LAMPHHS Education Committee presents
State School and Hospital Preservation: A Survey of the Field
Join the LAMPHHS Education Committee for an event exploring nationwide efforts to preserve historic mental health institutions and their records, highlighting the the common strategies and challenges of doing so without national standards.This presentation will look at nationwide efforts to preserve historic, state-run asylums "for the insane" and schools "for the feeble minded." Asylums (now state hospitals) and schools proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in every state in the country. By the 1960s, many of these institutions housed thousands of residents, and employed hundreds of staff, and maintained property the the size of college campuses. While more than half of historic asylums and schools have now closed, their legacy continues to shape urban space and psychiatric practice today. Yet, there are no national standards for how best to preserve these institutions, nor is there consensus on whether their records should be accessible. In the absence of authoritative guidance, preservation work is typically carried out on an institution-by-institution level. Using data from 372 historic mental health institutions and 500 preservation projects, this presentation will cover common strategies and challenges seen across the nation - with a special emphasis on the role of archives and records.📅 Date: May 30, 2025
🕛 Time: 12-1:30 PM EST
📍 Location: Online (Zoom)
Meet our Speakers!
Cash Kelly, MSIS (they/them)
Graduate Research Assistant, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at AustinCash Kelly is an archivist and researcher, whose research and archival practice focuses on madness, disability, and gender and sexual minorities. They received their Masters of Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin in May, 2025.
Elizabeth Stauber (she/her)
Archivist and Records Manager, Hogg Foundation for Mental HealthElizabeth serves as Archivist and Records Manager for the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. In this role, she collects, organizes, preserves and provides access to historically significant records produced by the Foundation over the last 85 years. She advocates widely for the preservation of mental health history and is the project director for the Dialogues on Mental Health Records project.