Doctoral Dissertation Research: Violence, Structural Inequality, and Institutionalization

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

State hospitals in the United States have generated considerable discussion among practitioners, government officials, and the general public, from the rise of the asylum in the 19th-century through deinstitutionalization efforts originating in the 1950s. This doctoral dissertation project will examine the biological impact of institutionalization through skeletal analysis of persons who were institutionalized in the past. The research will advance our understanding of institutionalization beyond what can be gleaned from historical accounts alone, and offers a framework for future biological anthropology research to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. The research may raise mental health awareness and presents an innovative method of linking health disparities in past institutionalized samples to modern-day psychiatric treatment. The project will support graduate training as well as public and descendant community science engagement. This dissertation research uses skeletal samples from asylums in four states (Colorado, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio) to understand how incarceration impacts institutionalized women’s health and how it is differentially embodied across ancestry and geographical region. In bioarchaeology, evidence can be seen through varying skeletal pathologies that reflect health disparities indicative of negative conditions that people endured during life. The analysis will focus on skeletal trauma, disease, and fracture analysis which will be statistically examined through hierarchical log-linear analysis and binomial logistic regression. The project highlights the heterogeneous physiological impact of past mental institutionalization in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. It investigates whether skeletal health and epidemiological differences or trends exist across institutionalized geographical samples and attempts to determine if differences in trauma and disease patterns between African-American and Euro-American groups are present in order to gain insight into the impact of racism and segregation within the institutional setting. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.