Transcript
Will James (0:00)
Lost Patients is about serious mental illness. This episode mentions rape and suicide and includes descriptions of surgical procedures, so it might be disturbing for some listeners. One day, three generations of women rode through Seattle in a car, trying to help one of them remember. Carrie Davidson was in the backseat. Carrie's mom was driving. And in the front passenger seat was Carrie's grandmother.
Carrie Davidson (0:29)
My grandma has dementia. She just turned 95. We had taken her out, driving her around Seattle, like to the places where she used to live, just trying to jog her memory and get her talking. Something came up about my grandpa, and I said, gosh, I wonder what his mother's name was. And she pipes up in the front seat, she sits up, she goes, lillian Massey. And I was like, okay. I had never heard that name before.
Will James (0:58)
Lillian Massey, Carrie's great grandmother. With that recovered memory, suddenly, a fourth generation of Carrie's family appeared in that car. For Carrie, it was a revelation. Carrie knew her grandfather had been adopted, but it was so long ago, in 1925, she didn't think she'd ever know who his birth mother was. He struggled with alcoholism when he was alive. His kids struggled, too, in different ways, as if an unhealed wound was passed from one generation to the next. Carrie thought knowing more about Lillian and why she put Carrie's grandfather up for adoption might reveal where that wound came from.
Carrie Davidson (1:39)
I was like, I'm going to find her. And so I joined Ancestry and started looking, and I found nothing. Nothing, nothing. I searched for her and it kept kicking me over to another website and pulled up her death certificate. They had what I had never been able to find, and that was like our first substantiation, that she was a living, breathing person and she died in January of 1934. And. Sorry. And it said that her death place where she lived was Northern State Hospital. What the heck is Northern State Hospital?
Will James (2:31)
Carrie would soon learn. Northern State Hospital is tucked in a lush valley encircled by gray mountains, a couple hours drive north of Seattle. For more than half a century, it was a psychiatric hospital, but it's been abandoned for a long time, closed by Washington State in 1973. Before then, tens of thousands of people passed through this compound, many of them from Seattle. Thousands died here. Today, it's mostly a ruin. Northern State Hospital is how psychiatric care used to look in the US Sprawling campuses of ornate buildings where people spent years or decades under the care of psychiatrists and nurses employed by the state government. At one point, at their peak, half of all hospital beds in the US were in these institutions. This is the memory that hangs over the system we have today like a shadow. So much of what we've built in the past half century Is in reaction to hospitals like Northern state. The answer to the question of why people in mental health crises today get lost. This is where it starts. When you talk to people today about these old psychiatric hospitals, you, get one of two responses. One is that these were hellholes. Patients were warehoused, neglected, forgotten, abused, experimented on, and we were right to shut them down. But these days, you also find people who are nostalgic for these asylums because at least there was somewhere for the most seriously mentally ill people to go that was not the streets. At least the state took responsibility, real responsibility, for their care. For Carrie, learning Lillian's name in the car that day sent her on a journey that lasted years. She started hunting down every scrap of information she could find that could help her imagine what her great grandmother's life was like at this asylum in the valley.