I was invited to join some friends from the Photo Venture Camera Club this morning on a photo shoot at Central State Hospital, a facility abandoned some years ago.

It was a beautiful morning and we got to Central State early, ahead of the heat.   Central State was occupied, I think, until sometime in the 90s.  The deterioration since then was quite evident.

In addition to walking around taking pictures, I was also going down two other mental paths, one concerned with the stories I have heard at our church, Church of the Saviour, about a mission group within the church that worked to close down this mental hospital.  The other path, distantly connected to the first, concerned the work I did at the Hutchings Psychiatric Center in upstate New York.

The church mission group had as one of its tasks finding and furnishing apartments for hospital residents who were being released to the community.  They also spent time with inpatients.  One inpatient had not spoken in many, many years.  One of the women in our church had children who were profoundly deaf and she could gesture American sign language.  She tried it with this woman and to everyone’s surprise the woman responded.  A beautiful hunch.

This image might represent the confused state of mind that someone who had been living as an inpatient for years might experience on hitting the streets.  This brings up the other path my thoughts were taking.  Many years ago I worked in the research department at Hutchings in Syracuse NY.  One of our jobs was identifying optimal locations for community outreach centers.  At the time Hutchings was charged with maintaining a relatively small inpatient unit and an extensive set of outreach units around the county staffed to provide medication, socialization, group therapy and some individual therapy in the community.  What I saw was that the system worked pretty well although there was significant return to the inpatient unit even with solid community programming.  I don’t know what the community programs are like here in Indianapolis, I would guess not as strong as the Hutchings program.  I’ve met some of the people who would have benefited from that when our church has fed the homeless.  That’s where some of them are now.

When out photographing, I’ve come to think about windows as metaphors for gateways to the human mind.  Windows can give us a hint about what is going on in there.

But often they simply reflect the world back at itself.

If they reflect anything more than the sky.

Abandoned.  The Central State institution is abandoned.  I think many of the people are as well.  One of the people on the shoot is a school speech therapist and as we were walking around this morning, she was describing the plight of of some young people going into the world after high school who stand little chance of anything meaningful in employment.  Somewhat retarded, they aren’t retarded enough to qualify for the help that is provided and they don’t have, and likely will never have, the skills needed to survive in the world.

This is Memorial Day.  My dad and all of my uncles who went into World War II came home safely, some level of miracle.  As we remember those who sacrificed for freedom, let us also remember those who are being passively sacrificed right here at home.

I don’t want to leave the impression that we have pulled the plug on all those people who came out of Central State.  We haven’t.  But care is needed for a lot of people, more care than is being provided.  Let’s remember that too.