Finding Ourselves on Ward 81, 1976

“They are the women we might have been or one day become”

– Ward 81 by Dr Karen Jacobs and Mary Mark Ellen

Laurie in the Ward 81 Bathtub, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, 1976

In 1976, photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her friend, the sociologist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, documented the lives of women living in the high-security, all-female wing of the Oregon State Hospital in the city of Salem.

A year earlier, Mark had photographed there on the set of the Milǒs Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and had met several women who lived on Ward 81 of the hospital

This time, over 36 days they got to know the women and their lives in this world apart, recording their stories and photographing their existence. At night they slept in an empty adjacent ward. The result is an empathetic, compassionate and nuanced portrait of lives on society’s extreme. “They are the women we might have been or one day become,” says Jacobs.

The Cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Posing, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, 1974

“The women had very, very strong personalities,” says Mark. “Some of them were funny, some romantic, some social. You could label them just the way you might label your friends -this is the comedian, this is the romantic, this is the social one, and so on. The difference was that the feelings were so much more exaggerated. There’s no bullshit; the emotions are pure.”

– Mary Ellen Mark

Mona with Michael Douglas’s Picture, Ward 81, Salem, Oregon, 1976

Asylums offered a life with its own special protections and limitations, a simplified and narrowed life perhaps, but within this protective structure, the freedom to be as mad as one liked and, for some patients at least, to live through their psychoses and emerge from their depths as saner and stabler people.

In general, though, patients remained in asylums for the long term. There was little preparation for return to life outside, and perhaps after years cloistered in an asylum, residents became ‘institutionalized’ to some extent, and no longer desired, or could no longer face, the outside world.”

~ Dr Oliver Sacks

 

“I insisted that we not see the patients’ records, what they allegedly had done, any psychiatrists’ evaluation. We didn’t want to see what anybody was accused of, because these people were all put in by a judge who had determined that they were a danger to themselves or others. I wanted us to treat these people as people and be friends with them. To be honest, I think they were thrilled to have someone who was interested in them. The staff were just obligated to do these tasks, give them medicine, serve meals, et cetera … Mary Ellen and I didn’t have tasks except to hang out with the patients all day”

– Karen Folger Jacobs, Ward 81: V0ices

Mona and Beth in the Shower, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, 1976

in 1913, the hospital was officially renamed Oregon State Hospital. The board and trustees had petitioned for a name change prior; in an 1897 biennial report, it was noted:

[We would] also recommend to your honorable body that the present name of the institution, the “Oregon State Insane Asylum,” be changed to “Oregon State Hospital.” The disgrace felt by patients, as well as the humiliation of their relatives and friends, would be largely obviated by a correct understanding of the character and objects of the institution, and this would be conserved by the change suggested.

Mona, 1976

“We felt the degeneration of our own bodies and the erosion of our self-confidence. We were horrified at the thought of what we might become after a year or two of confinement and therapy on Ward 81”

– Mary Ellen Mark

Carol T in the Mirror, 1976

“Instead of the 1-2-3-4 of a picture story, I was interested in doing pictures that would stand alone,” she recalls. “Looking back now, I feel that the pictures are almost like a scrapbook, a memory of a certain time in my life and in theirs. I wanted to help these women make contact with the outside world by letting them reach out and present themselves. I didn’t want to use them. I wanted them to use me”

– Mary Ellen Mark

Verla in Her Room, Ward 81, Salem, Oregon, 1976

“Nobody did anything special for them. They didn’t have choices. They were deprived of a lot of things that we think of as normal”

– Karen Folger Jacobs

Laurie on Ward 81

Ward 81 ceased to exist in November 1977 when it became the female segment of a coeducational treatment ward.

Photographs: Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation