www.suitcaseexhibit.org/indexhasflash.html
Around a year ago, this exhibit came to a local gallery in Syracuse. I just found the website and it is impossible to describe it in a few words. I strongly encourage you to take a visit into these 10 peoples lives. I don't want to raise them to the level of untouchable heros or pitiful martyrs. They were simply people, most misunderstood, who lived out decades in locked state mental wards.
In the mid-1990s in the tail end of deinstitutionalization, the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital was closed for good. In the attic, workers uncovered perfectly preserved time-capsules...the patient's belongings they brought into the hospital. These were the lives they left behind when, most against their will, they entered the state facility.
Dedicated research pieced together these 10 life stories and are now available. So go, read, consider how our country, our society, has treated mental illness in the past...then make the connection to how we treat mental illness currently.
Do we see people with mental illness as valuable to society?
Do we value them even when they are still suffering from their symptoms?
Are we scared of people that aren't like us?
Do we dig deeper, or make easy assumptions?
When does a diagnosis become low expectation?
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