A Field of Stigma

Photo Credit: Azam Hostetler

A couple of years back, my father and I were in Middletown, Connecticut — a place near where my father grew up and a place we frequent every now and then. We’d been up planting flags for Memorial Day at the veterans cemetery that morning, under the dreary haze of clouds. We ended up casually driving around the Connecticut Valley Hospital grounds afterward, and we took a turn down a side road along the edge of the property. 

Quite surprised were we, to see a forgotten grove of grass nestled behind a tree, littered with nearly 1,700 graves. These stones bear not names, but numbers. 

The Valley Hospital used to be known as the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane, established in 1868. The associated cemetery for psychiatric patients came ten years later, and patients would be buried there up until 1957. The reason why the graves only bore numbers? Confidentiality. Families were ashamed of their relatives with mental illness and in this way their identities stayed quiet, as did the talk of mental illness.

One would never know this cemetery was back there with how it was hidden. It felt wrong to see suffering covered up with only numbers instead of names for remembrance. At the same time, it could not be denied that there was a creepy, eerie sense about it. As if with the cemetery’s hidden geography itself, tucked away in the corner, I felt as if I was looking at something that I was not supposed to.

My paternal grandparents actually met at the hospital through employment. It was already called Connecticut Valley Hospital by then. My grandfather was a psychiatric aide who took care of the patients and gave out prescription medication. There were different wards and different buildings for different mental conditions. Some patients may have been violent or put into straitjackets, others were suicidal or needing help with daily hygiene. 

My grandmother, who went to St. Raphael’s School of Nursing, had to complete her training by rotating through state psychiatric facilities, one of which ended up being Connecticut Valley Hospital. So I guess one could say I’ve got a connection to this place, even if simply by family history.

The roots of the hospital’s 19th century practices reflect attempts for more humane treatment towards the mentally ill, making it a landmark institution at a time when many people were kept in jailhouses. However, stigma and shame was still strong. Hospitals back then, called ‘asylums’ used the then common practice of listing numbers on gravestones instead of names. Wealthier families may have their relatives buried at their own financial expense in other cemeteries, but via state expense, the less financially fortunate took this cemetery as their final resting place. 

I remember distinctly feeling speechless, as if there was not much to say. It is difficult to grasp the feeling of death, especially for myself who has been fortunately exposed little to it. If you’ve ever been to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, you’ll know the indescribable feeling with no name to it. You just keep looking at those white stones as far as the eye can see, expecting an answer or sense of meaning. I am not saying this feeling is the same, but with how hypersensitive I am it was hard to not feel heavy.

The good news is that in recent years they’ve been making public the names that those numbers represent. There are now several memorial stones at the front of the cemetery and I feel that it’s right to finally honor them. However, cynically it can also be said that we only have done this to make ourselves feel better about it. There is no way to make them feel better, but at least one can connect those numbers to names – even if mostly nobody remembers who those names represent anymore. 

Connecticut Valley Hospital remains to this day a state facility specializing in mental illness as well as addiction. It’s just that lonely field at the back still that sits there, full of engraved numbers. It wades through the rivers of time and history and begs the question, “what does it mean to be remembered?” 1458 isn’t a name. Nor is 815. These were humans once. How did they live on the hospital grounds? What issues were they dealing with? If they had any family, were they reachable? 

This hospital, it could be said, is a place that I have a connection to through my grandparents. I wonder what they would have thought about the cemetery, or how many people in their day paid this plot of land much serious attention.

Stigma, I believe, is usually invisible. It lurks in internal biases, stereotypes, and verbal words (or a lack thereof). Yet every once in a while, you get some shame so strong that it leaves a physical, historical mark. For once it’s a stigma that you can see with your own eyes and not just within the mind. And that’s not something you see everyday.

It goes to show that much has changed with mental health treatment and perception, yet in some ways not much has changed either. I think of how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go. We’ll all be forgotten one day we often forget, yet I hope the world does a better job of bringing honor and remembrance to issues like these, not just long after they happen, but as they do.