Listen

Overview

Listen to conversations and re-enactments based on primary archival materials related to the mid-twentieth-century history of Morningside Hospital and the Alaska Mental Health Act. You can hear letters from members of Southern California women’s clubs, objecting that Congress is planning to send their husbands and sons to a gulag in the Alaska wilderness; minutes from meetings where psychiatrists discuss whether a long-term patient will be able to survive outside the hospital; and diagnostic debates about whether a patient has, following psychoanalysis, an underdeveloped ego or, in accord with the then-brand-new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a mood or brain disorder.