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The event coincides with National Mental Illness Awareness Week (Oct. 4-11) with this year's theme of "Building Community and Taking Action."
"The installation events on Sunday will be particularly meaningful for the Grave Concerns Association (GCA) because for the first time descendents of multiple former patients will be present," GCA Chair Laurel Lemke said. GCA Vice Chair Carol Slaughter added that the publicity about the group's work this year has sparked an increasing number of inquiries from families who lost track of their relatives after they were sent to Western.
Three patients will be singled out for special honors on Sunday. They are Mary Beran Hart, Michael Wutz and John Krause, all with families expected to attend the ceremonies.
Lemke said Hart's story was especially poignant. She had been brought to the hospital for post partum depression and died there in 1914, unattended by family or friends. Recently, Lemke helped two great-granddaughters -- Mary Gosselin of Tacoma and Marjean Galbraith of Cushing, Minn. -- search through the graveyard, finally locating her burial site in a wooded area of the cemetery.
They marked her No. 1300 gravesite that day by outlining it with small rocks. On Sunday, this time surrounded by family members, the site will be remarked with a stone crafted by Premier Monuments. It includes her full name, date of birth, date of death and a cross to remember her Catholic faith.
The Grave Concerns group was originally organized after a rededication ceremony in 2000 for the old cemetery in Fort Steilacoom Park during Mental Illness Awareness Week that year. Four years later, the group was instrumental in changing a state law that required the hospital to use only numbers on the gravesites of patients buried there.
"The Legislature's decision to change the law effectively ended an era in which the stigma of mental illness prevented identification of mental patients who died," Lemke said. "We feel what we are really doing is restoring these individuals’ histories as well as their identities. They were real people, with real lives and, in some way, we're giving that back to them and their families."
This will mark the fifth family-initiated event that Grave Concerns has arranged since 2004 and the third installation work event this year, building on the support of the Greater Puget Sound Consumer Coalition and the state's federally funded Transformational Mental Health Project. Those who attend the ceremony on Sunday will be asked to help install 30 additional markers with patient names.
Among those expected to attend are representatives from the Pierce County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the NAMI-Citizens-Guild, Rose House, TACID Mental Health, OptumHealth Public Sector, Pierce-RSN, Mental Health Action and Western State Hospital Local 793. The event is free and open to the public.
Lemke said the Grave Concerns group will provide some digging equipment to install markers, but that volunteers are urged to bring work gloves and their own shovels.
Other upcoming events:
ASSIGNMENT EDITORS:
For additional information or directions to Sunday's dedication, please contact Laurel Lemke at LEMKELA@dshs.wa.gov
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT NATIONAL MENTAL ILLNESS AWARENESS WEEK:
www.nami.org/NavigationMenu/Campaign_for_the_Mind_of_America/Mental_Illness_Awareness_Week/MIAW_2009_Building_Community,_Taking_Action_.htm
FOR ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND, CONTACT:
Jim Stevenson, Communications Director, HRSA, DSHS, 360-725-1915 (Pager: 360-971-4067).
DSHS does not discriminate and provides equal access to its programs and services for all persons without regard to race, color, gender, religion, creed, marital status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, veteran's status or the presence of any physical, sensory or mental disability.