160 years later, activist Elizabeth Packard honored in place of
psychiatrist she exposed
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[August 10, 2023]
By JERRY NOWICKI
& MOLLY PARKER
Capitol News Illinois
news@capitolnewsillinois.com
In June 1860, Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard was committed to the
Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane in Jacksonville by her
husband, a Calvinist minister, for, in part, publicly disagreeing with
his positions on religion, women’s rights and slavery.
She remained there for more than three years under the care of a
psychiatrist who used torturous treatment methods likened to
waterboarding, and who collaborated in the imprisonment of women sent to
the center even in cases when they were not actually suffering from
mental illness.
Now, a state-run mental health center in Springfield – one that for the
past 55 years has been named for that psychiatrist, Andrew McFarland –
will be renamed in honor of Packard, whose meticulous notes brought much
of McFarland’s patient maltreatment to light.
“Today we are putting a spotlight on the real hero associated with this
institution,” Gov. JB Pritzker said before signing an order Wednesday to
change the name of the 120-bed mental health hospital. Packard, he said,
is “someone who, in truth, better expresses our proud history of
positive reform; someone who changed our world for the better.”
At the time Packard was sent to the asylum, it took little more than a
husband’s word to commit a woman – to essentially imprison them – for
months or years at a time, even if they showed no signs of mental
illness. After her husband, Theophilus Packard Jr., sought her
commitment, historical accounts say she was violently forced from her
home and put on a train to the facility.
A housewife and mother of six, Packard spent three years inside the
hospital in Jacksonville, about 30 miles west of Springfield, a facility
that closed in 2012. McFarland oversaw the hospital and perpetuated the
lie of her “madness.” He allowed her release in 1863 only after
declaring her “incurably insane.”
Instead of breaking Packard, the injustices she endured strengthened her
resolve. While confined to the facility, she documented inhumane
conditions and patient mistreatment.
For years after her release, she championed the civil rights of people
wrongly accused of “insanity” as well as those living with mental
illness. She traveled the country telling the story of her wrongful
imprisonment and authored several books. In 1867, she successfully
lobbied the state legislature to pass a law that afforded people accused
of “insanity” the right to a jury trial prior to commitment against
their will.
That same year, the legislature set up a commission to investigate
Packard’s and others’ claims against McFarland. That commission
recommended “an immediate change in the office of Superintendent, and
the correction of abuses shown to exist,” according to an account by the
Sangamon County Historical Society.
McFarland, however, continued to lead the facility until 1870, when he
founded a private asylum.
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Gov. JB Pritzker speaks at a news
conference in Springfield on Wednesday before signing an order to
rename McFarland Mental Health Center after Elizabeth Packard, a
woman who was committed into an Illinois asylum against her will in
1860.
Despite the legislature’s own commission detailing McFarland’s patient
mistreatment, lawmakers nearly 100 years later made McFarland the
namesake of the Springfield psychiatric hospital when it opened in 1968.
“With that designation, the state didn't just let Elizabeth down, it let
down millions of Americans struggling with their mental health,”
Pritzker said Wednesday.
Packard lived until 1897, spending much of her latter years caring for a
daughter who had mental illness – and ensuring she was not
institutionalized. McFarland died by suicide in 1891.
While several historical accounts have acknowledged Packard’s advocacy,
her story gained new life in June 2021 when it was featured in a
historical novel by bestselling author Kate Moore, of Cambridge, titled:
“The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for
Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear.”
At Wednesday’s news conference, Pritzker thanked Moore for her book. He
also credited Springfield resident Miranda Bailey-Peetz for launching a
petition drive to rename the facility, garnering hundreds of signatures.
In an interview with Capitol News Illinois on Wednesday via Zoom, Moore
said the idea for the book came from the #MeToo movement. She wanted to
explore the idea that women have historically been “silenced through the
false claim that we’re crazy.” In searching for a heroine for her book
on the internet, she stumbled upon a passage about Packard in a
University of Wisconsin essay about lunacy in the 19th century.
“And when I started looking into her story, I was like, ‘wow, she is the
one,’” Moore said, adding that she learned through extensive research
that Packard was fearless in her pursuits to help others but also
incredibly modest. Packard may not have personally sought to have her
name emblazoned on a building, Moore surmised, but she would have been
“delighted” to see McFarland’s name removed and that “the truth is
finally coming out.”
“I think she would be personally grateful that she and her work have
been recognized when, so much of her life, she was denigrated and dumbed
down. I think you would have to take pleasure in that feeling of respect
being shown to what you've dedicated your life to,” Moore said. “But I
also think she would say the work is not done.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news
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