The Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex was the site of Mama’s two dozen plus psychiatric incarcerations. I have visited it three times in my life. Once, in 2001, when I went to retrieve her entire psychiatric record, five years after her death. I was young. It was terrifying. There’s a chapter about this in my book.
I visited two decades later, in August 2021. That’s when I first explored the County Grounds of Wauwatosa—learning of the long, vile history that preceded this place. These grounds had witnessed the rise and fall of buildings to warehouse the unwanted and undesirables of society going back to the mid 1800s. The Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex was built to replace the Dickensian 1880s era asylum that stood for nearly 100 years before it was torn down.
Mama had been locked up in the old asylum, too, before it disappeared in the late 1970s, leaving behind only faint marks on the grassy field behind a new apartment complex to hint at its former, behemoth existence.
I wrote about First Lady Rosalyn Carter visiting the then-brand new Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex in 1980—a fact I’d discovered in the newspaper archives last summer, but with no details about what she’d said. Then, by some wild coincidence, some small miracle, last week I found an article embedding the video of the dedication, which had just been put online a few months ago.
At the end, after admitting that “most mentally ill” people should receive care in the community, she goes on to praise the shiny new asylum, calling it a “great achievement.”
“What you’re doing here is so very important,” she said. “For the residents of Milwaukee County, the promise of humane and decent care in this community is a reality. I’m proud of that. I’m honored to be here. You’re a great example to the whole country of what needs to be done all over.”
The third and last time I visited the Mental Health Complex was in July 2022, which I wrote about here. At that time, the signs were already up announcing its imminent closure in September of that year.
How I have wanted to be there to see this hideous, evil place wrecked, reduced to nothing. A few years ago, I even wrote a fantasy sequence about this in an essay for the forthcoming Mad Studies Reader. In that scene, Mama’s ghost and I watch the building come down, celebrating and cackling like the witches we are. Middle fingers way up.
The moment I’ve waited for for so long is here. The demolition I never got to witness directly is under way.
It was not meant to be for me to return this summer to see it. But my new friend Kelly was kind of enough to take some photos for me when they were visiting Milwaukee this past week. I thought I would feel something. But as I looked through the images of destruction they so thoughtfully took and sent to me—a kindness that means oceans to me—I felt empty inside.
Perhaps it’s because I know that Granite Hills, the new Milwaukee asylum, was built and opened before this one was even torn down. Human rights abuses are already happening there, as I wrote about earlier this year. Perhaps it’s because in the fucking Wall Street Journal they are clamoring for the asylum to be rebuilt, everywhere.
I cannot feel relief. I cannot celebrate. Because the asylum lives on.
It wasn’t until the last photo Kelly sent, taken by their relative, that the dam broke. I can’t get over the sight of this sweet little cardinal, nestled among the rubble. Life among destruction. Cardinals are seen as symbolizing our departed loved ones. A sighting of a redbird is our dead ones’ way of letting us know that they are at peace on the Other Side. I immediately thought of Mama, felt her near, as I took in the scene.
Even with all I know, all that’s in my mind and on my heart, she’d want me to celebrate just a little. To let my breath out for once. To raise my middle finger high.
The place is fucking gone.
Oh yes! When The Massachusetts Mental Health Center closed and they had a huge celebration with tulips in every room, I was disgusted. I had been hoping to be able to go into my room. But I wasn’t allowed. Only those horrible tulips (which I normally love) I still get a weird sick feeling in my stomach when I drive by its old location during the ‘60s. My home for 2 years.
What I was trying to say was that MMHC was horrible and should never have had any of those tulips in every room, celebrating its existence, even though it was finally closing.