The Latest on the Dialogues on Mental Health Records Project

This post was guest authored by Lorrie Dong, Ph.D. Dong is an independent preservation and archives consultant in Washington State. She completed her Information Studies masters and doctorate at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation and post-doc work were focused on the historical mental health records at Central State Hospital in Petersburg, VA.

 Begun in 2025, the Hogg Foundation’s Dialogues on Mental Health Records Project is providing a groundbreaking platform to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and sharing public mental health records through a series of nationwide convenings. To date, we have held five virtual meetings attended by over 100 stakeholders in the management of historical health records. Participants have included archivists, historians, genealogists, descendants, hospital administrators and staff, and mental health consumers, including former patients. Many participants identified themselves as belonging to multiple stakeholder groups.

Meeting with Stakeholders

In June and September of 2025, we met virtually with state and university archivists and historic preservation administrators. Our discussion focused on disparities in access to mental health records because of users’ socio-economic statuses and inconsistencies of privacy and access laws in place across the country. Participants also discussed the tension that exists between balancing their respective duties to state entities and to archival users.

In June and October of 2025, we met with researchers. The diverse group, which included genealogists, academics, historians, family members, and mental health and disability advocates, discussed several aspects of health information laws that make their work challenging. Specifically, they noted the laws’ variability, transience, and restrictiveness.

In July of 2025, a small number of hospital staff convened with us. This group, which included school of medicine professors, state hospital historians, and healthcare patient privacy officers, spoke of the difficulties in adequately caring for and providing access to historical medical records at their facilities. They also contended with the challenges of how to build strong, consistent relationships with archivists.

At present, we are conducting outreach with former mental health patients in Central Texas through an online survey and one-on-one interviews led by a peer support specialist. We are also continuing to offer online surveys for descendants and hospital workers to better understand their relationships to these records.

On the Horizon

This year, we will be hosting a series of virtual presentations by various groups and individuals from across the country who are engaged with issues of preservation and access to historical mental health records. Finally, we will be hosting an in-person symposium in Austin on September 24-25, 2026. We look forward to gathering enthusiastic individuals from across all stakeholder groups who would like to share their experiences, engage with those who may have differing perspectives, and tackle some of the biggest challenges to the management of historical health records.