Tamao, Shuko (Author)
Rembis, Michael Allen (Advisor)
State University of New York at Buffalo
Rembis, Michael Allen
Publication date: 2020
Language: English
Physical Details: 228
This dissertation examines the memories of former asylum residents who were committed to American state-run psychiatric hospitals as patients between the 1940s and 1970s, the period characterized by the deinstitutionalization of asylum residents. In doing so, I introduce and examine two different modes of memories, collective and personal. The former asylum residents and patient liberation activists—who identify as consumers/survivors/ex-patients of psychiatry—used these two kinds of memory either as a platform to advance their political agendas or to navigate their lives in the community as former asylum residents. I demonstrate how they interacted with these two different modes of memory and explain how they shaped the history of state hospitals during that period. This dissertation considers former asylum residents as vibrant and essential, albeit not always equally empowered, political actors in the process of deinstitutionalization. The first-person narratives of asylum residents were excluded from historical inquiry because their testimony was regarded as unreliable, a stigma that stemmed from their diagnostic labels. However, historians of disability and madness have argued that scholars need to re-evaluate disabled or mad people’s first-person accounts as historical sources. In doing so, I investigate the memories of postwar asylums in the context of the postwar historic shift where an increasing number of former residents began re-examining their asylum experiences as a part of a larger story of liberation and empowerment of oppressed groups. This dissertation employs six oral interviews with former asylum residents. In addition to print and online sources, I have used a number of archival collections belonging to religious conscientious objectors, psychiatrists, journalists, and consumer/survivor/ex-patient (c/s/x) of psychiatry activists.
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