"Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else." —Fred Rogers

picture of Mister Rogers in red sweater putting on his sneakers in the beginning of "Mister Rogers Neighborhood." (Image credit IMDb

This week I finished a poem I started more than twenty years ago I called “The Abandoned Insane.” It was about the first discoveries in 1998 of patient graves without names in old cemeteries connected to the Asylums at Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts and at the Georgia “Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum” in Milledgeville. The graves were only numbered with wood or steel sticks.

Over the years I gathered details about the grounds, abandoned buildings and un-named graves from over 300,000 acres in the U.S. All along I thought two things: 1. The owners of those mental hospitals were simply saving money by not having stones with etched names of the patients; 2. Those huge institutions were for everyone’s treatment.

Then last month I read that the first asylum erected outside the city of Boston in 1811 was financed by prominent Bostonians who wanted the sidewalks cleared of homeless people. In 2024 politicians address the public’s concern and alarm over growing numbers of homeless encampments by arresting and committing “those” people to mental health treatment in hospitals —except that most of them were closed during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations.

When ex-patient activists discovered files that listed patients’ names, that information was declared as sealed medical records; the graves could not be identified by name. So, I asked myself if the families that did not claim the bodies of their kin were avoiding the embarrassment of having a relative labeled “crazy lunatic”? Could there have been private-pay clients who escaped raw sewage in the hospital halls and multiple electric shocks followed by lobotomies because they boarded in famous physician’s homes or resided in smaller private asylums with palatial sun and reading rooms, private baths, art lessons, and community concerts? Yes, there were, some still in business as Psychiatric Institutes.

Images shown are the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane (1869-1996), Ovid, New York.

So, my three-page poem, now called “When the Lunatics Arise,” submitted to Mad in America, has led to a stack of research for a future essay. Watch for it right here! Bonnie

Growing Up MAD in the South:
Stories, Poems and Other Aberrations

Growing Up MAD in the South: Stories, Poems and Other Aberrations takes place in Atlanta, GA, during the 1950s and '60s, when racism, sexism, and personal salvation were lurking behind “Well bless your heart.” Diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17, the “Mad” narrator struggles with both her aberrant senses and righteous anger at a society that fails to value everyone. From a toddler learning language to an adolescent trying on love, she flowers into a creative adult who finds grace writing for a literary magazine in an all-girls college. With a widowed Methodist mother and a protective Hard-Shell Baptist Granny, the narrator’s upbringing is shaped by the lyrics of gospel music. Bonnie manages to confront “Should,” “Keep Quiet,” and “White Only” with lyricism and laughter.

Available in Kindle/Nook/digital format, soft cover, and hard cover.

South to West

California, the Golden State, was where my husband and I made the decision to relocate at the end of my memoir Growing up MAD in the South. In the last chapter, we are in New Orleans, both with summer jobs, encountering sexism, classism, and racism, thinking about what to do with the rest of our lives.

In the late 60s, Sid had read about small companies trying to develop personal computers and ways to store data, risky jobs if a young man didn’t want to be drafted for Vietnam. I wanted to write for a newspaper and go to graduate school, not teach fifth grade. We both wanted to live where the answer to “What did your people do in the [Civil] War?” was not grounds for your worth as a human being.

In 1970, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, living in Los Angeles, travelled to New Orleans and then throughout the South. Her notes were recorded in the national bestseller South and West: From a Notebook (2017). Didion is quoted in Nathaniel Rich’s Foreword with the observation that Southerners hold fiercely on to their past. People in California seek to leave the past behind.

Click to hear the Beach Boys (Jack Benny 1965)

I left old melodies of the Carter family
for the sounds of The BEACH BOYS and THE FIFTH DIMENSION.

Click to hear the 5th Dimension (Arsenio 1991)

Picture of Bonnie Henderson Schell in her office in front of a quilt hanging.

They say to write what you know. I don’t know if what I have seen makes me different from others of my generation, but I think my restless brain and creative visions cause me to write from an unconventional and droll perspective. A friend says I write "through the eyes of a child, the heart of an adolescent in love, and a wise adult with unconditional acceptance of all of humanity."

I was raised in Atlanta, Georgia on the good King James and the big Liberal Arts questions, chief among them “What is the meaning of life?” I spent 30 years in California with people offering answers to unasked questions in run on sentences. In the South, we inherited given answers to questions so that even when the questions changed, we gave the same answers. People came west to seek their dreams in the wide, open horizons. Many southerners were trapped behind kudzu vines and Spanish moss blocking the horizon and doilies clouding their vision like pointillist cataracts.

In southern California I ran a yarn shop, Happy Hookers, and later, in northern California, a drop in center, The Mental Health Client Action Network, for the neurologically diverse and frequently homeless. People came to the needlework shop to knit for the pending birth of babies, for crocheted bikinis and for something to do while they sat with the dying. While the south still called a psychotic break with reality a “nervous breakdown,” best kept in the backroom, Californians proudly wore sweat shirts that said “I graduated with a brain chip from UCLA Hospital.” I joined Psychiatric Inmates Rights Collective carrying signs that read “Housing, not Haldol” and became fascinated by the rhyming “word salad” of the so-called “seriously and persistently mentally ill (SPMI)” who were “likely to deteriorate.”

Always I am trying to distract or otherwise work around my Russian Blue cat, Smokie, who wants to lie across my pen, paper, and keyboard, and purr. Smokie always manages to type something that scrolls down leaving me a place to put my words, so I never have to stare at a blank screen.

Bonnie Jo Henderson Schell

"Write for the sake of the silenced. Write what makes you afraid to write."

—Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Class,” The Crack in Everything

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