Remains of 3600 former mental hospital patients found in Oregon State Hospital...

[student456]

Ok so this news story is about the Oregon State Hospital being torn down (the same place that the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed...but the article also says that in 2004 they found the remains of over 3600 former hospitalized pts there! ahhh I never heard about that - so sad! And seriously creepy too.

Taken from Associated Press at

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jDCpObMbMSrpnOFiuwxOaRelBPfwD91UEFG00

"Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn't get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.

"Nobody said anything to anybody," said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber "the room of lost souls."

The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions."

[student456]

Ok update:

I must have read too fast...for some reason I thought that the article I just read (which was posted on TIME as well as various other websites) meant there were skeletons in canisters from former patients...it is actually cremated remains in these tiny canisters that no one has claimed. Still sad though that they were left there and no family members have claimed them

More information from MSN on the cremated remains found in copper jars

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16675307/

[RN1982]

Hey that movie was great. Loved Nurse Ratchet.

[UM Review RN, ASN, RN]

So sad.

I hope those whose remains aren't claimed get a decent burial.

[3rdcareerRN]

That's not the only mental health hospital to have stored patient remains, although perhaps the most grim.

See: http://www.hhsc.state.tx.us/newsletter/NewsRelease/2005/05/050205_Forgotten.html

[DaMale Nurse]

At my work, Eastern State Hospital(one of Washington states mental hospitals) there are two large graveyards where pt's were berried from the start of the hospital 1889 to 1957. Most of the grave stones are pt identification numbers and there is a group that goes every summer for a couple of weekends to repair the graves, most of it is digging up the stones that have sunk several feet in the ground and trying to generally make the graveyards nice. They also try to get the family's of the deceased pts to let them make proper name stones for them.

[HM2VikingRN, RN]

In MN there is a very real movement to fully identify the remains and sites of graves on the Regional Treatment Center grounds. It is a simple matter of human dignity and respect for those who had some pretty horrible lives from a group of illnesses that were poorly understood.

Courtney wants the museum to include a display of ashes not yet claimed by relatives. "You've got to remember your past to make the future better," he said.

at http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jDCpObMbMSrpnOFiuwxOaRelBPfwD91UEFG00

[rnmomtobe2010]

I am at a lost for words....

[grace90, LPN, LVN]

I get a knot in my stomach thinking about how children like my mentally impaired son, 50-60 years ago, would have been abandoned into one of these institutions and never known love or a true family.