Dorothea Dix Hospital 1960

There is a lot of information about Dorothea Dix Hospital.  

It was opened before 1850 and closed about 2000.

In an 1872 "Bird's Eye View" of Raleigh, the Dix Hill Asylum
(now Dix Hospital) was labeled simply
"Lunatic Asylum."
(Inset illustration in C. Drie,
"Bird's eye view of the city of Raleigh, North Carolina 1872."
from Learn NC, link below

But the most interesting information I gleaned from Katie Howell's death certificate is that she was either

1. taken to Dix Hill (as it was called) after she'd died at home, where the death was pronounced and the autopsy performed, or
2. she was already a patient at Dix Hill at the time of death.

If she died suddenly and was taken to the hospital on an emergency basis, I have no further questions.  Her death was sudden and unavoidable.

If she was already a patient at the hospital, there are a ton more questions I have.  Why?

Because Dorothea Dix Hospital was a mental hospital. 

Dorothea Dix Hospital Female Annex 1900s
"View of Female Annex, Dorothea Dix Hospital 1900.
From the General Negative Collection, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC."
from Flickr, State Archives of North Carolina

According to the Learn NC website,

"Traditionally, the mentally ill who could not be kept with their families became the responsibility of local government, and were often kept in common jails or poorhouses where they received no special care or medical treatment. Reformers sought to create places of refuge for the insane where they could be cared for and treated. By the late 1840s, all but two of the original thirteen states had created hospitals for the mentally ill, or had made provision to care for them in existing state hospitals. Only North Carolina and Delaware had done nothing."

"[In] 1856 that the facility was ready to admit its first patients. Dorothea Dix refused to allow the hospital to be named after herself, although she did permit the site on which it was built to be called Dix Hill in honor of her father. One hundred years after the first patient was admitted, the General Assembly voted to change the name of Dix Hill Asylum to Dorothea Dix Hospital."

Cherry Ames Rural Nurse 

On the wordpress site NC Archives, we find this information:

 

Dorothea Dix Hospital, formerly known as the The State Hospital at Raleigh, was named for Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), an activist who worked for improving conditions for the mentally ill in hospitals and asylums. Dix influenced North Carolina legislators to remove mentally ill inmates from prisons and to create a state institution where they could receive treatment. A location was chosen in the countryside a short distance outside of Raleigh, North Carolina . The first patient was admitted on February 22, 1856, and, fifty-one males and thirty-nine females were admitted during the next nine months. During the early twentieth century the hospital continued to add more buildings to the facility in addition to new patients. By the 1930’s there were over 2,000 patients. Situated on a 425 acre tract of land on the south side of the city of Raleigh, there are more than 120 separate buildings on the site, many of which were constructed during 1910-1930 and 1960-1980. The buildings are used for patient care, offices, shops, warehouses and other activities in support of the hospital. The photographs in this collection include images of the hospital’s buildings, facilities, staff, and residents. (1 box, ca. 3 linear feet.) 

This website includes some links that are broken, unfortunately.



From the Science Museum in UK, we find this explaination of women's mental issues in the 1950s and 1960s:

Feminism and Change:  Many women’s lives in the 1960s and 1970s were still organised around Victorian stereotypes of the loving mother and dutiful housewife. Women who did not behave ‘properly’ risked ending up in psychiatric care. ... Freud’s focus on sexual fantasies, and the fact that most of his patients were women, rehashed old ideas. It was similar to hysteria being labelled a ‘women’s problem’ that should be cured by finding a man.

Nurses and Mental patient

Patients discharged from the State Hospital in Raleigh suffered from the stigma associated with mental institutions, and having been a patient of that hospital.  In 1959 the name of the hospital was changed to the Dorothea Dix Hospital to honor Dorothea Lynde Dix.  It is incredible that legislators assumed that changing the name of the hospital would change people's perception of mental illness.

In the 1960s and 1970s North Carolina used federal funds to open a number of community mental health clinics to relieve the overcrowded state psychiatric hospitals. . As a result of these trends, a reevaluation and downsizing of the state mental health programs was undertaken. The populations of the four state psychiatric hospitals decreased from approximately 10,000 in 1964 to 2,700 by 1989. As patient populations continued to shrink at state hospitals, physicians began to offer more sophisticated treatments. Dorothea Dix Hospital, once the cornerstone of psychiatric care in the state, was scheduled to be closed in 2007. -- https://www.ncpedia.org/psychiatric-hospitals

The Questions

If Katie was in the mental hospital, it could be for a couple of reasons.  She could have genuine mental problems.  or she could have been sent there for some spurious reason.

Some reasons for admission to mental hospital include:

List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum
from the late 1800s
from dangerousminds.net

While this list is applicable for 1860s, I cannot find a list of reasons for a woman, a grandmother, to be admitted in the 1960s.  Author Wendy Wallace published an article about women's mental health.  She included an anecdote about her grandmother who, in the late 1960s, fell into serious depression after the sudden death of her husband.  She was too lonely and found it impossible to cope.  This is the ONLY story I found of this decade, and it makes me wonder if Katie was depressed?  Assuming, of course, that she was already a patient of the hospital at the time of her death.

In the late 1960s, my gentle grandmother was plunged into a serious depression after the sudden death of her husband from a heart attack. A daring and sporty young woman, who grew up in a lively family, she found the loneliness and grief of widowhood in her 50s unbearable.

1954 dresses, The News Herald, 10 December 1954, Newspapers.com

I was 11 or 12 when she became ill; the stigma around mental distress was stronger than it is now and my parents tried to protect me from it. But I noticed how Gran’s round shape changed to a drastically reduced outline and was aware of my parents’ worried conversations about her, of emergency phone calls and sudden dashes to see her in hospital, where, I later found out, she was admitted more than once after attempts on her own life.

My grandmother’s grief might today be recognised as such, and treated with bereavement counselling rather than being labelled ‘depression’, as it was in the 60s, and treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). However horrific the idea of ECT seems to my generation, which associates it with the shocking scenes in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, how much worse, I wondered, would her situation have been 100 years earlier. Anyone who could persuade two doctors to sign certificates of insanity could put away inconvenient or embarrassing relatives in a madhouse. Women – with lower social status, and usually less power and money – were more vulnerable. -- By Wendy Wallace

An Answer

I have contacted family members to find out.  I essentially crowd-sourced my question on FaceBook, knowing several Howell kin were my friends, or were my Dad's friends.  I wrote,

I am a genealogist/Family Historian. I'm looking for information regarding the death of Katie Watkins Howell, wife of Fristus Howell, North Carolina. If you have any information, reply here or in a private message. Thank you. Feel free to pass this request along to any family member who might be able to help.

Dad replied that Great Gramma died just after he and my mother married, and is buried in the same Howell Family cemetery that her husband Fristus Howell and my grandmother Lois Howell Vidunas are buried.

A cousin added "She had an aneurysm. Died at Dorethea Dix hospital from what I’ve been told."  Dad didn't know this information.

I then asked if she'd been taken to the hospital or was she already there at the time of her death.  Cousin replied that she'd had an aneurysm and died at Dorothea Dix Hospital, had been staying at the hospital at the time of her death, and that she had had some mental problems in her later years.  

The Skirmisher, History of the United States by Ellis 1894

Dad mentioned that his grandmother had problems remembering things, of knowing what was going on around her.  I'm not sure what kind of mental problems she actually had, but I do know that her family was a loving family and they cared for her the best way they possibly could.  The doctors did not know very much about mental illness, what caused it, how it should be treated.  Even the definition of mental illness was debatable by today's standards.  I'm sure, if she were alive today, her treatment would look entirely different due to the research scientists did in recent years.  Mental illness is just as debilitating as physical illness is.  It can sap the vitality right out of you, and it takes a great deal of energy to get out of that great abyss.  Sufferers need lots of help.  From us all.

Credits

• Learn NC website
• http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4780
• Science Museum
• http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/menalhealthandillness/womanandpsychiatry
• dangerousminds.net
• http://dangerousminds.net/comments/list_of_reasons_for_admission_to_an_insane_asylum
• State Archives of North Carolina, Flickr
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/6238475302/
• Wendy Wallace Article "Sent to the asylum: The Victorian women locked up because they were suffering from stress, post natal depression and anxiety"
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2141741/Sent-asylum-The-Victorian-women-locked-suffering-stress-post-natal-depression-anxiety.html 
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Resources of interest
https://www.flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/page5