The Women of Owen Clinic Institute and Their Impact on Rural Mental Health
Document Type
Panel Presentation
Keywords
mental health, history, women and gender
Biography
Mallory Stanley will receive her B.A. in History and her B.A. in Psychology at the end of this semester. Her research interests center around mental health, history, and women’s studies. She is a Senator for the College of Liberal Arts in the Student Government Association. She plans to continue her education at Marshall Univerity as a graduate student.
Major
History, Psychology
Advisor for this project
Dr. Laura Diener, Lindsey Harper
Abstract
The mid-1900s was a pivotal moment in reforming mental health treatment and care in American Psychiatry. This movement becomes particularly clear when examining the championing work of two women, Dr. Thelma V. Owen and Dr. M. G. Stemmermann, at a rural mental health facility located in Huntington, WV: Owen Clinic Institute. My research seeks to connect their works, both published and unpublished, to the anonymous writings of their patients to convey a full perspective on the stigma of treatment and mental illness at the time and how the Clinic utilized “home-like care” as opposed to traditional state hospitals of the time. My research also sheds light on the specific hardships they faced in their work simply because they were women in their field.
By utilizing the 14 volumes of the Longview newsletter written by the patients of Owen Clinic Institute from Marshall’s Special Collections, my research will expand the previous work by giving a unique insight into patient life, treatment styles, and rural community beliefs regarding mental illness at the time. Combined with the independently published work of Dr. Owen and Dr. Stemmermann, Trends in Psychiatry (vol. 1-3), containing their various speeches and works identifying the lacking mental health care in the region and how they proposed to change it, I can give both sides of the research and convey the effects of their implemented treatment and activism. This paper will interest students and faculty from many disciplines, including history, psychology, and women’s and gender studies.
The Women of Owen Clinic Institute and Their Impact on Rural Mental Health
The mid-1900s was a pivotal moment in reforming mental health treatment and care in American Psychiatry. This movement becomes particularly clear when examining the championing work of two women, Dr. Thelma V. Owen and Dr. M. G. Stemmermann, at a rural mental health facility located in Huntington, WV: Owen Clinic Institute. My research seeks to connect their works, both published and unpublished, to the anonymous writings of their patients to convey a full perspective on the stigma of treatment and mental illness at the time and how the Clinic utilized “home-like care” as opposed to traditional state hospitals of the time. My research also sheds light on the specific hardships they faced in their work simply because they were women in their field.
By utilizing the 14 volumes of the Longview newsletter written by the patients of Owen Clinic Institute from Marshall’s Special Collections, my research will expand the previous work by giving a unique insight into patient life, treatment styles, and rural community beliefs regarding mental illness at the time. Combined with the independently published work of Dr. Owen and Dr. Stemmermann, Trends in Psychiatry (vol. 1-3), containing their various speeches and works identifying the lacking mental health care in the region and how they proposed to change it, I can give both sides of the research and convey the effects of their implemented treatment and activism. This paper will interest students and faculty from many disciplines, including history, psychology, and women’s and gender studies.
