Books

Praise for The Lives They Left Behind

"…A fascinating…glimpse into a closed world, where "incurables" were sent as a last result, with no expectation that they would ever return to society. The haunting thing about the suitcase owners is that it's so easy to identify with them." — Newsweek

"In their poignant detail the items helped rescue these individuals from the dark sprawl of anonymity." — The New York Times

"[The authors] spent 10 years piecing together a handful of poignant biographical narratives, tracking down medical records, talking to former staff and using artifacts from the suitcases as clues to the lives these patients lived before they were nightmarishly stripped of their identities." — Newsday

"As we have yet to provide a full measure of support and treatment to men and women diagnosed with mental illnesses, The Lives They Left Behind offers a sobering reminder of past tragic errors, lest, in our search for new therapies, we lose sight of what should matter most: our sense of common humanity." — Drew Days III, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law at Yale Law School, former Solicitor General in the Clinton Administration and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Carter Administration

"No reader will walk away untouched by these compelling portraits…." — Ronald Bassman, Ph.D., author of A Fight to Be: A Psychologist's Experience from Both Sides of the Locked Door

"An important and profoundly moving story…. The exquisite details we learn about the patients' lives—the color of lace on a dress, a plea to a bishop, the photo of a wife who died—convey the particulars of their humanness, their strengths, and their tragedies, and a chapter revealing sad and frightening parallels between long-ago and current treatment of many people called mentally ill should shock us all into action." — Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., author of They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal

"Darby Penney and Peter Stastny have…performed an important service, reclaiming these individuals from the nameless, faceless fate of being only 'mental patients.'" — Judi Chamberlin, author of On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System

"In unpacking the prior lives stored in these suitcases, Darby Penney and Peter Stastny turn remembrance into an act of alchemy." — Kim Hopper, Ph. D., author of Reckoning with Homelessness

"A stunning achievement…." — Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America

"A unique and mesmerizing evocation of lives erased… at once unnerving, heartbreaking, and a bitter testament to an era in psychiatric history whose legacy is all too present today." — Gail A. Hornstein, Ph.D., author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

The Lives They Left Behind - Paperback

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

By Darby Penney and Peter Stastny, with photographs by Lisa Rinzler

Price: $14.95 Trade Paperback
13-digit ISBN: 978-1-934137-14-7

"The Lives They Left Behind is a deeply moving testament to the human side of mental illness, and of the narrow margin which so often separates the sane from the mad. It is a remarkable portrait, too, of the life of a psychiatric asylum--the sort of community in which, for better and for worse, hundreds of thousands of people lived out their lives. Darby Penney and Peter Stastny's careful historical (almost archaeological) and biographical reconstructions give us unique insight into these lives which would otherwise be lost and, indeed, unimaginable to the rest of us."

--Oliver Sacks, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Columbia University Artist, and author of Musicophilia

Now in paper back, this is the acclaimed portrait of institutionalized patients whose abandoned possessions recall their lost lives.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients' belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

Publication Date: January 2009 / Pages: 205 / Trim Size: 6 x 9