A New Year and a New Look For The Traveling Memorial Exhibit
OptumHealth February 2, 2012
The Gardens at Saint Elizabeth’s is a national memorial to remember once forgotten psychiatric patients. In addition to remembrance, it will also be a place of recovery offering dignity and hope to anyone living with mental illness.
A colorful Traveling Exhibit captures and explains the moving story of The Gardens at Saint Elizabeth’s’. Accompanying the Traveling Exhibit is a flat screen TV, the Recovered Dignity DVD, a supply of brochures and bookmarks. The bookmarks contain a collection of seeds, including forget-me-nots, which people can use to plant their own recovery gardens. It is perfect for seminars, conventions, and organizational meetings.
We have changed the look of the traveling Memorial. The new exhibit is even more eye-catching then the previous design. Are you interested in displaying the new Memorial at one of your upcoming event? Please go to www.memorialofrecovereddignity.org to learn more about the project. See how it has positively affected other groups that have displayed the exhibit. It is easy to complete the required request and send it to me the e-mail address is included in the request form (peter.ashenden@optum.com) and we will check for availability on the date that you have requested.
This Memorial has helped other groups to examine restoration projects in their local community. This is your opportunity to jumpstart your local community to get involved in such an important project. It is important to remember Optum offers the exhibit free of charge upon acceptance of the required request form.
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“Project Dignity”
by Tom O’Clair, Family Affairs Specialist OMH News January 2012
The Bureau of Consumer Affairs (BCA) has the charge of overseeing and caring for 17 cemeteries that are, or once were, connected to New York’s “State Hospitals” or Psychiatric Centers. Over the years as hospitals have been closed or operations moved, the cemeteries associated with our facilities and the maintenance of them were, in some cases, inadvertently forgotten as they were almost always located at the perimeters of the hospital grounds. In more recent years, Office of Mental Health (OMH) has joined the movement of other states and the nation in recovering the dignity of those former patients and sometimes employees, laid to rest there.
Over the past several years, the BCA has been working with family and consumer agencies to reclaim these cemeteries and return them to a standard of respect and reverence deserving of the people who rest there. In the past few years, restoration work has been started at the former Gowanda and Harlem Valley hospital sites as well as the current Rockland Psychiatric Center site. Some of these hospitals have two or three cemeteries on their grounds and are in various states of repair or disrepair.
In working with the communities our cemeteries are located in, we hope to start restoration efforts at several other cemetery sites. We hope this will be a successful partnership between families, affiliate organizations, communities, and OMH to come together and return the dignity taken from so many in life. Members of the BCA, as well as members of the Executive staff, have volunteered some of their own time to work with these entities in past years in an effort to accomplish these goals.
We have started planning our 2012 restoration efforts and hope to have more information in the near future. If you are interested in participating in the restoration of the cemeteries or for more information, contact Tom O’Clair in the BCA at (518) 474-4888 or visit the BCA’s website.
http://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/resources/newsltr/2012/jan/consumer_affairs.html