Dialogues on Mental Health Records

The Dialogues on Mental Health Records project is a platform to address the challenges of managing historical public mental health records through a series of nationwide convenings. These convenings will bring together people across regions, disciplines, and life experiences.

Historical public mental health records include administrative and patient records with identifiable health information about individuals from 50 years following their death. These records are crucial for family history research and our collective understanding of the historical impact of public institutions, but the records require careful management due to their sensitive nature.

Many state hospitals in the United States were established in the late 1800s and were often deeply connected to their local communities where people would live, work, and engage in recreational activities on the grounds. State hospitals were also at the center of many historical movements including segregation and desegregation, deinstitutionalization, major medical breakthroughs, and a social movement of people with lived experience with mental illness fighting for their rights. This complex social, medical, and political history is often flattened into ghost stories of haunted asylums, contributing to stigma against people who receive care in state hospitals.

A series of virtual meetings will be scheduled to take place over 2025, culminating in an in-person conference in Austin, Texas in the spring of 2026. These meetings will gather:

• Archivists;
• Historians;
• Researchers;
• Genealogists;
• Individuals with lived experiences in public psychiatric hospitals;
• Psychiatrists;
• Peer support workers; and
• Hospital administrators.

Participants will discuss what historical public mental health records should be preserved, how they should be shared, who should have access, and many other questions. Currently, there is no space to have these complex and sensitive discussions, and there are no frameworks for managing historical public mental health records that practitioners can directly reference.

The outcome will be a community of practice, and a comprehensive publication designed to facilitate ongoing dialogue among key stakeholders across the nation.

State School and Hospital Preservation: A Survey of the Field

This landscape analysis dives into the status of state hospital preservation work nationwide. With data on 372 historic state-operated mental health facilities and nearly 500 state hospital preservation projects, this report summarizes national trends in this complex field by identifying common strategies, frequent challenges, and potential gaps in state hospital preservation work.