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click here to download REPORT TORTURE POSTER
Welcome to The Opal Project! Recruitment for the first round of
this Institutional Review Board-approved research took place on the East Lawn of the State Capitol building in Albany, New
York, in July of 2006, at the 26th Annual Bastille Days Vigil and Demonstration with the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance, to stop the use of shock on children. I asked participants who were advocates and activists with psychiatric histories, who gave informed consent to be
involved with this study, to confront The Opal and offer ideas of what, if anything, they thought ought to be done with it.
The Opal, which was "dedicated to usefulness," is a ten volume Journal that was written and edited by the patients of the
Utica State Lunatic Asylum, circa 1851. The more than 3,000 pages of material in The Opal includes political commentary, humor, advice, and theory on
insanity in the form of articles, poetry, prose, cartoons, plays, and literature. The Opal was written by the patients who lived on one of the private wards in the Asylum, where there was little
reported violence, unlike the basement, for example, where Phebe B. Davis in her 1855 expose of the Utica State Lunatic Asylum reports crib patients were kept. The crib, known as the Utica Crib was invented at the Asylum. It was a wood slat adult-sized crib with a top that came down, locking a person inside of the
crate to be swung. The Utica State Lunatic Asylum,
opened in 1838, was the first state-operated asylum in New York State. As the premiere state-operated institution, there is
a wealth of information on its geography, design, construction, administration, implementation, and evaluation through many
different sources, but especially the Asylum's Manager Logs, which can be found at the Oneida County Historical Society. Though the Old Main building is no longer operational,
it still stands on the extended campus of the New York State Office of Mental Health's Mohawk Valley Psychiatric Center and was recently renovated, though there are sections that are going to be destroyed, so the building is endangered. Many
of the participants of this project live in Utica or are attached to Utica through the headquarters of the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance, which operates an advocacy office inside of Mohawk Valley Psychiatric Center's locked facility. Comparisons of treatment between the 19th and 21st centuries were much easier
to find than people expected. In the 21st century, those involved with The Opal Project see The Opal as evidence of
a 'lunatics liberation movement' from the 19th century that discussed the liberation movement from the 18th century.
There are several places on the web that you
can go to get more information about The Opal. The Library at the Disability Museum has 26 Opal entries available online for you to view.
You can see pictures of Old Main listed as one of its incarnations,
Utica State Hospital at the Historic Asylums of America website
Roger Luther has done incredible work at photographing some of New York's Asylums, including
Old Main. NYS Asylum has a wealth of images and information available.
Mary Rose Eannace published her groundbreaking dissertation
on the literature of The Opal and discussed many of the issues inmates faced including control and censorship. Eannace, M. (2001). Lunatic Literature: New York State’s The Opal (1851-1860). UMI. Furthering this work is Benjamin Reiss' Letters from Asylumia: The Opal
and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860. American Literary History - Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2004,
pp. 1-28. This site introduces "The Opal Project”
and asks, “Is there an Opal in your future?"
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