and publishing “a lively little periodical called The Psychiatric Aide.”1 The COs led the most organized efforts to draw attention to conditions at state mental hospitals in the mid- to late 1940s, but they were not alone in exposing institutions. In his PM series and subsequent book, The Shame of the States, Deutsch wrote about not only Byberry and Cleveland State Hospital but a broad range of state and city institutions at which COs had not served: Manhattan, Rockland “Mental Hospitals Are Again under Fire”    |   297 State, Pilgrim, and Brooklyn State Hospitals in New York; Letchworth Village, a “village for the feebleminded” in New York; Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York; Detroit Receiving Hospital in Michigan; Napa State Hospital in California; and Milledgeville State Hospital in Georgia. Conditions at the institutions were depressingly familiar: terrible understaffing and overcrowding; infectious diseases , vermin, and parasites; injuries and abuses; and restraints. Only Brooklyn and buildings set aside for a U.S. Army hospital at Pilgrim were offering therapy to any but a handful of patients. Time reviewed Deutsch’s Shame of the States book in a December 20, 1948, article with the title “Herded Like Cattle.”2 Deutsch was merely one of a number of journalists who published in-depth exposés of institutions in the mid-1940s. In The Shame of the States, he rattled off the names of investigative reporters who had “enlisted in a long-range crusade to civilize the state mental hospital system”: Walter Lerch of the Cleveland Daily Press, who has crusaded tirelessly for decent state hospitals in Ohio. Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, who has done an outstanding job on the state hospitals of Illinois. Al Ostrow of the San Francisco News, whose series on California’s mental hospitals of his state were reprinted and widely distributed by his paper as a public service. Mike Gorman of the Daily Oklahoman of Tulsa, whose series on the mental hospitals of his state were likewise reprinted under the title, “Let There Be Light.” Marge Whitmore, who graphically portrayed Hawaii’s Shame in 1947, L. D. Parlin of the St. Paul (Minneapolis) Dispatch, and others who are taking up the torch in many other parts of the country to cast light on the darkest recesses of institutional life. To this journalistic fellowship, one must add Albert Q. Maisel, whose picture story on America’s Bedlams in Life magazine in 1946 attracted wide attention.3 Like Deutsch, Mike Gorman remained active in the field of mental health after the publication of his exposé. He would later head up a new national mental health organization in the 1950s. Gorman did not set out to expose Oklahoma’s institutions . He had become a reporter in 1945 after his discharge from the army. In 1946, his publisher at Oklahoma City’s Daily Oklahoman asked him to investigate complaints the paper had received...

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