Dear Fellow Researchers, As the daughter of a person who has worked with the Georgia State Hospital, please let me clarify a bit about the nature of State Mental Hospitals. There are wards in these state hospitals for the criminally insane who were place in these instutitions by the courts. HOWEVER, the vast majority of the patients in various state hospitals were placed there by their own volition, or by their family or guardians. It was considered a disgrace by the sane members of a family to have someone who lost control of themselves under severe stress such as the death of a parent or child. Also the mentally retarded children were frequently placed in these hospitals even for mild Down's Syndrome. Manic depressives or those with bipolar depression ended up in these institutions. Many other people with less well known mental illnesses were place in these institutions because the wonder drugs of today had not been invented. The problem is that the families of such people were ashamed to admit that their child or family member was not sane. Therefore they "hushed it up" as far as family traditions and oral history is concerned. Today, we have better medicine and better means to help a person recover from most mental problems. However, we still have problems coping with our own feeling about putting our loved ones into "Nursing Homes" when they suffer old age dementias and Alzheimer's Disease. One must simply image that the same stigmas were much more prominent before 1970 to understand why everything was "hushed up" about persons with mental problems and depressions who were in the State Hospitals. I understand that the English Royal Family also had some dementia's in their line [King George III and others] and the same "Hush Up" occurred in that family as well. Now we know about this problem from biographers of the Royal Family and from recent plays about King George III. Sincerely Mary (FAY) Nelson 9