There are some things that are talked about and understood so much more now than they were in years past. When you are exploring your family history, you may find that there are ancestors that people are reluctant to discuss, or for whom many details are missing. It is possible that these ancestors may have suffered from a mental illness, for which they may have been hospitalized in a mental institution.
Mental illness was very much misunderstood until quite recently, if you look at it from a historical perspective. During the 1930’s, frontal lobotomies (removing part of the brain) were being performed as a treatment for psychosis. That would never happen today. The ways that we treat mental illness improved greatly around the 1950’s when some of the early medications were developed for the treatment of illnesses such as bipolar disorder. Prozac, one of the most commonly prescribed pharmaceutical treatments for depression, did not even exist until 1987.
When people from our families’ past behaved in a manner that their contemporaries were unable to understand, they were often labeled as “idiots” or “insane”. Court proceedings were held and the person suffering from the illness was ordered to be hospitalized. This means that there are court records that you may be able to locate if you know the state and county where your ancestor lived. Death records of institutionalized patients usually listed the informant as someone who worked at the mental institution, so that may be a clue to whether your ancestor had been living in a mental hospital at the time of his or her death. The institutions where the mentally ill lived out their days also kept records of their patients. While many mental hospitals have closed, there are a few that remain open and if you are lucky enough to get the hospital to release the records to you, you may be able to locate your ancestor’s hospital records and perhaps even letters that were written to them by other members of the family.
Our ancestors that suffered from mental illness are often not discussed as openly as our other ancestors. To learn more about these individuals, we may have to dig deep and search many different types of records. If we are persistent, though, we may be able to uncover the details of their life and the condition that affected them. They are, after all, part of the family and no less deserving of being included in our family history than those ancestors who had no mental illness.
Photo by Clarita on morguefile.com.