Concluding her series on mental health and homelessness, our columnist metaphorically walks the grounds of a moldering Phoenix cemetery – and picks through several decades of neglect in the psychiatric hospital next door.
Not long ago, I was driving to Tempe from Downtown Phoenix with a colleague. We’d just finished interviewing a man living in a shelter, for a project on homelessness. “Let’s take Van Buren back to the office,” I said.
My colleague gave me side-eye. He’s in his early 20s and grew up someplace else, but he knew Van Buren Street in East Phoenix – once the epicenter of the city’s prostitution industry, and still one of its most blighted roadways – hardly amounted to a scenic tour. Not in a traditional sense, anyway.
“Look,” I said, motioning north as we approached 24th Street. “That’s the Arizona State Hospital.” The fence and foliage obscure any kind of view, but if you pay attention, it’s clear that this is some sort of locked facility.
“What is it?” my colleague asked. When I told him, he didn’t believe me. He probably never even considered it a possibility in today’s world – that people are locked in mental wards in the middle of the city. We’ve talked plenty about mental health issues, but always in the context of the people living on the street or in the community.
I wish I’d had time to take him to my newest discovery, the Arizona State Hospital Cemetery, just south of the ASH complex on Roosevelt Street. No one’s been buried there for decades, and it appears it’s been that long since anyone bothered to take care of the narrow plot of land. There’s a plaque at the front, but most graves appear unmarked. Even if there were grave markers, you likely wouldn’t be able to see anything because the space is covered in dead yellow grass.
The friend who showed me the cemetery is obsessed with the stories of the people buried there, and I agree – it’s fascinating to fall down the findagrave.com rabbit hole. ASH patients were buried there in the 1800s, before Arizona was a state, and if you’re lucky, someone may have posted a newspaper snippet (and I do mean a snippet, usually just a couple lines) about what happened to a particular individual.
Like Mrs. Catherine Clark, who died in 1891 and was buried in what was then called the asylum cemetery. “Mrs. Clark is the woman whose husband was killed in a mine accident at Tombstone a short time ago. The shock unbalanced her mind, and she became so violent that it was necessary to bring her to the asylum,” according to one citationless news clipping.
The website also mentions an emancipated Southern slave buried in the cemetery. Other entries describe an 11-year-old boy and a girl who was locked up because she had
“epileptic fits.”
One man, Miguel Acedo, died at the hospital in 1936. He was either 58 or 59 years old – his birthday was unknown. The only details listed: “Male/Mexican/Married.”
Willie Bloomfield died at ASH in 1920 at age 16. A relative posted an account of his life based on conversations with other family members, saying she knows he was a handsome young man who loved gardening.
“Dad said that for some reason Willie was upset over something and one of their neighbors passed by the house and reported to the authorities that Willie was throwing one of his fits. Dad called this particular lady a ‘busybody who had her nose in everything.’ Dad said that after this report that Willie was taken from the family and put in a state hospital. Dad said that the family used to go visit Willie in the state hospital until someone at the hospital told them to never come back.”
I admit I spent an entire afternoon reading entries about people long dead and gone. But really, what haunts me is the thought of the people who are living at the state hospital right now.
Like the woman who – decades ago, after begging many times for mental health treatment and not receiving it – lured her three children into a shed and set them all on fire. She survived, along with one son. And she’s lived at the state hospital ever since.
Attorney Josh Mozell has represented her for 10 years. “Her day-to-day at the hospital is sitting in a gray unit with a semi-lit hall wandering around and maybe watching a video, having a social worker say hello to her, seeing a doctor once a week or so, and that’s her life,” he says. “It speaks to this absolute lack of care or attention to this person at the state hospital. These are the kind of things that would drive anybody mad and create massive waves of depression.”
Perhaps worse, he says, hospital staff have forced his client to visit shopping malls and other public spaces in the name of community re-integration, even though Mozell’s fairly certain she’ll live out her days at ASH.
“She has been severely burned over most of her body, and she doesn’t want to go out into public,” he says. She’s embarrassed.
It’s not just that ASH can be a violent, unsafe place, Mozell says. Life is just generally unpleasant. That’s particularly crushing when you recall that this is not supposed to be a prison but instead a place where patients are rehabilitated. Once upon a time, Mozell says, the grounds were green, and patients worked in gardens.
But now when he visits, the only plants he sees are dead. “The dead tomato plant in the planter is the best representation of what society thinks of the state hospital. It’s just left to die. And everybody that’s there is left to exist in that dying institution.”
There are few windows – real or metaphorical – into the hospital. But you can listen to the recordings of the monthly meetings held by the state-appointed ASH Independent Oversight Committee to get a glimpse of what life inside is like. Committee members don’t have much power, but they can make site visits and ask a lot of questions. They also hear from patients.
Among recent patient requests: a mirror in the gym; permission to purchase more than two snacks a day from the vending machine; access to New York Times bestsellers.
One committee member advised a patient to write down their concerns. Writing materials are hard to come by, the patient replied.
In August, a male patient joined the meeting with his own long list. He expressed concern about an ongoing situation with a staff member he wasn’t getting along with, and discussed what he sees as flaws in the grievance process.
But he spent most of his five minutes on simple quality-of-life issues that most of us take for granted.
“Four of the seven toilets on our unit do not have seats on them. So, you have to sit on the bowl itself. I don’t feel that’s very sanitary. And water gets all over your behind and you get all wet,” he told the committee.
The trash cans reek of sewage and need to be cleaned with bleach, he said. The washing machine smells like human feces. The law library consists of two books. It felt like the patient was just getting started when the committee chairperson stopped him
mid-sentence.
“You’re over time. Sorry.”
