Before Olmstead...
Before Olmstead...
By Talley Wells
This year is the 15th anniversary of the Olmstead Decision, the US Supreme Court's landmark ruling that declared people with developmental disabilities have the right to live in the community rather than institutions. The Atlanta Legal Aid Society and Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities (GCDD) have teamed up with many others for a year-long celebration that includes an "I am Olmstead" campaign to tell the stories of men and women freed from years in institutions and nursing facilities.
As part of the campaign, I am writing four articles on Olmstead: Before Olmstead; The Olmstead Case; Since Olmstead and The Future of Olmstead. Over the course of 2014, each article will be featured in the Making a Difference magazine and I will reflect on the lessons, promises and the unfinished business of the Olmstead Decision.
When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) published its "Hidden Shame" series in 2007, it exposed shocking incidents of unnecessary deaths and abuse over a five-year period at Georgia's state hospitals for people with mental illness and developmental disabilities. The larger reality was much more devastating – this five-year span was only a small segment of a timeline of abuse, isolation and neglect that stretched out over more than a century.
Even those who did not experience maltreatment suffered harm. As the United States Supreme Court explained in its 1999 Olmstead Decision, unnecessary confinement in institutions is disability discrimination for two reasons; it creates the perception that the men and women in institutions are incapable of being part of the community. It also "severely diminishes the everyday life activities of individuals, including family relations, social contacts, work options, economic independence, educational advancement and cultural enrichment." In short, institutionalization deprives citizens of their most basic rights.
The good news is that the era of institutionalization is ending. There is a seismic transformation happening in Georgia and throughout the US for people with disabilities and for all of our communities.
The 19th century world of institutions, segregation and hopelessness, which still has vestiges throughout our State and country, is crumbling. While we have not yet arrived, we are moving into a 21st century world of independence, inclusion and opportunity.
A major step in this transformation occurred when the Supreme Court declared in Olmstead that most individuals with disabilities have the right to live in the community rather than in institutions.
In 2009, the Today Show reported that approximately 30,000 graves, most of which are hidden or unmarked, are scattered in the fields of Milledgeville, GA holding the remains of men and women who had been confined at Central State Hospital. Central State was the largest campus of eight hospitals across the State that held people with mental illness and developmental disabilities. In the 1960s, over 12,000 men and women were held at Central State. Today, the most visible marker of these lives lost to neglect
and isolation are the numerous shuttered brick buildings languishing on the road to the few buildings that remain active.
Central State opened in 1842 after the Georgia Legislature passed a bill creating a "State Lunatic, Idiot and Epileptic Asylum." Over time, thousands of men and women were sent to live there. For many, the experience would include confinement, improper care and long or permanent separation from loved ones.
Throughout the 1900s and early 2000s, investigation after investigation found incidents of abuse, maltreatment, overcrowding and unnecessary deaths. According to a history written by Andy Miller, in as early as 1909, investigators found that Central State was a "death trap." Similar findings would be made in almost every decade that followed. In 1960, Jack Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on multiple problems in the State's mental health hospitals, including doctors experimenting with unapproved drugs and at least 12 of 48 doctors having serious alcohol problems. From 2002 to 2007, the AJC's "Hidden Shame" articles reported that the state hospitals had 115 suspicious deaths.
In addition to isolation and confinement, hundreds of people with disabilities were sterilized at Central State Hospital and at Gracewood Hospital in Augusta, GA. The first sterilizations occurred in Milledgeville in 1938 after a bill allowing such sterilizations was passed by the Georgia Legislature in 1937. When the bill passed, the AJC stated in an editorial that the bill was the "scientific and humanitarian method of checking the increase in insane, feebleminded, physical, human derelicts."
It would be after over 100 years of institutionalization of people with disabilities that the Olmstead litigation would take place. The case would become the Brown v. Board decision for people with disabilities, guaranteeing for most the right to not be segregated in institutions and the right to live integrated lives in the community.
But Olmstead did not take place in a vacuum. Prior to its inception, a number of lawsuits and other actions were brought up on behalf of people in institutions to return them to the community. The State also began closing some institutions for financial reasons.
Families of people with disabilities often opposed the closings because they believed their loved ones were secure and content in the institutions and did not trust what would happen to them after the closings. Also, vehement concerns were raised over the loss of
jobs for those who worked in the institutions.
It was in the midst of both this long history of institutionalization and the din of voices concerned about hospital closings that the Olmstead litigation would take place. As with Brown v. Board of Education, Olmstead would not end the discrimination
and segregation. But it would begin the era in which we are today of tearing down institutions and slowly building up communities that are integrated and inclusive.
It is taking way too long, but we are on our way.
