They offered little mercy to women-often throwing them to the wolves waging war on the “epidemic of hysteria.” Agnes was depressed by the harsh treatment of women that she witnessed in these facilities. Degradation and humiliation of female mind and body.Īgnes spent her early years training in some of these most firmly established hospitals, run and dominated by men. To Agnes, the atrocities inflicted upon women in standard medical environments of her time, such as Cooke County Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, were painfully obvious. With private rooms and private routines, Agnes’ early vision of healthcare for women was a forerunner to a more modern, thoughtful, idea of mental health. The dancing woman, listening for guests unseen, wistfully serves the decaying grounds and spirits of Rockhaven Sanitarium in Glendale, California.Ī small force of volunteers tend to the sanctity, the sanity, of the shuttered and aging sanitarium.Ĭreated by Agnes Mary Richards in 1932, Rockhaven Sanitarium was the first of its kind-intended to support the female “insane” and mentally afflicted in a cloistered, homelike environment.

Color furniture contrasts time-bleached, outlived walls of contamination and crazy. Soundless cries still echo in empty halls, palpably silent. Shards of sunlight slash worn, trodden floors. Saturated colors, red, green, blue, bleed through peeling whitewashed layers of decay and denial and decay again. MEMORIES ARE LIKE GHOSTS AND GHOSTS ARE MEMORIES TRACING THE RIDGES AND EDGES OF OUR MIND’S ABILITY TO OPEN WIDEĪ woman, dancing haunted, haunting steps, washes decades-dirty floors with attention and care.

Glendale sanitarium