Generational Melancholia

Written by Paula Mock, with support from the DAC team

Content Warnings: Suicide, institutional abuse/trauma, details of mental health diagnoses

“Well, you know your great-grandmother had been in an institution in the fifties, right?”

My uncle Erich, my mom, and I were sitting around in Erich’s living room, surrounded by fancy furniture and glass figurines that I’ve always been afraid I’ll bump into and shatter. Uncle Erich is an antique dealer, and he lives in a small town in Illinois with his husband, both of whom smoke heavily (inside with the windows closed) and feed stray cats in the neighborhood. The experience of visiting their house each summer has always been something I’m unable to fully describe to anyone who hasn’t been there – eating rich German chocolate cake for my birthdays, going on sunset cornfield drives, and listening to stories of how much chaos he and my mom caused when they were young. 

On this visit, though, I went on our annual trip to the midwest with a renewed curiosity about our family history and a desire to ask more questions than I had on previous visits (as a sullen teenager). After some small talk and coffee and Sara Lee coffee cake, my mom brought up my involvement in this research project – which led my uncle to ask the question at the beginning of this piece. 

Edith Golden, my great-grandmother, was involuntarily committed to Camarillo State Hospital in the early 1950s, after she reportedly stuck her head in an oven in an attempt to end her life. Erich had kept (in true family pack-rat form!) all of the correspondence from this time between Edith, her daughters, Madelon and Arlene (both of whom seemed to fully support Edith’s indefinite institutional care), the Golden family’s lawyer, Donald Frey, and the doctors at Camarillo State Hospital. 

I spent the better part of that afternoon examining the handwritten (22 page) plea from Edith to her daughters for support, the chilly responses from her daughters, and Arlene’s account of Edith’s suicide attempt (this account is fairly different from Edith’s). 

Besides being physically and emotionally exhausting, this discovery also gave me a more personal perspective on the Mansfield Training School documents we had looked at in the Connecticut State Library in the previous few months. Although I had never even met my mom’s mom, my grandmother, let alone my great-grandmother, reading her extremely detailed and vulnerable account of being inside an institution made me feel closer to my family and the summer research project with the Mansfield Training School somehow.

I was born in 2002, and growing up as a female-presenting person, especially one who attended an engineering and science middle and high school, I’ve had countless moments where I’ve felt like I wasn’t being listened to, taken seriously, or understood. Reading Edith’s desperation at having no one believe her really eats at me – I’ve been in various mental health treatment settings for depression, anxiety, OCD, and a pretty debilitating eating disorder, and knowing that if I’d been more just decades earlier I could’ve gone through similar experiences is more than frightening. Being unwell and seeking help is hard enough in itself – combining that with a (valid) fear that you’ll be declared just another “melancolic” or “hysteric” woman and dismissed as crazy, it’s more than understandable how older generations of people, particularly women, tend to brush off mental health concerns in favor of toughing through it themselves. 

I’m grateful to have had access to safe, reliable, compassionate care options, but even today, many people who struggle with these (and similar) issues don’t have access to those kinds of resources. Care for one’s well-being, both mental and physical, should be universally accessible and affordable for anyone who needs it. 

For Edith, and for anyone else who’s suffered within the walls of an institution, I hope the conversations around the concepts of Disability, mental and physical otherness, stigma, institutionalization will continue, and that we will continue to work toward a standard of care that allows individuality, support, and kindness in the ways that each person needs.