Clergy Identify and Memorialize The Psychiatric Dead

As reported in the Advocate

It will take another 11 years to finish this quest to bring a measure of dignity to those buried in Connecticut Valley Hospital's cemetery, to put a face on 1,670 faceless dead from decades past, 100 names at a time. As they have each May since 1999, the Rev. John C. Hall and nine other Middletown clergy members recently gathered for a memorial service at the old cemetery off a gravel road on the grounds of CVH, the state's first and only remaining public psychiatric hospital.

On this day, the names of the dead in graves 500-599 - the markers bear only a number that corresponds with a death registry - were read one by one, each followed by a blessing. The clergy, a few in flowing robes starkly white against the aging stones, moved from marker to marker, their progress matched by a couple of dozen onlookers.

Bob Byrnie stooped and placed a white rose at each marker. His grandfather, a carriage painter named James Byrnie who suffered from lead-poisoning dementia, is buried here. His grandfather died in 1906. It was not until 1997, after an exhaustive records search by Bob Byrnie and his sister, Anne Grace of Cromwell, that James Byrnie's fate was learned. "To put a face on those buried here - it's just a wonderful concept. I look forward to coming each year," Byrnie said. [...]

Until the mid-1950s, the dead at many of the state hospitals across the country were buried under small, numbered markers. The stigma of mental illness was that great. In later years, it was thought that state confidentiality laws prevented the hospital from identifying the dead. The names would surface another way: In the late 1990s, Wesleyan graduate student Ben Holder found a list of the dead at Russell Library. Then in December 1999, the state attorney general concluded that because the deaths preceded the state's 1969 confidentiality law, it would not be a breach of privacy to name the patients now.