Maybe like me you’re not only interested in finding immediate solutions for your depression problems. Of course that is important, but maybe like me you appreciate a wider perspective as well. For example by taking a look at the past.
We cannot just learn from the past. As I happened to illustrate in my previous post, we can also recognize the life and personalities of psychiatric patients from long ago. Their times and situation and treatment (if any) may have been different, but in essence they were people like us, with problems not really different from our own.
If you share this interest, then here is a remarkable photo project. It’s not just unique: in some respects it’s very touching as well.
What is this photo? It shows some things found in a suitcase.
When in 1995 the former Willard Asylum for the Insane (Ovid, New York) was closed down, in one of its attics about 400 forgotten suitcases were found. They once had belonged to patients, from the 1920s to the 1960s. The suitcases complete with their contents had been left behind after people died, went back home or were transferred to another place. Rather than discarding all unclaimed suitcases, the staff had carefully kept them in store.
In 2004, the New York State Museum in Albany opened an exposition showing a few of them: Lost Cases, Recovered Lives: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic.
One of the people visiting this exposition was photographer John Crispin. He was fascinated enough to start an ambitious long-term project to carefully photograph everything – all those suitcases and what was in each of them.
Each one of the suitcases is a kind of time capsule, so each one of Crispin’s suitcase photos is a very specific, detailed, clear document of the past. At the same time his photos show, through the filter of semi-random trivial objects, what’s been left of these patients’ lives.
Crispin photo’s are respectful, and carefully composed, but they also become more mysterious the longer you look at them, because of all the unanswerable questions that arise, all the untold and perhaps tragic life stories that they suggest.
When I saw these photos I really felt a strong urge to rummage around in those suitcases myself, to find out more about the people who once arrived in the asylum carrying them.
I discovered Crispin’s photo project thanks to a recent Slate post by David Rosenberg, who shows some more photos.
But the best place to go is Jon Crispin’s own blog where he reports about the progress of his Willard Suitcases photo project, with many more photo examples. Do take a look!
There’s one more question that Crispin’s suitcase photos made me ask myself, and that I want to ask to you now.
Suppose you were to leave behind one such small suitcase yourself? As a time capsule for your great-grandchildren, to be opened 80 years from now?
Just a modest little suitcase with some simple small essential things that you would take on a trip, things that may represent you even when you’re long gone yourself: things that will show a glimpse of your life – with the people you loved, the depressions you suffered from, the way you tried to care for yourself, and so on.
Besides your obvious smartphone (and a battery charger that hopefully will work 80 years from now) what little things would you put in that suitcase?
Do you see? When you get this far, Crispin’s project may even tell you something about yourself.
As promised when I posted a 
This portrait here is not Emily Autumn, who is filling the rest of this post.
“Hi! You know, I’m getting used to these interviews! You really do a wonderful job telling people about my work here! Now first of all, do you remember that last time, I introduced you to our therapeutic concept of NUMB meals? Those unidentifiable meals where patients won’t get any clue about what it actually is they’re trying to eat? Well in the meantime, with full support of our management and marketing divisions, I’ve been able to develop NUMB into a regular product, complete with registered trademark. We’re already selling the concept to more hospitals than you’d care to know. It’s a tremendous success and I’m very, very proud to have a share in it. I refined and streamlined the whole thing, too: we can now use the very same basic recipe every time – for daily variation, we only need to mix a few color additives that give those same foodballs a slightly different look every day. Simply super. You really should give it a try; maybe later on I can still serve you the meal that you missed last time?”
“What you see here is the room of a patient who arrived only a couple of days ago, so she’s still in the process of building her own informal environment. But as you see, she has already managed to leave quite a personal touch. And by doing so, she’s gradually re-discovering her own valuable identity: re-establishing the lost core of her own individual personality, so to speak. All by herself! Starting from nothing at all! Every time I see them achieve something like this, I’m deeply moved, I can tell you. Now you wonder why there’s hardly any furniture in here? That’s simply because she hasn’t had time yet to explore our Furniture Repository.”
“Our patients are invited to go through the stack and borrow whatever they think would fit in their room, anything that can help them feel at home. Furnishing their own hospital room is of course also a stimulating, challenging activity in itself. And there’s more! If you want to shlep a heavy soggy armchair to your room, of course you need to ask some other patients for help, so it’s a great social stimulus as well! Once again, in fact we all benefit here: for from a budgetary point of view… But let me stress that as always, therapeutic considerations come first. Now let’s walk on to the lavatory arraignments, shall we?”
“Same story here: I hope you’re not going to find this a bit, um, Dull… ha-ha. Again that familiar homely atmosphere where we offer as much activities as possible to the patients themselves. Toilets, wash basins, shower cabins, it’s all there for the patients, so we leave it to them to discover they still should regain some kind of responsibility of their own. Beginning to understand that cleaning themselves also means cleaning things themselves. Feeling just a tiny bit responsible again is one of the many small stepping stones of the long staircase up towards recovery. Absolutely. Works in wonderful ways. Yes you noticed? We also let them wash and dry their own clothes if they need to. All by hand, naturally: repeating some simple physical activity is just another great stepping stone in our therapeutic trajectory.”
“Ah yes. The people who are afraid of mice. I can tell you, for those patients who couple their depression or other psychical problems with some kind of phobia, our Mice Project works in even more positive ways. Due to the number of mice in our wards, a confrontation with them simply cannot be avoided. So after the initial phase of sheer panic or feeling afraid and repelled, this in fact confronts such patients with the actual roots of their irrational fears or repugnance. Because they cannot stay clear of the mice, in due course they are forced to come to terms with them – and thus, to re-orientate themselves and at the very least begin to accept and control their panic and fear. And the long-term exposure to our mice will gradually teach them that all their fears are actually unnecessary and unfounded.”
“Of course this kitchen is not for actual cooking. We get our hot meals delivered from the hospital’s central kitchen; more about that in a minute. The one thing this kitchen is used for most often, all day long, is simply to fetch a cup of coffee. From the machine over there in the corner. Shall I get you one? Sugar? Whitener? Now please tell me what you think of our coffee.”
“The plastic cup. Yes. Let me explain. As you know, most patients feel bored most of the time. So they often get themselves a cup of coffee just out of boredom. It’s part of their Kill-The-Time strategy. Take a guess, how many cups of coffee will an average patient have in a day? You’re not even near. It’s thirteen. So we cannot use real coffee cups: the dirty cups would pile up all over the place and we would lose a lot of time just washing them. Besides, a real coffee cup can break. Some patients might even break them on purpose, leaving a trail of dangerous shards. So plastic cups it is. But we make sure our patients re-use the same throwaway cup several times. How? Well, about half past ten every morning, we simply remove the entire plastic-cups-stack. We make sure that for the rest of the day, no new clean cups can be found. Nowhere in the entire ward.”
“By the way, I hope I don’t need to explain the absence of any sharp kitchen knives? Fine. Then let’s take a look at what’s on the table over there. This is the bread we use for breakfast and lunch. No ordinary bread, I assure you. We would never allow your regular white or brown bread in here, whole wheat bread least of all. No, this bread is custom-baked for us here in the hospital. Just feel one of the slices! Yes this is it: the one and only original Sponge Bread. Sooo soft, sooo spongy, it feels as if it might melt away in your mouth, hardly a need to chew, almost like you could just as well drink it.”
“My name is Dunstan Dullish. Nono, not Dulles. They always get that wrong. Dullish. I Ess Eych. I am the Adjunct Background Facilities Coordinator here, for the entire Dullville Hospital Psychiatric Department. What I do is I manage the patients’ in-house experience. This is of vital importance so I am very happy, yes, really happy that you give me this opportunity to tell a bit more about my expertise and responsibilities. My job may be little known but it should not be taken lightly. I love it. Okay now, shall we? For a start, take a look around in this Unit Day Room here. Actually we call this the Living Room because we want to make our patients feel a little at home. Make them feel comfortable. Cozy. What I absolutely try to avoid, is that sterile clean-shrubbed clinical hospital atmosphere.”
“See the dimmed, soft, natural colors? The maintenance-free witherproof greenery? The vomit-resistant but still comfy armchairs? I can assure you it’s all very carefully chosen, up to the smallest detail. We literally do everything to pacify them. Everything. Though in fact of course, you know as well as I do, this is no Living Room at all. This is more like a Waiting Room. What we see here all day long, well into the evenings, is patients hanging around Waiting. Just Waiting. That’s pretty much all they do. They will sit waiting for their turn with the Adjunct-Assistant Psychiatrist, they wait for their supervised walk in the garden, they wait for their daily shot of Prostratebam or Effexorelse or Sanerexcept, they wait for a call from home, they wait for their Group Talk Session, they wait for my lunch rolls. They sit waiting for hours.”
“So we have them kill Time. Big Time. This cabinet over here? Our Games Cabinet. We have social games such as Monopoly, competitive games such as chess, and concentration games such as jigsaw puzzles. Altogether nothing special you would say, right?”
“Do you see that old TV over there? Do you wonder why it’s so small, why no widescreen? Well this forces patients to drag their chairs close together right in front of the set, so in effect this enhances the group experience of watching TV. To prevent channel-choosing conflicts, we make sure there is just a limited number of safe channels. Safe meaning not-disturbing, of course. Like, we block NGC because of their Airline Disasters. We block CC because of their cynical, subversive South Park cartoons. Sweet things like Little Lost Doggies, that’s what we go for.”
“Even more important, yes absolutely essential is, of course, we always take care the remote is either missing or broken. And if some wiseguy… well, we just flip out the battery again. For them, this means less unexpected channel switches, and a little more physical challenge.”
“Now here is the reading corner. One of my prime concerns. Having too much choice can be daunting, so we keep the number of books limited. Naturally, visual, superficial, easy content is best. You know, a coffee table book about Castle Ruins in Scotland, that sort of thing. Anything that will distract them, that they won’t easily contaminate with their troubled minds. Take this big one with Garden photos: just what they need. Although you never know for sure, I’m sorry but that’s the way it is. A really depressed patient may see horror even in the most innocuous things.”
“As you can guess our budget is limited so for actual reading matter, we depend mostly on what’s been left behind by patients themselves. Dog-eared novels, self-help literature, you name it. Once in a while we’ll do some screening, weed out the less desirable things. And of course that same little games trick works with books too: just tear out a few random pages. Works about the same way. Stimulates emotions but also imagination. Though I must say, some patients won’t even notice when there’s a page missing.”
“Now what I’m really proud of, is our magazines service. I developed a truly cost-effective solution here that works out great in several ways. You know, with magazines, you need variety and circulation. Sure there still are hospitals that keep using the same old little stack of torn-out Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, NatGeo, Cosmo issues for years on end – they don’t really do anything about it, though your average patient will be through with the whole stack within a couple of days. I would never allow that kind of negligence here.”
May 22, 1859 –
