MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — While a new documentary chronicles the unique history of Central State Hospital, its creators believe that it can also serve as an important component in mental health discussions that are very much relevant today.
“Central State Hospital: An Oral History” is a film by Daniel McDonald, Stephen Price Jr. and Joe Windish that has been more than a decade in the making. Its origins trace back to 2009, when the U.S. Justice Department reached a settlement agreement with the state regarding conditions at Georgia’s seven psychiatric hospitals that led to major changes in the way the state operates its mental health care services.
“The timeliness of the effort was what drove it…,” McDonald said of the film. “I think locally for Milledgeville, that is really commonly thought of as the time of the most recent great downsizing of Central State Hospital where it did shed a number of programs to get it down to the place where it is now.”
McDonald worked as a local and state government reporter for The Union-Recorder during that time and had written several articles concerning Central State Hospital, including that landmark settlement that fell under his reporting beat. Later, though he was then working at Georgia College’s Russell Library, he still had a great interest in talking to people who knew Central State Hospital as it was historically to mark that time of great change in the institution.
“I was just following the ongoing story from a reporter’s perspective,” he said.
Price was a professor in the college’s mass communications department at the time and quickly grew interested in the project as well, working to recruit a filming crew and getting his students involved. Soon, crews began shooting videos of the buildings and grounds while McDonald worked to set up interviews. He wanted to talk to as many people as possible who could provide insight into the hospital at the time as well as employees and other related individuals who could speak to the 100-plus year history of the institution. Interviews were shot between 2010 and 2015, and the end result was about 30 hours of raw footage and thousands of still photos.
Windish, who is retired from Georgia College’s Russell Library, served as editor for the film, and his main involvement began years after the interviews were shot. He had the hefty task of condensing those hours and hours of footage into the story they now tell.
“The issues are absolutely alive and the same today,” Windish said. “We are still dealing with it… [The film] documents the history, but that history is so telling in terms of where we are still dealing with mental health issues… It’s an important topic that is still relevant today, and this history can inform the issues as we look at them today.”
Price said that through the project, he learned so much about mental healthcare in America.
“This is something that affects all of us,” he said. “Central State has its own story and its own history, but the people that lived there, that worked there, that were treated there, that’s our neighbors, that’s our family. It’s easy to look at mental health care and [say], ‘Oh, that’s somebody else’s problem. I don’t want to have to deal with that,’ but public policies and tax dollars and our own compassion really needs to go into that as well… I think the film brings to light an issue that all of us should pay attention to.”
McDonald said he is appreciative to both Windish and Price, as well as to Kari Brown, who served as public affairs officer at the hospital, and to the many who shared through the interviews. He said the film itself is another chapter in the ongoing effort to try to understand what Central State Hospital means to the history of mental health care in America and the state and the role it played as a major institution in the city of Milledgeville and the surrounding area.
“It was important for me to do this because we were watching a major piece of history unfold right in front of our very eyes, and it wasn’t just one event but kind of a culmination of humanity’s efforts to care for one another when someone has a mental illness that they are facing,” McDonald said. “It really speaks to, in my opinion, human nature and how we care for one another. I think to a certain extent up until that point, a lot of that history, at least in the United States of America, was experienced at that hospital, and there were few other institutions across the country where you could look at our efforts to care for people when they have a mental illness that would have so much of that history longitudinally as Central State Hospital did.”
“I hope the takeaway is that we need to continue to do better in caring for our brothers and sisters who may at some point in their life have a mental illness and know that we ourselves could be in that same experience, and I hope that we would come together as a society to care for others the same way that we would hope to be cared for if we found ourselves needing that care,” McDonald said.
View a trailer for the film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQfOQ84uMs
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